Chapter Twenty.
Wood as a Boomerang Thrower — as Amanuensis to a Thunderbolt — and as an Amateur Infant Psychologist
This triple tale of a curiosity-inflamed Promethean poltergeist begins with lightning and boomerangs, circles properly back to the point of departure as boomerangs should — and then sails off, still boomerang-propelled, into amateur experiments in infant psychology, including a gunpowder plot directed at his own innocent and bored baby granddaughter. Yet the man has kept complaining that I make him out a monster in parts of this narrative…
When I went out, on Mrs. Wood’s gracious invitation, to their summer place at East Hampton last June for a few days’ quiet rest from work on this biography, I found myself chasing all day long in the fields surrounding the farmstead, at the heels of this unextinguishable Crile Elk who never gets tired of anything, at an age when most learned professors are occasionally fain to sit down or take naps. Our main expeditions were across the road into a big field spotted with daisies, where he threw the boomerang and tried to teach me to do it. Previously he had led me to a clover field beyond the bam laboratory, where he had taken his celebrated “autograph of a thunderbolt”.
The thunderbolt’s “signature”, which still hangs in the barn, and which was reproduced with photographs and an article some years ago in the Scientific American, was obtained by Dr. Wood just after it had nearly killed him. Said he, showing me the spot:
“A heavy storm had passed, and the sky was blue overhead. I started across this small field which separated our house from that of my sister-in-law. I had gone about a dozen yards along the path in the grass when my daughter Margaret called to me. I stopped for perhaps ten seconds, and just as I started off again a brilliant blue line of fire came down from the sky with a report like that of a twelve-inch gun, striking the path about twenty feet in front of me and sending up an enormous white cloud of steam. I walked on to see what record the flash had left. There was a withered patch of clover about six inches across, with a hole in the center half an inch in diameter. If Margaret hadn’t called and stopped me, I’d have been ‘on the spot.’ I went back to the laboratory, melted about eight pounds of solder, and poured it into the hole”.
What he had dug out after it hardened looks like a slightly bent, oversized dog whip, cast in metal, heavy as dog whips are at the handle, and tapering gradually to a point. It is slightly over three feet long. My own surprise was that it hadn’t penetrated the earth more deeply.
When we’d returned to the house for tea, I noticed a boomerang reposing on the mantel in the living room. It was a large one — no toy. It was what I suppose a bushman would call a business boomerang. It was made of hardwood, polished, smooth.
“Did it come from Borneo?” I asked.
“I made it myself”, replied Wood. “I’ve made a lot of them”. He took me across into the big daisy field, and for the first time I was watching an expert throw the boomerang. The stance, form, and follow-through seemed more complicated than those in golf, tennis, discus-throwing, or anything I knew. The stance of the discus-thrower in Roman sculpture is closest to the stance Wood took — right foot well forward, shoulders bent to the left, the boomerang held far to the left and backward, with the arm curved behind the waist. Then forward on the left foot, with the boomerang coming up, vertical, high above the right shoulder. As the final step or leap forward is made with the right foot, the boomerang is thrown overhand and perpendicularly — and a little downward, almost as if toward the ground. Instead of striking the ground, it turns over on its side, when properly thrown, and then begins to soar upward in a sweeping curve. When well thrown, it completes the curve and returns to the thrower’s feet. The sport is not without danger. Experts have been in hospitals with broken kneecaps and other injuries.
Dr. Wood encouraged me to try. I managed after repeated trials to make the boomerang rise once. But not in a good flight. Boomerang-throwing requires as much form, practice, and skill as top-notch tennis or golf.
That evening I said to Wood: “You are supposed never to have shown much interest in games or sports. How did you happen to take up boomerangs?”
He said: “It touches aerodynamics, of course, and I suppose my first interest was technical… scientific. But it soon occurred to me that the best way to learn about them would be to throw them myself”.
He loves to talk, and this is what he told me.
While I was a student at the University of Berlin, back in 1896, I chanced to be thumbing a bound volume of the Annalen der Physik, published some twenty years previously. By accident I ran across an article on the flight of the boomerang. It was largely a mathematical treatment by some long-dead Herr Doktor who had probably never thrown a boomerang in his life — and maybe had never seen a real one. It was filled with aerodynamical equations that I didn’t understand. But there were diagrams of the different paths of flight the boomerang could take, circles, figure eights, etc., that fascinated me. There was a footnote stating that “boomerangs were obtainable” at a certain toyshop in Berlin, at a cost of one mark fifty each. I hunted up the address and found that after all those years the shop was still operating. But the young salesman had never heard of boomerangs. I insisted, and finally an old patriarch was summoned who shook his head solemnly, scratched it, and then said slowly, “Ja, ja, warten Sie einen Augenblick. Na — ich erinnere mich” (Yes, yes, wait a minute. Now I remember).
Calling for a stepladder, he climbed to a shelf about ten feet from the floor, tossed a lot of stuff aside, dug out a large parcel wrapped in brown paper, which shed clouds of dust as it came down, and disclosed half a dozen small wooden boomerangs, toys really, of rather light weight. I bought them all, such as they were, hurried home, and repaired immediately to a large open lot behind our apartment in Charlottenburg.
After false starts with all sorts of wrong holds and deliveries, I finally began to make them come back a little, and eventually learned to throw them. I brought some of the boomerangs back to America, and one of the duties imposed on me as instructor of physics at the University of Wisconsin was to give every autumn a boomerang demonstration to the undergraduate class in physics which numbered some three hundred. It was their favorite “lecture” of the year, and always attracted large crowds of gapers from other departments and from the town.
A few years later while on a lecturing visit to England, I became acquainted with Professor Walker, the mathematical physicist at Cambridge, and it turned out to my joy that he too was a boomerang enthusiast. From him I learned to make and throw real boomerangs, made of ash, quite heavy, and with which orbits of much greater diameter could be obtained. These were real weapons, similar to those used in Borneo and the Malay Peninsula. Careful shaping of the surfaces was necessary, giving to the implement, in a slight degree, the properties of a screw propeller. In this way the rapid rotational energy was utilized in supporting the implement when in horizontal flight. I was introduced also to the “war boomerang”, a still heavier implement with the arms bent only at a small angle. This was not intended to return, but flew along a few feet above the ground for a much greater distance than it was possible to throw a war club or spear. It is my guess that the “returning boomerang” is perhaps used by primitives only for hunting aquatic birds in flight. If thrown through a thick flock, flying above the water close to shore, it would return to the shore if it missed. It would need to be retrieved, together with the bird, only when a hit was made.