During my short talk I happened to mention that I’d brought over a sample of a newly discovered chemical (a derivative of sulpho-urea) that was absolutely without taste to about 40 per cent of humanity, while to the remainder it was as bitter as quinine, and that any who cared to sample it could be accommodated. Later on, when I produced the little pillbox filled with the flourlike white powder, I was surrounded by a crowd of German Herr Professors and their Fraus, holding moistened, outstretched fingers, and all crying:
“Bitte, bitte” (Please, please).
Then came a terrific general argument and uproar.
“No, it tastes not at all!”
“But yes! You have no taste!”
“It is terribly bitter!”
They almost came to blows over it.
In 1935 Wood was elected president of the American Physical Society, and was obliged to attend again the Pacific Coast annual meeting, which was in Pasadena. He chose high explosives as the subject of his presidential address and enlivened it with stories of cases he’d solved for the police.
As he was descending an elevator after the annual dinner, one of the members came up to him and said,
“Dr. Wood, will you forgive me if I ask a rather impertinent question? You seem in a good mood, and I’d like to risk it”.
“Shoot”, said Wood.
“Are you a Christian Scientist?”
“No”, Wood replied. “What put that in your head?”
All he could answer was that he’d heard it somewhere.
It was only later, when Wood told his wife about it, that she remembered Margaret’s attempt, as a little girl, to uphold the family honor. She had confided to her mother one day that the neighbor’s little girl had said, “We are Episcopalians. What are you?”
“And what did you say?” Gertrude asked.
“I said we were Christian Scientists”, Margaret answered. “You see, I knew papa was a scientist, and I supposed we were Christians”.
In the summer of 1936, the Woods went to Mexico, which seemed to them, except for Egypt, the most interesting country they had visited. Wood’s enthusiasm for archaeology came once more to the fore. He was particularly interested in the obsidian razors, made by the Aztecs in Montezuma’s time, and he asked several local archaeologists how they were made, but no one seemed to know. Obsidian is a black volcanic glass, and the razors were thin narrow blades, very sharp along both edges, not over 1/16 of an inch thick and five or six inches long. He worried over this problem, until one day, in poking about over a pile of excavated material at the great pyramid of Cholula, which is so vast that it carries on its summit a large modern church, he picked up an obsidian five-sided “peg”. He recalled one of his old laboratory experiments, and this gave him a clue. The razor might have been made at one fell swoop by a blow of a hammer against one edge of the pentagonal top of the “peg”; in other words it was a long, keen-edged “chip”. Examining the five edges at the top, he found that each one had a roughened spot, where the hammer blow had fallen. He had frequently made “paper-thin” mirrors in the laboratory which had one edge “razor sharp”, by silvering a piece of plate glass, standing it on edge, and hitting the upper edge a sharp lick with a hammer. The thin chips that scaled off were often half an inch square and very light. These he used as reflectors in photometers, or for galvanometer mirrors. He didn’t experiment with his obsidian specimen, as he felt sure that his twentieth-century skill as a manipulator would not come up to that of a half-savage Indian in the pre-Cortez age.
In 1938 Wood took a transcontinental motor trip, from Chicago to Berkeley, California, with Professor and Mrs. F. A. Jenkins and their two boys. He went to Pasadena, and to the Mount Wilson Observatory, where two of his eight-inch diffraction gratings had been installed in the spectrograph of the great 100-inch telescope in place of the glass prisms formerly used. Dr. Dunham had already made some new discoveries with them, the most exciting being that interstellar space is filled with the vapor of ionized titanium, the vapor being of such extreme tenuity, however, that it manifests itself as a black absorption line only in the spectra of the most distant stars, the line being much narrower and blacker than the lines belonging to the star itself.
On the way home he spent a week at Flagstaff, Arizona, visiting Dr. Slipher, the present director of the Lowell Observatory, where they made preliminary experiments with a new type of grating for photographing star spectra without a slit. Back in East Hampton, Gertrude joined Wood in a trip to London and Cambridge, where the British Association was holding its annual meeting. Wood gave a communication on a new combination of two prisms and two diffraction gratings for measuring star velocities, which was favorably commented on by Professor Harlow Shapley, Director of the Harvard Observatory, who was in the audience. He also showed motion pictures of the animated crystals of protocatechuic acid, which he had been studying for the past two years. The man assigned to operate the machine lent for the occasion had plenty of trouble. It would start, stop, run backwards for a second or two, then forwards continuously instead of intermittently, giving an imitation of a shower of rain on the screen. This went on and on, the operator becoming more confused each minute, and two hundred people were waiting patiently in the dark. Finally Wood called out, “Is there a doctor in the house?” And a young man in the back row dashed down the aisle and had the machine running perfectly in ten seconds.
Following the Cambridge meeting the Woods spent a week in Oxford for the meeting of the Faraday Society, then to London during “Crisis week”, with everyone rushing for gas masks and all of the parks swarming with men digging trenches. Wood refused to accept gas masks, as they were sailing for home the following week, and he didn’t think the Germans would start things with gas anyway.
It was this same year in London, 1938, that Wood was finally awarded the great gold Rumford medal by the Royal Society. If I understand correctly, this medal is like the coin in the wedding cake. That is to say, it seems to be the best within the best. To begin with, foreign membership in the Royal Society is the highest scientific honor Great Britain can award a non-Britisher, and after they’ve had that piece of cake, rare members are rarely awarded the Rumford medal too. It’s apparently even more complicated, however, for there’s also an American Rumford medal, which Wood received in 1909. Wood has the cake and the coin too. He is a foreign member of the Royal Society and recipient of the medal. Here was the Wood gambit:
1909: Dr. Wood was awarded the American Rumford medal by the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston.
1914: Dr. Wood was recommended for the British Society’s gold Rumford medal by Sir Joseph Larmor, but nothing came of it.
1919: Dr. Wood was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society.
1924: Dr. Wood was recommended again for the Royal Society’s Rumford medal by Merton, and nothing came of it.
1938: Dr. Wood finally got the gold Rumford medal.
The Royal Society and the Rumford medal require a bit of further explaining to the American lay audience. Both go back for centuries. The Society was incorporated in 1662, and is the oldest in the world, with the exception of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. Sir Isaac Newton was elected a fellow in 1672, and wrote to the secretary, “I shall endeavour to show my gratitude by communicating what my poor and solitary endeavours can effect… “. A succession of great names occurs in the Society’s annals through the centuries, and around 1790 or 1800 that of Count Rumford blossoms. He was a celebrated colonial British-American scientist, and he founded the award in double, to be given in America by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in England by the Royal Society. A curious final tangling fact is that Count Rumford himself was the first recipient of his own medal in England!