Towards the end of this crowded year of 1909, Columbia University wrote to Wood asking him if he would care to be an Adams Research Fellow of Columbia. There was a fund left by Edward Dean Adams of New York as a memorial to his son, Ernest Kempton Adams, the income to be devoted to maintenance of a research fellow and the publication and distribution of the results of the research.
All that Professor Wood would have to do in return for the honorarium was to permit the publication of his papers by Columbia University in the form of a book, for the years during which he held the fellowship.
Wood accepted it and held the fellowship for three years. It enabled him to take a sabbatical in 1910-11, and again in 1913-14, Johns Hopkins University paying him half salary during the years which he spent abroad.
Chapter Ten.
Wood Sets Up the Mercury Telescope in a Cowshed — and Puts the Famous Cat in the Barn Spectroscope
Wood’s invention of the so-called mercury telescope — a revolving dish of quicksilver at the bottom of a pit — was one of the most sensational, useless, and significant things he ever did. It was constructed on the principle that mercury in a shallow metal dish, when rotated, assumes the form of a paraboloidal reflecting mirror. The dish of mercury was placed at the bottom of a well beneath an old cowshed with a hole ripped in its roof, and rotated slowly by a motor while the observer at the top of the well looked down through an eyepiece lens at the enlarged, reflected images of celestial bodies as they crossed the zenith.
Wood had the machine built by Warner and Swasey of Cleveland, the celebrated makers of large astronomical telescopes. Every conceivable refinement had to be made to secure a smooth rotation of the dish of mercury, since any jar to the dish would cause ripples on the surface of the mercury and distort the images formed in the mirror. Wood had the brilliant idea of accomplishing this by surrounding the mercury dish with an independently mounted rotating collar, driven by an electric motor and attached to the mercury dish only by thin bands of rubber. These rotated the dish without transmitting the vibrations of the motor. The focal length of the instrument could be varied from four to fourteen feet by altering the speed of the motor. Standing at the edge of the well and looking down into it, one saw the images of the overhead stars, enhanced to the brilliance of distant arc lights, suspended in space at the mouth of the well — an especially marvelous sight when the great star cluster in the constellation of Hercules crossed the zenith.
On August 27, 1908, the New York Times gave the entire streamered front page of its Section II to a profusely illustrated piece entitled:
A NEW IDEA FOR READING THE STARS
Wood of Johns Hopkins at East Hampton Working on a Telescope that isn’t a Telescope with a Lens that isn’t a Lens.
On Sunday April 11, 1909, the Baltimore Sun eructed an even more sensational front-page spread, with black-and-white drawings of Wood looking like Tarzan, a huge hunk of cratered moon resembling Swiss green cheese, the ripped-up cowshed looking like a cowshed, and the diagramed gadgets in a cross section of the well beneath it resembling nothing then on earth, but presaging the cartoons that were later to make Rube Goldberg famous. The headlines were equally diverting.
New Telescope May Solve the Riddle of the Universe!
IS MARS INHABITED?
MERCURY REFLECTOR INVENTED BY BALTIMORE GENIUS TO BRING THE MOON WITHIN A FEW MILES OF EARTH.
The Associated Press and popular science syndicates went to town on it, while the cowshed became a shrine for pilgrimages of scientists and curiosity-seekers. It got on the cables. The French gazettes wrote about the “Puits et Plancher Poulie”; the Berlin journals announced the epoch-making invention of “Ein originelles Spiegelteleskop." A couple of Teutonic astronomers made the pilgrimage, peered down into the well, exclaimed, “Gott in Himmell Wunderschön”
The idea which excited everybody was that if a twenty-inch dish of quicksilver at the bottom of an old well under a cowshed could work such wonders, then a twenty-foot dish down a mighty mine shaft, as it were, would bring the moon to Baltimore and the Bronx. Even the Boston Transcript began to get excited over signaling the Martians — though Wood himself, needless to say, had never made nor countenanced any such fantastic blurb-and-boloney bunk.
Arthur Gordon Webster, then head of the Department of Physics at Clark University, who was one of the first to visit East Hampton, had been humorously scornful of the mercury telescope, and had written in the Wood guest book the jingle which appears at the head of this chapter. The astronomer W. H. Pickering had come visiting later, and after Wood had resolved the quadruple star Epsilon Lyrae for him in the mercury telescope, he had written in the same guest book the following happy pun:
His brother, the even more famous Edward Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, said, at the top of all the first excitement, “I think we’d better wait..”.
And Wood himself — who had found an old penciled record on the cowshed door, “Heifer calf, May 1860”, and added in his own scrawl, “Mercury telescope, June 1908” — was in complete accord with Pickering.
Not so, however, the great Empire State of Texas. The Texans were all for signaling Mars instanter. The idea of waiting didn’t appeal to them at all — nor to that late great religious- fundamentalist archaeologist, the Reverend Professor William S. Cole of Atlanta, Georgia, and the Bible Belt. He felt that God had inspired Professor Wood and that we might obtain even a glimpse of the Pearly Gates through the roof of the humble cowshed. Professor Cole had no financial backing and couldn’t get going on his idea, but wealthy Texas began bombarding Wood with telegrams. The first one came from Fort Worth, was signed by the Star Telegram, and read: “What would it cost to establish plant in West Texas to observe Mars with your mercury reflection would you be willing to conduct experiment large uninhabited areas clarified atmosphere and altitude make conditions perfect”.
On its heels the same day came another urgent wire: “Kindly let us know if you are willing to establish experimental plant huge mercury mirrors if all expenses guaranteed Stamford Texas will stand for ten thousand dollars perhaps more please answer”.
When Dr. Wood replied declining the offer and explained to the newspapers and Associated Press that he hadn’t the remotest idea of going to Texas or trying to signal Mars, the Texans frantically raised the ante to $50,000 and wired: “We will do all we can to help you and assure you we are in earnest”.
Even this failed to melt the professor’s heart. In fact he became a bit impatient and ironic. When prodded by the New York Herald about schemes for signaling Mars, including one which involved covering several square miles of desert with mirrors, he wrote in reply: