The little boy, now grown to daring youth, had returned for a last time to his gigantic toy and had used it to make his first important contribution to scientific knowledge.
Chapter Two. Four Intransigeant Years
Four Intransigeant Years as a Student at Harvard — Wood Beards His Professors and Dreams a Dream
From the autumn of 1887 until his graduation from Harvard in 1891, young Robert was a difficult problem to most of the faculty with whom he came in contact and conflict. In some studies he was disturbingly brilliant and original; in others he was so indifferent that he narrowly escaped flunking them. It would have been the same in any university. When I asked him how he’d happened to choose Harvard, he said, “Father chose!”
He had entered with the maximum number of conditions. He removed them by taking one or two extra courses each year, but remained a poor student to the end from the viewpoint of those among the academic pundits who discouraged originality — and these were still in the strong majority. By that time, however, Harvard, in response to President Eliot’s advocacy of the elective system, had got away from the hard and fast curriculum which forced every student to take a set variety of subjects, mostly classical. Wood was allowed a considerable choice of subjects. These were largely scientific. He specialized in chemistry and would probably have continued in it throughout his life, with his poltergeist-Promethean penchant for fires and explosions… if the water closet in a certain later — and supposedly select — boarding-house in Leipzig hadn’t opened directly on the dining-room….
While chemistry was his serious concern at Harvard, his hobby was geology, and the great Professor Shaler said one day to his father, “It’s spoiling a good geologist to make a poor chemist.” Despite the glacier episode and other wrangles, Shaler remained his best friend on the faculty. Wood admired him deeply, and my guess is that Shaler had a profound influence in shaping the character — and some of the idiosyncrasies — of the future professor of physics. Shaler was a classroom P. T. Barnum, who delighted in dragging in the cherry-colored cats and elephants. As Wood vividly remembers him, he was a red-bearded, long-legged Kentuckian, noted for what the students called “the geological stride,” which kept classes at a dogtrot as they followed him on expeditions to the rock-bound coast of Massachusetts or to various inland quarries which they visited. Shaler gave the most popular course in college, designated NH-4 in the catalogue. Its popularity lay partly in the legend that it was a “snap,” but there was also an aura about his lecture room which delighted the more intelligent of the students. He was spectacular on occasion to a degree seldom equaled on any stage in the heyday of high vaudeville, and often given to forensic hyperbole. One of Shaler’s fantastic flights so intrigued young Wood that after close to fifty years he can still quote it verbatim. It has never appeared in print, and he begged me to include it.
The geologist had been lecturing one day on the gradual development of life on earth; nature’s provision of terrifying fertility to insure a species against extinction; the necessity of avoiding overcrowding by the introduction of mass massacre of certain lower forms of life, to supplement nature’s own massacres in which species higher up in the evolutionary scale devoured the surplus. Said he by way of peroration:
“The female aphis or common plant louse, gentlemen, produces in a single summer three thousand eggs — gentlemen! — and I have made a calculation that if all the progeny had lived since the first appearance of the Aphididae on earth, we should now have a cylinder of plant lice equaling in diameter that of the earth’s orbit around the sun, and projecting itself into space with a velocity greater than that of light!”
Though our young student was lost in admiration for Shaler’s style and vigor, he frequently precipitated violent arguments concerning Shaler’s theories and facts. Shaler had a fantastic notion all his own that the earth, long ages ago, had itself spawned the meteors and meteorites which now from time to time come crashing back to us. The astronomical theory, of course, is that they are broken fragments of comets, moving in orbits like asteroids, and that when in the course of their wandering they get entangled with the earth’s gravitation, they plunge into our atmosphere, become red hot, and fall to earth in the Siberian forest or in Old Man Jones’s cow pasture.
In a lecture one day, Shaler said, “I feel sure it is more reasonable to regard meteorites as volcanic bombs, ejected from great craters erupting here on earth when the earth was younger and more vigorous. These masses of lava were ejected at such velocity that while they were unable to escape completely from the earth’s attraction, they were projected in orbits of enormous eccentricity, and instead of falling back immediately, return to our planet only after the lapse of millions of years….”
Young Wood, only a sophomore and a surpassingly intransigeant one at that, had been an “astronomer” since the age of ten. He drew Shaler’s attention, after the lecture, to the fact that a velocity of over seven miles a second would be necessary, or fifteen times the velocity of a rifle shell.
Shaler was tolerant, as truly great men are, even in their intolerance, and he and Wood had a long argument about it, but the young student, of course, was unable to shake his conviction in the least. Not even the old Sturtevant plant with its giant machinery could yield any convincing experiment on that.
Professor Jackson of the Chemistry Department was a horse of another color than Shaler. He was one of those “horses of instruction” whom William Blake had in mind when he wrote that the tigers of wrath were wiser. He discouraged original experiment by undergraduates and particularly frowned on impromptu research work in the laboratory.
Wood had read about the compound of iodine and nitrogen which is formed by pouring ammonia upon iodine crystals and allowing them to dry on blotting paper. This compound is a very dangerous explosive, quite harmless when wet, but detonating with a loud explosion upon the touch of a feather when dry. Even a fly lighting upon the powder may cause its detonation. The method of preparing it was so simple that he couldn’t resist the temptation to try it in the laboratory, where he was supposed to busy himself only with qualitative analysis.
Iodine crystals were on the supply shelf and ammonia was on every student’s desk. It was the work of a few minutes to prepare the explosive compound. Having developed a slight bump of caution from earlier experiments in his boyhood in the manufacture of fireworks and explosive substances for celebrating the Fourth of July, he divided the half-teaspoonful or so of the dangerous substance into quite a number of small heaps on a sheet of blotting paper to avoid the danger of having the whole mass go off at once. One of the smaller heaps appearing to have dried, Wood touched it with a lead pencil. A crack like the report of a pistol resulted and a light cloud of violet smoke floated away from the scene of the explosion. All of the other piles had been scattered without exploding, as they were still in the wet condition. Professor Jackson walked up to his desk and said, “What was that, Mr. Wood?”
“Tri-iodide of nitrogen,” meekly answered the embarrassed young student.
“Please confine yourself to the experiment of the afternoon and do not let similar disturbances occur again,” said the Professor, coldly.
“No, sir,” replied Wood. Jackson turned away and walked down the laboratory. Presently there was another resounding crack as one of the students stepped on some of the material which had blown off on the floor and dried, and for the rest of the afternoon there were numerous scattered explosions from the scattered particles of tri-iodide. Later Wood discovered that a little of the material laid along the top of the back fence caused surprise to prowling cats.