This, by the way, was only one of Wood’s ventures in the theater. Flo Ziegfeld, a neighbor of the Woods in East Hampton, was a frequent visitor to the barn laboratory, and after seeing the miracles effected by invisible light and other special rays, asked if Wood could devise a system of lights and costumes of special material which would disappear when the stage illumination changed, leaving the girls practically naked. Wood worked it out completely. To make it funny, the comedian was to appear with a chorus of girls in evening dress. He was to carry an “X-ray” field glass, and to explain that their clothes vanish when he looks at them. As he turned the glass on them, the lights would change, and they would appear stark naked to the audience. He was then to turn the X-ray field glass on the audience.
It was a little too soon for so daring a strip without the tease, and the act never went into production. Wood gave Ziegfeld other ideas, however, having mainly to do with stage lighting, which were incorporated in the Follies, year after year.
In 1934 Wood was elected vice-president of the American Physical Society and attended the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Section in Berkeley, California. The sessions were held in the buildings of the University of California, in conjunction with the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The attendance was large, and each member was required to wear a large button with his name on it.
George Kaufman’s political satire, Of Thee I Sing, exploiting “Wintergreen and Throttlebottom”, candidates for President and Vice-President, had been the hit of the season in New York. As Wood was now vice-president of the Society, he wrote “Throttlebottom” on his badge, and the meeting at once divided into two groups, a minority which was onto the gag, and a majority which was not. The badge was continually supplying amusing situations, as when an elderly lady at a garden party introduced him by his stage name to a circle of her friends, and when a young professor who had just introduced him to two charming young ladies as “Professor Wood”, was corrected by them, glanced at the badge, made profuse apologies, and added, “A most extraordinary resemblance”.
After the meetings at Berkeley were over, Wood hurried back East, picked up Gertrude, and together they sailed for Europe and the International Congress on Radio-Biology at Venice.
The opening meeting of the congress was held in the Doge’s palace, in the Grand Ducal room. Especially invited foreign delegates sat in a semicircle on the enormous dais. Marconi, president of the congress, gave the first address.
Wood had been asked to show the motion pictures of the Tuxedo experiments with supersonic waves. His lecture was delivered in English, and because of anticipated interest, arrangements had been made to have it translated sentence by sentence, as delivered, into three additional languages. It began something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen, I take great pleasure in being able to show you with a motion-picture machine the results…
At this point the polyglot interpreter raised her hand and said, “One moment, please… Messieurs et Mesdames — c’est avec un vif plaisir que je me trouve capable de vous montrer, à l'aide du cinéma… Meine Herren und Damen, es ist mir eine grosse Vergnügen dass ich im Stande bin Ihnen zu zeigen, mittels einer Maschine für Lebendebilde… Signori c Signorini, sono molto lieto di potervi dimostrare oggi i risul- tati delle nostre esperienze per mezzo cinematografico…
She paused and looked encouragingly at Wood. By that time he had completely lost the thread of even the simple phrases with which he had begun his talk. One can imagine the predicament in which he found himself when a similar treatment was applied to the technical part of the description. Wood remarked, “Why my highly sophisticated audience did not drown this polyglot nightmare in waves of laughter, I have never understood”. He says this was the most painful experience he has ever had on a lecture platform, especially as he had heard his wife remark to an Italian, who had been bored by the long papers that had been given, some of them lasting over half an hour, “Well, you won’t be bored by Mr. Wood’s lecture, because he always gives his addresses in the shortest possible time”.
Marconi’s famous yacht, the Electra, was anchored in the harbor. This was the yacht on which all of his experimental apparatus was installed. But none of the members of the congress was invited on board. The only exception, Wood says, was Arthur Compton’s little boy, who was interested in wireless.
The Woods were given a cocktail party at one of the cafes on the Piazza San Marco. The Marconis were invited to the same party, but told their hosts they could come only after dark, since their appearance in public in daylight caused a crowd to collect, and the crowd usually followed them about from place to place. They appeared about dusk and sure enough, within a minute or two, people began converging on the cocktail party from the entire Piazza, whereupon the Marconis arose hastily, excused themselves, and disappeared.
In April, 1931, Friedrich W. von Prittwitz, the German Ambassador at Washington, on behalf of Berlin University, and at a large reception given in honor of Dr. and Mrs. Wood at the Embassy, presented Wood with an honorary Ph.D. By that time the fact that the famous Johns Hopkins professor was not a Ph.D. had become a sort of academic joke. Most incipient professors, while still young, take the pains to obtain the degree before they so much as dare apply for an instructor- ship in any first-class college. Wood doesn’t blame Harvard for overlooking him. It wasn’t Harvard’s fault. He just hadn’t bothered to do the routine. And in the meantime he’d been given, from his own and a dozen other countries, nearly every degree, gold medal, silver medal, bronze medal, and academic honor[11] that could be showered on a scientist.
Now that Berlin belatedly had capped his LL.D.’s with a fine new Herr Doktor’s Ph.D., “made in Germany”, our hero was duly grateful, but didn’t take it oversolemnly. At the lecture and subsequent banquet given in his honor when the Woods visited Berlin that summer, he couldn’t resist trotting out the magic, humanity-dividing powder he’d been playing tricks with in America and in England, where he and Mrs. Wood had stopped the week before.
I quote from Wood’s notes concerning what happened when they reached Germany.
I gave an illustrated lecture on some results I’d obtained with some new types of spectra I’d discovered, and the serious part of the visit was over. At the end of the banquet, which was an evening affair attended by professors and wives, an amusing speech was made by von Laue, discoverer of the method of photographing crystal structure by means of X rays. He said a Ph.D. (honoris causa) from Berlin University was a rare honor, requiring the unanimous vote of the entire faculty, and that so far as he knew no physicist had received it before. As some members had never heard of the proposed recipient a copy of his book on How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers had been passed around at the meeting, and this had made the vote unanimous.
I made a halting reply in bad German, in which I tried to tell the story of a Japanese professor who “wished very much to buy very many copies of very funny book to send to very many friends in Japan”, and was able to sit down under cover of laughter. Gertrude didn’t think I’d made a sufficiently grateful acknowledgment, and made a pretty speech of her own, expressing our gratitude and the pleasure we’d experienced in renewing old friendships — all in better German than I had been able to grind out.
11
In addition to his medals and awards, Wood has the degree of LL.D. from Clark University, University of Birmingham, England, and Edinburgh University; Ph.D., University of Berlin; is foreign member Royal Society, London; honorary member London Optical Society; corresponding member Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen; foreign member Accademia dei Lincei, Rome; Russian Academy of Science, Leningrad; member American National Academy of Science, Academy of Arts and Sciences, Philosophical Society, Physical Society; honorary member Royal Institution, London; honorary fellow London Physical Society; foreign member Royal Swedish Academy, Stockholm; foreign member Indian Association for Science, Calcutta.