In the summer of 1909 Mars was in opposition, and all the astronomers were on tiptoe. Wood took out the six-inch lens of his big spectroscope at East Hampton and mounted it on a block of cement on the lawn in front of his laboratory door. A silvered mirror reflected the light of the red planet through the lens and thence to an eyepiece forty feet away, at the back of the dark laboratory, where he viewed the magnified image of the planet while lying comfortably on the floor on an old mattress.
During this same summer he resumed his experiments on photographing the moon in ultraviolet light, and showed the possibility of getting some notion of the nature of the rocky surface of the moon by photography with light confined to selected regions of the spectrum. His first paper on the subject was communicated to the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain by Sir Robert Ball, the Astronomer Royal, and published in the Monthly Notices of the Society, from which I quote:
The preliminary experiments were made at my summer laboratory at East Hampton, Long Island, N. Y., with an improvised instrument made out of odds and ends. A thin film of silver, opaque to all visible light, transmits quite freely ultra-violet light of wavelength 3000, but these rays will not go through glass, consequently a lens made of quartz was necessary. A photographic telescope was made of a three-inch silvered quartz lens of six-foot focus mounted over one end of a piece of galvanized iron stove-pipe, with a plate- holder at the opposite end. This was lashed to a five-foot astronomical telescope which served for following the moon, during the three-minute exposure which was necessary. Both were attached to an equatorial mounting made of an old bicycle frame embedded in a block of cement, the steering axis pointing to the pole star. A slow motion enabled me to make exposures of several minutes if necessary. A more detailed description of this instrument will be found in the English Mechanic for November 12, 1909.
I had discovered an extensive deposit of some material which is dark in ultra-violet light, close to the crater Aristarchus. This deposit shows scarcely at all in the pictures made in yellow light, while it is nearly black in pictures made by light confined to the ultra-violet range around wave-length 3000.
Parallel experiments made in the laboratory showed that many substances which are white in ordinary light are jet black when photographed with these very short waves. Chinese white (zinc oxide) and most white garden flowers are good examples. These white flowers, if growing on a snow-bank, would be nearly invisible, and would not appear in photographs made in the usual way, but would be clearly brought out in pictures made with the quartz lens and the silver film.
In this same year, 1909, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences gave Wood the American gold Rumford Medal for his work on the optical properties of metallic vapors, and Clark University, at Worcester, Massachusetts, conferred on him the degree of LL.D., in company with other distinguished American and European scientists, including Freud and Vol- terra, the celebrated Italian mathematician. Wood has never taken his honors any too seriously, and here’s what he says, recollecting the occasion.
After the rather heavy and solemn ceremonies were over Professor Webster, head of the Physics Department, invited us to his house for cheese and beer. As things dragged a bit, Webster asked me to show them a celebrated parlor trick I’d invented when a student at Johns Hopkins.
Lying on the floor one evening and watching the inverted face of one of the graduate students who was talking while standing up, I had been intrigued by the ludicrous expressions of the talking mouth when viewed upside down. In my imagination I pictured eyes and nose on the chin to complete a small face engaged in animated conversation. It was screamingly funny, and I at once got out my water colors and painted the eyes and nose in the proper position with respect to the mouth, laid a mirror flat on a table, seated myself before it, and covered the upper part of my face with a black veil, transparent enough to see through. By holding a mirror in my hand well out in front of me, I could see the reflected image of the little face right side up in the large mirror, and I recited Jabberwocky with many grimaces to observe the effect. It was a great success, and had been exhibited on many occasions to small but enthusiastic audiences seated in front of the mirror. After the performance in Webster’s parlor was over and the laughter had died down, dear old Volterra came up to Webster and, shrugging his shoulders and holding his hands palms up in a gesture of despair, said plaintively, “C’est plus gai ici qu'en Europe!”
Despite metallic vapors, gold medals, hard work, and what- have-you, the Woods had been keeping things pretty gay too in summertimes at East Hampton. Believe it or not, our professor learned to dance the bunny hug and turkey trot, and is credited with a howling wisecrack when someone asked if he wasn’t afraid of treading on the feet of the young matron who was giving him a lesson in the. then new “close-up” clinches. “How can I?” he demanded, “when her feet are always behind me?"
Costume parties, barn dances, amateur theatricals followed one another in dizzy succession every summer, and each gave Wood a chance to demonstrate his ingenuity and high spirits. The “face on the chin” trick was elaborated into a vaudeville act by projecting it in color by a homemade lantern onto a huge white head made from a properly compressed pillow. (Ziegfeld later experimented with the idea.) But Wood probably got most fun out of an “aeroplane flight” that was the climax of a vaudeville show that the Woods put on in the famous barn. Here is Wood’s account of it.
The feature of the evening was announced as an aeroplane flight from the roof of the barn. An iron wire had been fastened from a pole on the top of the barn, descending at a small angle all the way across the wide lawn to the front gate of the house. From this was suspended on two small steel roller trolleys a huge Weather Bureau box kite used in meteorological investigations, which had been sent to me as an aid in kite photography experiments. At the appointed hour I appeared on the lawn clothed in some ridiculous aviation suit, goggles, beard, etc. Introduced by a barker as Bleriot, the first man to cross the English Channel by air, I mounted a ladder behind the barn, climbed up over the roof, and hoisted the box kite over the ridge pole, with a straw man, clothed as I was, suspended below it. Lighting the stick of red fire between the fore and aft wings and giving the machine a push, I sank back out of sight behind the ridge pole. Away it went with a streak of red smoke behind and the trolley wheels adding their scream to the screams of the women which rose when the whole contraption — man, machine, and red fire — crashed into a bush by the gate.