Another thing that gave him an ascendancy in the gang was that he had learned all sorts of chemical tricks from the books on his father’s shelves and by his own crude, often daring, experiments. He had a love for fire, which has stayed with him all his life, and took particular delight in explosions and loud bangs. Here again the child was father to the man, for he is a leading authority on high explosives, found the key to the reconstruction of the Wall Street bomb, and has solved a number of bomb mysteries and murders for the police.
He had learned, when he was about fifteen years old, that chlorate of potash and sulphur, both cheap and easy to buy, when mixed together and wrapped in paper and hit with a hammer made a noise louder than any cannon cracker. Not content, he made a larger package, laid it on an old anvil, and hit it with an ax. The explosion nearly broke his arm. This didn’t discourage him. He was all for bigger and better noises. When Fourth of July approached he bought twenty pounds of the stuff and with the help of his cousin Bradley Davis and the boy next door set some posts in the earth and built a pile driver ten feet high with a heavy iron weight which when released from a catch at the top by a long cord fell on the old anvil. The first time they tried it, as he joyfully remembers, complaints came in that “the horses in a stable some doors away nearly stampeded, and the windows in neighboring houses rattled.” What he remembers best is that the concussions tore the leaves off all his mother’s raspberry bushes.
Bradley Davis later escaped Rob’s Mephistophelian influence and is now professor of botany at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor!
The three young devils had eight or ten pounds of the explosive mixture left over at the end of the day. They hid it in the cellar of a new building under construction near the railroad station and went blithely off to Boston to see the fireworks on the Common. Rob had learned that if you don’t hit the stuff with a hammer — or a pile driver — but merely put it in a pile and set it afire, it doesn’t explode but burns with a fierce blue flame. They were going to top off the evening by lighting up the town on their return. Rob didn’t know everything about the stuff's properties yet, and they had the unfortunate idea of utilizing some leftover firecrackers so that the flare would be accompanied by pleasing though small detonations. On their return shortly after midnight, they set the mixture, surrounded by cannon crackers, down in the middle of the street in front of the Congregational Church, lighted the chemicals — and ran.
Says Wood:
Before we’d run half a block one of the cannon crackers went off, and the whole mess exploded with a terrific detonation, followed by loud tinklings of glass from windows of the neighboring houses. The street lamps were extinguished by the concussion, and the whole square suddenly became dark. We ran all the way home and I entered the house as quietly as possible, but mother was awake and called out to me, “Rob, what was that terrible explosion?” I pretended not to hear.
His relations with his father and mother were “friendly,” he says, and he has no recollections of serious clashes. This is remarkable when one considers that Rob’s father was eighty when he was fourteen, and that while all boys of that age are fiends, Rob’s superendowments made him a superfiend.
On Decoration Day, in 1883, there was to be a parade around the Jamaica Plain monument to the veterans of the Civil War. It was the usual granite monument, surmounted by a soldier leaning on his gun. Rob decided that the monument needed decorating, so, with the help of the boy next door, he procured a large, broad-brimmed farmer’s straw hat, with an elastic to go under the chin. They trimmed it with rosettes of red, white, and blue and a bunch of long streamers of the same colors. The problem was to get the hat on the soldier’s head and slip the elastic under his chin to prevent the wind from blowing it off.
They surveyed the monument the afternoon before the parade, and Rob figured out that he could climb half way up but that the last ten or twelve feet were unscalable. He found a wooden pole about fifteen feet long and topped it with two horizontal jaws held together by elastic rubber bands. The lower jaw could be opened by pulling a string.
At 2:00 a. m. on Decoration Day, Rob crept out of his house and woke the boy next door by standing under his window and yanking a long string that had been attached to the sleeper’s big toe. Then Rob climbed the monument, with the hat firmly clamped by the jaws of his pole. He soon got the hat on the soldier’s head, and by careful manipulation adjusted the elastic under his chin. Stealthily the two boys crept home. Next day, they were sure they would be arrested if they dared step out of doors. So they had to miss the fun of watching irate citizens call out the fire department, with its hook and ladder, to remove the “abominable desecration.”
Another typical boy’s prank, with its special Wood touch, was monkeying with the doorbells of a new apartment house that had been built not far from the Roxbury Latin School where Rob was being bored to death. There was something fascinating about the long row of speaking tubes with push buttons beneath in the vestibule. The idea came suddenly to Rob one day that it would be simple to “short-circuit” them.
He found just what he was looking for at home, in the closet where wrapping paper, string, etc., were thriftily kept. It was a long pasteboard mailing tube about three inches in diameter. This he held against the battery of speaking tubes in the apartment-house vestibule, marking circles on it to coincide with the mouthpieces of the tubes. Later he cut these out with a sharp penknife and closed the open ends of the pasteboard tube.
Then, with the aid of his friend who lived in the house, he fitted this gadget over the speaking tubes, by which operation a multiple “party line” was introduced, making general conversation among the tenants possible.
The little devils then pressed all the push buttons, beginning with the top floor to facilitate a safe getaway. The ensuing confusion, resembling a new Tower of Babel, can be imagined.
Says Wood today, looking back to that part of his childhood spent in the Sturtevant plant:
The first really interesting thing I found in the factory was something that gave me a start in the study of electricity. I noticed that on going down a long dark passageway which conveyed a huge belt carrying the power from a flywheel to the blower operating the blast furnace, my hair always stood on end. I thought at first it might be because I was afraid. But I knew I wasn’t afraid and sought some other explanation. I wondered if there was a wind coming from somewhere. I held my hand up toward the whirring belt to see if wind was coming from it. Immediately purple streamers of fire began flying from the ends of my fingers. I was fascinated and excited. I put my hand closer to the belt, and a long spark leaped out to my hand. Like all children, I knew about electric sparks from the cat’s back, from shuffling along a heavy carpet and touching a doorknob — and I had found out how to pick up tiny bits of paper with sealing wax subjected to friction. I had also been reading Arnold’s Elements of Physics. In consequence, I realized at once that in that belt from the great flywheel I had a powerful static electric machine at my disposal. I know now that the belt I began to use might almost be considered the progenitor of the Van de Graaff generator. I made Leyden jars and various others pieces of apparatus which are only practical with a source of electricity of considerable volume.