Accordingly, the Woods packed up, stored their furniture, and went out to San Francisco to visit Gertrude’s parents. Robert Wood, Junior, was born on June 23, 1894, in his grandmother’s house.
After an interval for Gertrude’s recovery, both the Woods began to study German furiously. Their first tutor was a red- bearded young German, with a facetious manner and a craving for Mr. Ames’s best cigars. His visits resembled social calls, and in fact, since he preferred to talk in English, the German lessons were a flop. It was difficult to get rid of anyone so polite, however, and finally Wood hit on a way of getting rid of the man. He substituted a trick cigar for one of Mr. Ames’s Coronas. And when Herr Becker, at the next lesson, lighted it, there was a bang. It had exploded.
Their next teacher was a Frau Lilienthal, who was excellent. She gave them a letter to Professor Leo, Germany’s foremost Shakespearean scholar, who afterwards proved very hospitable to the Woods.
Late in the summer of 1894, the Woods started East with the two children, Margaret and Robert, Junior, bound for Berlin.
Chapter Four.
Escapades and Studies in Berlin — Wood Sits In at the Birth of X Rays and Takes to the Air in a Glider
There turned out to be only one water closet in the Leipzig pension where Wood, wife, and babies were to live while he studied chemistry with Ostwald. Moreover, it opened directly off the dining-room! Robert says his father “chose” Harvard for him, and there’s a story that it was Mrs. Wood, influenced by this open plumbing openly arrived at, who “chose” to go on to Berlin.
My own impression is that nobody ever successfully “chose” anything for Wood unless it chanced to coincide with his own choice. Anyhow, wife, babies, bags and baggage, they went to Berlin.
What seems to have first struck and stimulated Robert’s best — or worst — instincts in the German capital was the abundance of signs, placards, and police injunctions indicating that many trivial personal actions, free in democratic countries, were here either forbidden or state controlled. He had known, of course, about the Verboten placards, but not about the Strengsten untersagt ones. They translate literally “strengthily undersaid”, and while Robert insists they merely amused him, I suspect they had the same effect a red flag is supposed to have on the proverbial bull.
The first one he saw was over the window of his compartment in a railway coach, framed under glass in a neat oval bronze frame. It read:
DAS HINAUSLEHNEN DES KÖRPER
ASU DEM FENSTER, IST WEGEN
DER DAMIT VERBUNDENEN LEBENS-
GEFAHR STRENGSTEN UNTERSAGT
(“The leaning out of the body out of the window, is on account of the thereby intimately-bound-up-life-danger strengthily undersaid.”)
He improvised a screw driver, removed the placard, frame and all, put it in his pocket, and subsequently hung it in his room, to study the last two words if and when inspiration flagged. He went out and bought boomerangs, and began throwing them. He rolled rocks down neighboring German mountainsides, creating miniature avalanches. He made flights in Lilienthal’s glider. He set up a huge camera in the street and photographed a cesspool pump in action, under the impression, pretended or real, that he was photographing the Berlin Fire Department.
Richard Watson Gilder, then editor of Century, had been equally stimulated by “Strengsten untersagt”, and had written a poem about it. Young Wood learned the poem by heart and frequently declaimed it at dinner parties. The first two stanzas run:
Robert made up another stanza concerning his own Kinder. You had to license and put a number plate on the Kinderwagen (baby buggy) since it was “a vehicle on four wheels.”
Our young father of buggy-licensed babies had meanwhile, of course, begun his studies in the chemistry department at the University of Berlin. After some time spent, however, in dull routine and the working out of “some particularly stupid problems,” he began to drift more and more, as he had at Johns Hopkins, into the physics laboratories and lectures, to see what was happening there. Things looked more exciting, and after talking with Professor Rubens, who spoke perfect English, Wood took the plunge: he was definitely tired of physical chemistry and decided that physics would be his field.
He was told he could not start on research until he had performed all the preliminary experiments of the Kleine Practicum, which corresponds to undergraduate laboratory work in America. They were willing, however, to take his word that he had already done all but some half dozen of the experiments. The first experiment they required him to make was the accurate determination of the time of oscillation of a torsion pendulum, i.e., a large metal disk, suspended at its center by a wire, which slowly rotates first to the right and then to the left. On reading the instructions and thinking over the matter, Wood decided he knew a better method. On trial it proved to be simpler and more accurate than the classical one in use in the laboratory. Professor Blasius, who directed the work, was so much impressed that he asked Wood to write a paper on the subject; and Professor Warburg, the Director of the Physical Institute, approved its publication in the Annalen der Physik.
Thus Wood’s formal entry into the field of physics was marked by an example of the experimental daring that was to characterize all his future work. He continued to experiment on the side; and two papers of his — one on a lecture method of showing the nature of optical “caustics” and the other an ingenious method of determining the duration of the flash of an exploding gas — were published in the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine (commonly known as the Philosophical Magazine, or, more intimately, as Phil. Mag.), which was the leading English-language review in physics.
But the most exciting scientific event of Wood’s Berlin days was to come. Here is his own account of it:
One memorable morning in the early winter of 1895 Professor Blasius came to us in great excitement. “Come this way, something very wonderful has just been received”. We hurried along after him into one of the smaller rooms, where hanging on the wall were half a dozen or more strange-looking photographs, a life-size human hand with all of the bones clearly outlined, a purse with a number of coins inside, a bunch of keys inside a wooden box, and other objects. “What in the world are they?” we asked. “They just arrived”, he replied, “in the Geheimrath’s morning mail. Professor Roentgen of Würzburg sent them. They were made by some new kind of rays that penetrate most opaque substances and cast shadows on the photographic plate of metals and other dense materials. He calls them X rays, because x represents an unknown quantity in algebra, and he has no idea what they are. They come from the glass wall of a vacuum tube, where the cathode rays strike it”.