Said Gertrude Wood, his tolerant but not always meekly long-suffering wife, as we were discussing this childhood episode, “Thank heaven, that was one lecture I didn’t have to attend.”
A contributing influence to his Gargantuan precosity was the fact that while he was still at the age when children like to play with toys (and was being bored to death in “Mrs. Walker’s Select Day School” for nice little boys and girls of good family, where he stood continually near the bottom of the class), he had been given, to play with, one of the most powerful and dangerous toys that has ever fallen into the hands of any child in the history of the world. It contributed to his subsequent scientific achievements — for it was the immense blower plant and factory of B. F. Sturtevant, at Jamaica Plain, outside of Boston.
When young Robert was about four, the family had moved to Jamaica Plain, then an attractive Boston suburb. He had been born in a quaint old house at Concord, and had been dandled as a baby on Emerson’s knee. The Woods had had culture from earliest Colonial days, and Dr. Wood, Senior, had brought back a considerable fortune from the Hawaiian Islands, where he had pioneered in the cultivation of sugar cane.
Their next door neighbor in Jamaica Plain was Benjamin Franklin Sturtevant, founder of the still existing Sturtevant Blower Works for the manufacture of air blowers for mine shafts and other huge devices for ventilation. The Sturtevants had an only son, Charlie, three or four years older than Rob Wood, and the two little boys immediately became friends. It was this friendship, which grew as both became a little older, that led to Rob’s acquisition of the blower plant as a childhood toy — and the way it happened is a beautiful story of childhood friendship, ending on a note of sadness.
Dr. Wood says:
I looked up to and admired Charlie. He was nearly four years older, as I remember, and I was terribly anxious to be noticed by him. The Sturtevants had a large greenhouse in their back yard, and Charlie had a beautiful aquarium, almost like a swimming-pool, with various fish in it. I must have been seven or eight, and had begun to collect butterflies with a net I’d made of mosquito netting. One day as I passed along a small canal ditch by the roadside, I saw little fish swimming there, waded in, scooped some up, threw away my butterflies, and put the fish in my glass jar and took them home to Charlie for his aquarium. I said, “I don’t suppose you’ll want them, they’re only common minnows.” Charlie examined them and said, “Why, those aren’t minnows! They’re fine game fish. They’re baby pickerel.” I was thrilled and happy, and from that time on Charlie began to show some interest in me. Then Charlie did not appear for a long time, and I was told one morning that he had died. I was stunned for a few days and could not realize that I would never see him again. Now that Charlie was gone, and the factory was completed, Mr. Sturtevant, I think, must have transferred to me some of the affection he had had for his own son, for he frequently called me to the fence between our gardens and talked to me. When I was about ten years old, he took me all through the huge factory one day — the great Corliss engines, the iron foundry with its blast furnaces, the lathe rooms with their enormous belts and flywheels, machine shops, pattern shops, carpenter shops everything. He introduced me to the superintendents of the various shops and told them to let me come there whenever I wanted to and to let me do anything I wanted, so long as I didn’t hurt myself.
So that, at an age when most mechanically inclined kids are playing with toy sets of tools and tiny scroll saws in the family woodshed, Rob began not only with the traditional “buzz saw”, but with mighty power-driven machines, hydraulic rams and engines. That he didn’t kill himself — in fact never even had a serious accident — is a tribute to his own skill — and probably also to the friendly watchfulness of foremen and workmen. He was soon literally doing anything he pleased. The workmen in the iron foundry even taught him how to make sand molds, into which they poured the molten iron for his castings. Rob sometimes made mistakes — seldom dangerous ones. He kept a little diary of his exploits, illustrated with his own drawings but devoid of reading matter: this is still extant. The first drawing is the episode of the dumbbells. It occurred before he had begun to understand the plant’s gigantic possibilities. He had put a block of softwood on a big power lathe and started trying to make a pair of dumbbells. Chunks instead of thin shavings were flying, and he had wrenched his hand when a foreman passed, stared, and said, “What are you doing?”
Rob said, “Making a pair of dumbbells.”
The foreman said, “Well, I see one fine dumbbell already. That’s not a chisel you’re using. It’s a screw driver!”
On another occasion, he took a scolding from a superintendent of the plant, E. N. Foss, who had married into the Sturtevant family and was trying to prove his worth by small economies. (He later became governor of Massachusetts). Rob had decided to make an electrical machine which required a large, circular glass plate. Not knowing how to obtain this, he sawed out a circular disk of a dark heavy wood which he intended to varnish. Several days later his mother received a letter from the new superintendent complaining that Rob had destroyed two square feet of “bay mahogany” worth forty-five cents a square foot. Mr. Sturtevant’s new son-in-law had seen the board from which the circular disk had been cut, made inquiries of the workman, and been told that it was done by the boy Mr. Sturtevant had brought down. Rob was severely scolded by his mother and confined for two hours in the “blue room” (guest room, but used as a jail on occasion).
All this, of course, was trivial child’s play, merely a beginning. But even at the start, access to the tool shop, plus his own ingenious imagination, made him a ringleader of the “gang” outside school. Rob had found a book about Norway, with descriptions and pictures of skis. He had never heard of steaming wood to bend it, but went to the Sturtevant works, cut out a pair of skis with a mechanical saw, and curved the ends with galvanized iron and countersunk screws. Next day, he took them to the snow-clad hill where his friends were coasting on sleds, put them on, stood in a superior manner, slid about fifteen feet, and turned over in a snowdrift.
The crossbow came about because Rob’s parents wouldn’t let him have a gun while two of the boys in his gang had rifles. Rob and the less fortunate ones went hunting with slingshots. He had read somewhere about the steel crossbow, and proceeded to make one, with the help of the shop foreman. Shooting an arrow tipped with a heavy bolt of steel, which he also made, it penetrated oaken targets deeper than any rifle bullet. What impressed the boys most was that it kicked like a shot- gun.
Another discovery that made him a sort of king among the kids was that he had learned to apply the principle of the siphon, with the help of an old book of his father’s and a bent stick of macaroni. There’d been a thaw in January, and a flat space at the bottom of the boys’ coasting hill had turned into a little pond of water. This was bad, because as you coasted down where there was still ice you gathered speed. Then your sled hit the pool and you were drenched with mud and water. Girls on their high runner sleds came down less rapidly and went through fairly well, but no boy, of course, would use a girl’s sled. You simply went on doing belly-whoppers on your own sled, to end soaking wet and covered with mud. Rob appeared with a garden hose and announced that he proposed to dispose of the water. His gang, including older boys who went to the same school, was derisive. There was a rise of more than a foot around the pond, and everybody knew that water wouldn’t run uphill. Rob laid out the hose on the ground, had one of the boys stop up one end with his thumb and poured water into the other end until it was full. Already an embryonic showman, Rob took this end and, instead of laying it on the sidewalk, lifted it up over the high fence which separated the road from the lowland bordering the street. Of course the water came rushing through. It was perhaps Wood’s first public scientific triumph.