So I visited Nancy before rejoining my family in Paris, meeting Blondlot by appointment at his laboratory in the early evening. He spoke no English, and I elected German as our means of communication, as I wanted him to feel free to speak confidentially to his assistant, who was apparently a sort of high-class laboratory janitor.
He first showed me a card on which some circles had been painted in luminous paint. He turned down the gas light and called my attention to their increased luminosity when the N ray was turned on. I said that I saw no change. He said that was because my eyes were not sensitive enough, so that proved nothing. I asked him if I could move an opaque lead screen in and out of the path of the rays while he called out the fluctuations of the screen. He was almost 100 per cent wrong and called out fluctuations when I made no movement at all, and that proved a lot, but I held my tongue. He then showed me the dimly lighted clock, and tried to convince me that he could see the hands when he held a large flat file just above his eyes. I asked if I could hold the file, for I had noticed a flat wooden ruler on his desk, and remembered that wood was one of the few substances that never emitted N rays. He agreed to this, and I felt around in the dark for the ruler and held it in front of his face. Oh, yes, he could see the hands perfectly. This also proved something.
But the crucial and most exciting test was now to come. Accompanied by the assistant, who by this time was casting rather hostile glances at me, we went into the room where the spectroscope with the aluminum lenses and prism was installed. In place of an eyepiece, this instrument had a vertical thread, painted with luminous paint, which could be moved along in the region where the N-ray spectrum was supposed to be by turning a wheel having graduations and numerals on its rim. This wheel turned a horizontal screw with a movable nut on which the thread was mounted. Blondlot took a seat in front of the instrument and slowly turned the wheel. The thread was supposed to brighten as it crossed the invisible lines of the N-ray spectrum. He read off the numbers on the graduated scale for a number of the lines, by the light of a small, darkroom, red lantern. This experiment had convinced a number of skeptical visitors, as he could repeat his measurements in their presence, always getting the same numbers. He claimed that a movement of the thread of 0.1 mm. was sufficient to change the luminosity, and when I said that seemed impossible, as the slit of the spectroscope was 2 mm. wide, he said that was one of the inexplicable properties of the N rays. I asked him to repeat his measurements, and reached over in the dark and lifted the aluminum prism from the spectroscope. He turned the wheel again, reading off the same numbers as before. I put the prism back before the lights were turned up, and Blondlot told his assistant that his eyes were tired. The assistant had evidently become suspicious, and asked Blondlot to let him repeat the reading for me. Before he turned down the light I had noticed that he placed the prism very exactly on its little round support, with two of its corners exactly on the rim of the metal disk. As soon as the light was lowered, I moved over towards the prism, with audible footsteps, but I did not touch the prism. The assistant commenced to turn the wheel, and suddenly said hurriedly to Blondlot in French, “I see nothing; there is no spectrum. I think the American has made some derangement”. Whereupon he immediately turned up the gas and went over and examined the prism carefully. He glared at me, but I gave no indication of my reactions. This ended the séance, and I caught the night train for Paris.
Next morning I sent off a letter to Nature, London’s scientific weekly, giving a full account of my findings, not, however, mentioning the double-crossing incident at the end of the evening and merely locating the laboratory as “one in which most of the N-ray experiments had been carried on”. La Revue scientifique”, France’s weekly semipopular scientific journal, published a translation of my letter and started an Enquête, or inquiry, asking French scientists to express their opinions as to the reality of the N rays. About forty letters were published in the succeeding numbers, only a half dozen backing Blondlot. The most scathing was one by Le Bel, who said, “What a spectacle for French science when one of its distinguished savants measures the position of the spectrum lines, while the prism reposes in the pocket of his American colleague!”
Only two papers on N rays appeared in the Comptes rendus after this. They may have been delayed in the mail. The Academy at its annual meeting in December, when the prize and medal were presented, announced the award as given to Blondlot “for his life work, taken as a whole”.
The tragic exposure eventually led to Blondlot’s madness and death. He was a great man, utterly sincere, who had “gone off the deep end”, perhaps through some form of self-hypnotism or overstimulated retinal imagination due to years of staring in the dark. What Wood had done, reluctantly but with scientific ruthlessness, had been the coup de grace.
This climax was summarized by A. A. Campbell Swinton, F.R.S., in the Westminster Gazette:
… the highest scientific tribunal in France had made its award and all apparently went well till an American Professor of Physics — R. W. Wood, of Baltimore, now a foreign member of the Royal Society of London — exploded completely and forever the whole discovery by showing to Blondlot that he continued to see the spectrum, when no spectrum could possibly exist there, if indeed there ever had been one!
Toward outright scientific frauds and fakers, Wood is scornful and merciless, never feeling any sadness or depression over their exposure, but rather a savage and amused elation. One night in Baltimore, after a dinner, he told me and a couple of friends a number of his adventures in this field.
Some years ago, I was asked by Mr. Bernard Baker, president of the Atlantic Transport Line and trustee of the university, to come down to his office and look into the apparatus of a man whose experiments he was financing. It was a scheme for transmitting speech and signals under water. The man claimed he’d discovered a new chemical which was sensitive to sound. Mr. Baker had given him a large room in his office building to use as a laboratory, and I was taken there. He had a large table covered with a hodgepodge of pseudoscientific instruments. There was a dome-shaped bell with eight small pendulums hanging around it, touching its rim. Several parts of a typewriter were included in the setup! The whole thing, on the face of it, was perfectly preposterous, a collection of junk connected by wires. The inventor said his chemical was so sensitive to sound that it was decomposed by noises which the human ear could not possibly hear. I asked him how he could make it, if it was so sensitive, and he said he had to prepare it undersea, in a diving bell! I advised Mr. Baker to kick the man out of his office — which he did a day or two later.
On another occasion I was taken to the roof of a downtown office building to see a demonstration by an inventor who claimed he’d found a method of getting power out of the atmosphere. His table was covered with electric motors, a small toy railroad with an electric locomotive, and other little gadgets run by electricity. At one end of the table a pole ran up in the air, with fifteen or twenty brass points radiating from it. These, he said, gathered the power from the atmosphere, which came down the wire and operated the toys and gadgets on the table. There was a crowd of newspaper reporters and one or two men from whom he was trying to get money. There were several boxes under the table, partly covered by burlap, and one box which was completely covered. Nobody had paid any attention to this part of the “exhibit”, and I pulled the burlap from the box that was completely covered, disclosing a big storage battery with two wires leading up to the top of the table, along the inside of one of the legs! He cleared out of the hotel without paying his bill, carrying all of his apparatus with him.