Chapter Nine.
High Lights, Side Lights and High Jinks at Johns Hopkins in the Years Between 1905 and 1910
Early in 1905 Wood finished the monumental work on physical optics which was destined to make him an outstanding authority on all subjects connected with light. The manuscript of Physical Optics was in the hands of Macmillan, destined to appear officially in the autumn of the same year, but it was due in the meantime for the oddest “prepublication” in the history of scientific books. Here’s what apparently happened.
In 1905 the Wood family spent the summer again in France. Just as they were leaving Paris for Brittany, an enormous bundle of galley proofs arrived from New York. Wood dumped them in the Darracq, to be corrected and mailed en route. The Macmillan Company claims with truth the first official publication, but it seems to have appeared previously, “serially” and uncopyrighted, dipped into with amazement by tourists, in hotel privies and backhouses scattered all over Normandy and Brittany. Not caring to bother with the two sets of duplicates of the galley proofs, he had tossed them into hotel wastebaskets, as he mailed the corrected set back, in installments, to New York. Motoring to Paris over the same route two months later, they found large sheafs of Physical Optics hung on nails as toilet paper in many of the inns where they had previously stopped.
Weird extracurricular excursions, alarms, and adventures kept occurring to Wood and his brain children when they returned to Baltimore, despite the steady progress of his serious scientific work. One of these occurred when a wealthy Baltimore engineer by the name of Otto Luyties conceived what may have been the first practical idea in the world for experiment with helicopters and invited the by now famous Johns Hopkins professor to aid him in matters of theory. Since Luyties was paying all the expenses, Wood agreed cheerfully to lend all the “theory” he could.
At that period (says Wood) Lord Rayleigh’s collected works were my Bible. He had shown by calculations that the weight that could be raised by an engine or motor of given horsepower could be increased indefinitely by increasing the diameter of the airscrew. I verified these predictions by mounting a large electric motor, with its axis vertical, on a platform scales and attaching airscrews (or propellers of thin wood) of different diameters directly to the projecting axis of the motor. The blades of the largest one employed barely cleared the walls of the room, and registered the highest lifting force on the scales. Small models were made, driven by rubber bands, which rose in the air and sailed off in horizontal flight.
Presently Luyties built one whose horizontal propeller looked like a windmill about twenty feet in diameter. It had a twenty-five horsepower motor, and in May, 1907, they took it out to Sparrows Point for a trial flight.
Wood said, “Who’s going up?”
Luyties said, “Not me. I’ve engaged a parachute jumper who will do anything for fifty dollars”.
The propellers were of canvas like the sails of a Dutch windmill or the jib on a yacht. Just then the parachute jumper came up and Wood said, “Are you really going to do this?”
“Sure”, the parachute jumper said, “for a hundred and fifty dollars I’d do a bomb ascension!”
Wood wanted to know what that was, and the jumper said: “I go up in a balloon, drop with a parachute, and have a string about forty feet long below my legs on which a bottle of gunpowder explodes. Once the string got tangled up, the bottle exploded between my legs — and look at my scars! I will still do a bomb ascension for a hundred and fifty dollars, so why shouldn’t I do this for fifty?”
The helicopter was on the wagon scales, and the parachute jumper was on the helicopter. The engine started. The sails filled out. Wood says it was lovely. It looked like a merry-go- round. It finally trembled, lifted a hundred pounds of its own weight off the scales, but remained otherwise stationary. Wood says the parachute jumper got his fifty dollars — but he doesn’t feel that he himself was quite so well treated. While it was about to go up, it was Luyties’s machine and Wood was only a “theoretical adviser”. But when it came out in the Baltimore papers next morning, it was Wood’s machine that had failed to rise from the ground.
Wood also participated in many of the more serious, sometimes successful and sometimes tragic aviation experiments in those pioneer days. One of these was with his friend Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, who was subsequently killed in the ill-fated flight at Fort Myer with Orville Wright, in the autumn of 1908 — just a week after Selfridge had been a house guest of the Woods at their summer place on Long Island. On Selfridge’s invitation, Wood had made a trip with him to Hammonds- port, New York, where Glenn Curtiss, Selfridge, and McCurdy had been financed by Alexander Graham Bell to develop a power-driven plane.
They had just finished constructing the June Bug, he says, and were making short daily flights in a straight line. They hadn’t been able yet to make circular flights, principally because the June Bug's engine, which was then air-cooled, over heated too quickly. Wood, remembering his own laboratory expedients for cooling off red-hot sodium-vapor tubes, told them that if they packed the cylinders in cotton wool drenched with water, the engine would keep cool longer. Curtiss thought the idea was absurd, even as a temporary expedient, and vetoed it. Wood, always insistent when he believes he’s right in matters of that sort, proved his point conclusively with tests made on the engine of Curtiss’s six-cylinder racing motorcycle in the laboratory there. Before they were able to use this method with the June Bug, a water-cooling system had been worked out, making the longer circular flights possible. Wood, who had flown in Lilienthal’s glider, wanted at this time to make a solo flight in the June Bug, but the plane was “wavy” and dangerous, and Curtiss wasn’t wanting any needless dead celebrities strewn around his field.
Another of his extracurricular — but in this case completely successful — scientific stunts during this period was the invention of the so-called “fish-eye” camera. Long years before, while poking around under water in the primitive diving helmet he’d made with a wooden pail, he had suddenly said to himself, “I wonder what the world looks like to a fish..”.
In discussing refraction in his lectures on optics, he had always taken up the view which the submerged swimmer gets when his eyes are directed upward to the surface of still water, which appears as if covered by a dark ceiling with a circular sky-lit window directly overhead. The entire sky from horizon to horizon is compressed into this window and all objects surrounding the pond, trees, houses, fishermen, etc., should appear around the edge of this circle. The water is, however, always rippling from the disturbance due to the swimmer’s descent, and the eye does not focus well when submerged, so it is next to impossible to see any trace of what should be a sharp, though somewhat distorted, picture embracing an angular aperture of 180°. Wood had looked for this in vain with his wooden-bucket diving helmet at Cataumet many years before, forgetting at the time that the rays from the horizon, which are refracted down at a steep angle on striking the surface of the water, are bent back into their original direction when they enter the air inside of the helmet, through its glass window.
It occurred to him, however, during one of his lectures, that by immersing a camera — plate, lens and all — in water and waiting for the ripples to subside before making the exposure, a sharp photograph of the phenomenon might be obtained. After a few preliminary experiments with a tin lard pail furnished with a horizontal opaque diaphragm and filled with water, he constructed what he named the fish-eye camera. A brass box was made measuring five by six by two inches, into which a photographic plate could be slipped through a slot in the side, which was then sealed by a rubber gasket. The box was then filled with water through a small hole, closed by a screw cap. The optical system consisted of a small square of plate glass backed by an opaque film of silver covered with varnish, in the center of which he made a minute circular window, by scratching off the opaque film. This plate was cemented over a small hole at the center of one side of this box, glass side up. This was covered with a hinged lid, which served as a lens cap for making the exposure. The surface of the pond was represented in this case by the outer surface of the glass plate, the pinhole aperture forming the image on a photographic plate which was immersed in the water with which the box was filled. This was in effect a camera with the equivalent of a lens of a working angle of 180°, and it could be pointed in any direction, up, down, or sidewise.