It was advertised that at Marconi’s lecture the audience would be able to listen to transatlantic signals coming from Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. This was at a time when some still doubted such a feat was possible.
Kites would be flown from the roof carrying the antenna, and the audience would be able to hear signals by a system of telephones distributed over the auditorium. Days before the lecture, the historic halls of the Institution were invaded by workmen moving in Marconi’s apparatus. They took down the iron balustrade of the marble stairway leading to the second story, which interfered with the hoisting of some of the larger and heavier pieces of electrical equipment to the lecture room. The entrance hall was cluttered with packing boxes and excelsior for three days, and gradually there was assembled, behind the semicircular lecture table on which Faraday had set up his little coils and magnets, such a display of impressive modern electrical appliances as one seldom sees outside a World’s Fair. A great marble switchboard with voltmeters, ammeters, rheostats, inductances, etc., etc.; several mysterious- looking polished mahogany boxes, with shining brass knobs and bars; and many other things in between these. During the afternoon preceding the lecture Marconi’s two young assistants were on the roof of the Institution, raising the tandem of great kites and tuning the receiving instruments.
This interested me enormously, as I had been playing with kites at East Hampton, and I injected myself into the party, asking questions, making suggestions, getting in their way, and making other equally ineffectual efforts to help.
Marconi read his lecture from manuscript, his elbow on the reading desk and his forehead resting on his hand. He appeared to be the least interested person in the auditorium in what he had to say, and there were no experiments. Except that towards the end of his reading he said, “I have installed the apparatus here with which the signals are transmitted and you will hear the sound of the spark discharge in this box when I close the switch”. He opened and closed it several times and we heard “Buz-buz-buz, Buzzzz-buzzzz-buzzzz, buz-buz-buz” (SOS).
About ten minutes before the end of the hour I noticed that his assistants were getting nervous. They were “off stage”, and one of them kept disappearing every few minutes, then reappearing for a hurried whispered conversation. I tiptoed over to find out what was wrong. The transatlantic signals were coming in all right, but the wind was dropping and the kites were coming down.
“Tell Marconi”, I whispered. “Let the audience hear them while they can and then finish the lecture”.
They shook their heads. “Impossible”, one whispered. “They are to come at the end. He would be furious if we interrupted him”.
“Let me do it then”, I said. But they would have none of it.
The lecture went on monotonously, and came to an end with the words: “We shall now listen to the signals coming across the Atlantic”. He turned to his assistants who were standing at the side of the auditorium. They shook their heads, sadly, and one said, “The kites are down”.
Marconi turned to the audience and explained that the failure of the wind had made the demonstration impossible. To me it sounded as if he were slightly pleased to be saved the trouble.
Walking out with Lord Rayleigh after the lecture, I said, “What did you think of it?”
“Well”, he replied, “I feel disposed to think that if you or I had required something for a lecture that would make a buzz- buzz we could have accomplished it with simpler apparatus — and we’d have had the buzz-buzz”.
The Woods now picked up Elizabeth and Robert, Jr., and sailed for home on the maiden trip of the Olympic, then the largest passenger steamer afloat.
After returning to America in 1911, and while continuing, of course, in his post at Johns Hopkins, Wood started a series of experiments with Professor Pickering of the Harvard Observatory on a new method of determining velocity of stars by photographing their spectra with an objective prism. These were very dramatic and involved the photography of entire groups of stars through a filter consisting of a glass cell filled with liquid — a solution of a chemical with the beautiful name of neodymium. This gave an additional absorption line in the spectrum of each star, from which calculations could be made of stellar velocities as stars approached or receded from the earth.
This was one of Wood’s great contributions to astrophysics, a subject in which he has figured prominently ever since. The Wood-Pickering procedure continues to be used as one of the standard methods of measuring stellar velocity — though Wood today has a new method brewing which Harlow Shapley and other prominent astronomers believe may supersede all previous systems.
In the summer of 1911, Wood purchased and mounted at East Hampton a parabolic mirror of sixteen-inch aperture and twenty-six-foot focus, which he had arranged in conjunction with a large coelostat lent by the Naval Observatory. The coelostat mirror, turned by clockwork, followed the moon and kept the reflected beam horizontal and directed against the sixteen-inch concave mirror, which in turn formed an image of the moon at its focus near the coelostat where the plateholder and ultraviolet filter were mounted. Young Professor Masamichi Kimura, of Tokyo, who ranks today among Japan’s greatest living scientists, had come over to study and work with Wood on sodium vapor, and was invited to East Hampton to help with the moon photography.
During their work a curious episode occurred. Kimura had been a welcome and popular house guest for a week end, and later was residing in a near-by hotel while they continued their summer experiments. One evening they’d been planning to photograph the moon with ultraviolet light. They had set up the telescope and mirrors in the late afternoon in a field clear of buildings, out beyond the barn, and Wood said, “Come over at eight o’clock”.
The sky was clear, but between six and seven a heavy pea- soup fog rolled in from the ocean. It was summertime, but the fog was cold as well as thick. The Woods, who had been dining early, saved after-dinner coffee for Kimura and expected him to appear at the house any minute. He did not appear. About nine o’clock the fog began to roll away, and the sky cleared. A blanket of it, however, as it sometimes does toward Montauk Point, lay thick, waist-deep on the ground. Wood waded through it toward the telescope, planning to do the photography alone. As he approached the looming shelters that covered the mirrors, he saw another dark object embedded in the fog. It was the head and shoulders of the Japanese, sphinxlike in the clear, with the rest of him up to his elbows in the murk.
“Gosh”, said Wood, “how long have you been here?”
Kimura took out his watch, consulted it in the moonlight, and said, “Hoh, have been here one hour and twenty-two minutes”.