A complete survey of the gold deposits of Abyssinia was under way in 1932, and I wrote to Mr. E. A. Colson, president of the Bank of Addis Ababa, asking for small nuggets from different localities. These he mailed to me from time to time, and all yielded globules, but none the purple film. I had explained to him that should a sample ever be found containing iron it might prove to be a valuable clue in locating the rich deposits worked in ancient times. Mussolini, however, stopped the game just as it was getting under way, and Mr. Colson died shortly after.
Some of the sequins made by Dr. Wood are now in the Cairo Museum along with the originals. His solution of the mystery is embalmed in the British Journal of Egyptian Archaeology and in the archives of the Egypt Exploration Society.
Chapter Seventeen.
Wood as a Debunker of Scientific Cranks and Frauds — and His War with the Mediums
Dr. Wood has had a long career, dating back beyond the days of Blondlot’s “N rays” and the American visit of Eusapia Palladino, in the exposure of frauds and delusions, whether emanating from supposedly scientific laboratories or from mediumistic cabinets.
In the investigation of doubtful phenomena, he is neither academic nor tame nor conventional. In the case of the famous “N ray”, he made a trip to the University of Nancy, and dramatically exposed the most extraordinary scientific delusion of modern times. When Grindell Matthews came over from England with his “death ray” and was trying to induce our government to buy it for the navy, the Associated Press asked Wood to look into it. Wood “looked into it” and gave the press a scathing broadside in which he compared Matthews, “whether self-deluded or not”, to “promotors who try to sell Brooklyn bridges to innocent bystanders”.
In the Palladino investigation, in which he was a member of the committee appointed under the auspices of the Scientific American, he employed X rays and also an ingenious “Venetian-blind” arrangement by which the floor of the medium’s cabinet was illuminated without her knowledge. In the later case of Margery, the Harvard-investigated medium, he seized hold of and pinched — her ectoplasm!
In Wood’s opinion, these scientific leaders up false alleys divide sharply into two categories — self-deluded cranks and downright frauds. The former honestly imagine they have an idea and can make a fortune for themselves and others if they get the backing. The impostors usually set up a tiny but elaborate apparatus worked by trickery, with the hope of impressing some gullible capitalist who might advance them a lot of money to carry out the “idea” on a grander scale. Both categories are old as the hills and perennial as the daisies. Last summer Wood was being urged to investigate a man who claimed he could run a farm tractor by wireless power, with waves from a station a hundred miles distant. He also, of course, had a “death ray”. They always have “death rays”. He had a promotor who’d been pestering the great physicist, and who insisted he had seen a duck brought down from an elevation of eight hundred feet.
“Investigating such people”, said Wood, “is often amusing, but generally a waste of time. The bigger, more serious cases are different”,
Here is Wood’s own account of what was probably the greatest scientific delusion of our time.
In the late autumn of 1903, Professor R. Blondlot, head of the Department of Physics at the University of Nancy, member of the French Academy, and widely known as an investigator, announced the discovery of a new ray, which he called N ray, with properties far transcending those of the X rays. Reading of his remarkable experiments with these rays in the Comptes rendus of the Academy, the leading scientific journal of France, I attempted to repeat his observations, but failed to confirm them after wasting a whole morning. According to Blondlot, the rays were given off spontaneously by many metals. A piece of paper, very feebly illuminated, could be used as a detector, for, wonder of wonders, when the N rays fell upon the eye they increased its ability to see objects in a nearly dark room.
The flame of discovery kindled by Blondlot was now burning brightly, and fuel was added by a score of other investigators. Twelve papers had appeared in the Comptes rendus before the year was out. A. Charpentier, famous for his fantastic experiments on hypnotism, claimed that N rays were given off by muscle, nerves, and the brain, and his incredible claims were published in the Comptes, sponsored by the great Arsonval, France’s foremost authority on electricity and magnetism.
Blondlot next announced that he had constructed a spectroscope with aluminum lenses and a prism of the same metal, and found a spectrum of lines separated by dark intervals, showing that there were N rays of different refrangibility and wave length. He measured the wave lengths. The flame of N-ray research was now a conflagration. Jean Becquerel, son of Henri Becquerel, whose discovery of the rays from uranium had laid the foundation for the discovery of radium by the Curies, claimed that N rays could be transmitted over a wire, just as light can be transmitted along the inside of a bent glass rod by internal reflection. One end of a wire near the faintly luminous detector caused variation of its intensity as the other end, some meters away, was passed over the skull of a living person. If the subject was anesthetized with ether, the N rays from the brain first increased and then decreased as the sleep deepened. He claimed that metals could be anesthetized with ether, chloroform, or alcohol, in which condition they ceased to emit or transmit the rays. Biologists, physiologists, psychologists, chemists, botanists, and geologists climbed on the band wagon. The nerve centers of the spinal cord in their relation to disease and previous surgical operations were studied by the N rays which they emitted. The rays were given off by growing plants, vegetables, and even by a human corpse. Charpentier found the senses of hearing and smell were increased by N rays as well as the sense of sight. A tuning fork in vibration gave a powerful N ray. By early summer Blondlot had published twenty papers, Charpentier twenty, and J. Becquerel ten, all describing new properties and sources of the rays.
Nearly one hundred papers on N rays were published in the Comptes rendus in the first half of the year 1904. The N ray was polarized, magnetized, hypnotized, and tortured in all of the ways that had forced confessions from light rays — but only Frenchmen could observe the phenomena. Scientists in all other countries were frankly skeptical, in fact ridiculed these fantastic impossibilities. But the French Academy stamped Blondlot’s work with its approval by awarding him the Lalande prize of 20,000 francs and its gold medal “for the discovery of the N rays”.
During that summer we were at Beg-Meil, in Brittany, and I was out of touch with the scientific high jinks in Nancy, but in September I went over to Cambridge for the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. After the meeting some of us got together for a discussion of what was to be done about the N rays. Of our group, Professor Rubens of Berlin, with whom I had come in close contact while a student, was most outspoken in his denunciation. He felt particularly aggrieved because the Kaiser had commanded him to come to Potsdam and demonstrate the rays. After wasting two weeks in vain efforts to duplicate the Frenchman’s experiments, he was greatly embarrassed by having to confess to the Kaiser his failure. Turning to me he said, “Professor Wood, will you not go to Nancy immediately and test the experiments that are going on there?” “Yes, yes”, said all of the Englishmen, “that’s the idea, go ahead”. I suggested that Rubens go, as he was the chief victim, but he said that Blondlot had been most polite in answering his many letters asking for more detailed information, and it would not look well if he undertook to expose him. “Besides”, he added, “you are an American, and you Americans can do anything…”.