Later we learned that he was the “lumber king” of Wisconsin. It was my first meeting with an American captain of industry, or tycoon, as he would now be called. He was truly interested in astronomy, and had said a thing so extremely gracious it embarrassed me. When I thanked him for his hospitality, he had quoted the line about “entertaining an angel unaware”.
Wood’s official “job” at the University of Chicago was confined largely to cleaning up apparatus after Professor Henry N. Stokes’s lectures, and he presently resigned that appointment in favor of the janitor. Here is Wood’s own description of what followed.
Professor E. A. Schneider, a German, captured me for “research work,” suggesting what he described as a very interesting line of work on titanium. The first stage of the “research” was the preparation of a large quantity of potassium titanofluoride, a chemical that was not on the market. I would need a platinum dish and some of the mineral rutile, which he said he would order for me. The dish turned out to be as big as a finger bowl, and cost three hundred dollars, which I had to pay out of my own pocket, and there was about twenty pounds of rutile, which I had to pound in a mortar and pass through a fine sieve, until the whole mass was reduced to a powder as fine as pepper. It took about two weeks, and the black powder got in my hair and my nose, and over my clothes. Then came several weeks of work in fusing a mixture of potassium carbonate and the powder in the platinum dish, treating the mess with hydrofluoric acid, and crystallizing the product. I began to chafe over the monotony of going through this process over and over again, but Schneider kept me at it until the whole mass of rutile had been converted into the double salt. I said, “Well, what do we do now?” and was told that nothing more was to be done on the problem at present, and he would give me something else to do in the meantime. I smelled a rat, or I might more properly say a skunk, and spoke to Dr. Lengfeld about the work. He intimated that he thought I would make more progress if I took a real problem instead of serving as a manufacturer of chemicals.
So I left Schneider, who appropriated the large bottles of the preparation on which I had spent so much time and money. Later on I was told that he probably wanted it for some of his own work, and he even offered to take the platinum dish off my hands for half price, but that didn’t work. I started work under Felix Lengfeld’s direction and gradually forgot the unpleasant experience. Schneider left the university a year or two later. Years later, looking through the volumes of the German periodical, Anorganische Chemie, I found a paper by Schneider on the chemistry of titanium, in which he stated that he employed as his basic material the compound potassium titanofluoride, with no acknowledgments or statement of where he obtained it. He just took it out of a hat, like a rabbit. I kept the platinum dish for several years and eventually sold it for more than I had paid for it.
After my routine with rutile, I started a more interesting piece of work under Dr. Lengfeld’s direction, and published two papers in the American Chemical Journal. I reported the results of my research work at the weekly meeting of the Chemistry Colloquium, and felt a little nervous, as it was the first time that I had appeared before a critical audience. The subject was rather technical, and I had formed a resolve never to “read” a paper. It went off fairly well, and I found that embarrassment faded away rapidly as I went on.
Shortly after, I was asked to give a popular lecture with experiments, open to the public in the auditorium of the new Kent chemical laboratory. I chose as a subject “The Vortex Atom Theory,” propounded first by Lord Kelvin, and later developed by Professor Helmholtz of Berlin, which was receiving some attention by chemists at the time. I chose this subject chiefly because I wanted at least one spectacular lecture experiment that would make the audience sit up, and I decided that a huge “vortex machine” for making smoke rings would fulfill the requirements. I made a big one, bigger than I had ever seen, a cubic wooden box four feet on each edge, one side made of flexible thin oilcloth, loosely tacked on, with two diagonal strips of rubber tubing behind it, firmly attached to the corners. At the center of the opposite side was a circular hole about a foot in diameter. On striking the center of the square of oilcloth a smart blow with the fist, an invisible ring of air was shot from the box with such velocity and momentum that it would knock a large pasteboard box from the end of the lecture table onto the floor, while the impact on the face or body felt like a mild blow from a feather pillow. By filling the box with smoke produced by mixing the vapors of ammonia and hydrochloric acid, the rings were made visible, and the classical experiments with them could be shown on a large scale. With a little practice, two rings could be fired in rapid succession: the second ring, with a higher velocity, would catch up with the first and bounce off it, both rings remaining intact and changing into vibrating ellipses. This showed that a gas in rapid rotation had some of the properties of a solid (elasticity, for example). The “vortex atom” theory supposed that chemical atoms were endless vortices in the “ether of space,” tied in complicated knots, for it had been shown that if two or more vortex rings of a frictionless fluid were linked together or tied in knots they would spin forever, without interfering with each other or coming to rest. I had some other experiments which I’ve forgotten, but the big box came at the end of the lecture. When it was pointing skyward an invisible ring of air splashed against and extinguished the greater part of the circular ring of gas flames at the center of the auditorium dome. Two or three always remained lit, and the fire then ran around the entire ring, so that the experiment could be shown over and over again as fast as you could thump the box. Then I commenced a Blitzkrieg on the audience, shooting powerful invisible rings at the sea of faces. The spectators were delighted and applauded loudly, and I finally took courage and fired a ring at Mrs. Harper, the wife of the President, which lifted the front of her broad-brimmed hat several inches, and then one into the broad, smiling face of the President himself, who winced.
We now come to the early spring of 1894. Wood had finished a piece of research acceptable to the Department of Chemistry as a thesis for the Ph. D. degree, and the examinations were in the offing. He was, however, suddenly informed that he would be required to pass examinations in advanced physics and mathematics if he wished to come up in physical chemistry. This change in the requirements had resulted from the advent of A. A. Michelson as head of the Department of Physics. Wood had a long and somewhat heated argument with President Harper, claiming that he had not been told this in the beginning and was not well enough prepared in either subject to take examinations on such short notice. Harper overruled his objections, and Wood left the university early in May.
He had definitely decided anyway, at this time, to go to Germany with his family, to work with Professor Wilhelm Ostwald, then the world’s leading physical chemist. But it was necessary to put off the trip because of the imminent arrival of their second child.