At Harvard I roomed alone in Thayer 66 the first two years, but at the end of my sophomore year was fortunate enough to draw, in collaboration with a classmate, double room 34 in the newly finished Hastings Hall. Our room had a big bay window on the first floor looking directly down the baseball field. The field was surrounded by the cinder track, so that we and our friends had a private box for all of the spring games. The big window seat had cupboards underneath which could be locked up. Here we stored the liquid refreshments. There was a tea table with cups, saucers, and a brass teakettle, for camouflage. It was occasionally used on Mother’s Day or when girls came to the games. We drank beer for the most part, but had sherry and whisky in reserve for jamborees. I drank only moderately, never passed out, and never suffered amnesia. Before reaching that stage, I always felt a strong distaste for anything more, and was having plenty of fun with what I had.
I dined at Memorial Hall, the Student Commons, with the six hundred other sufferers, in spite of the legend that a student had once found a human molar in a plate of beans.
I took no part in college athletics, except as an innocent bystander, until near the end of my senior year, when I suddenly decided to try for the Varsity tug-of-war team, and much to my amazement found myself in place number four just in front of big Higgins, the anchor, whom I next met in England shortly after the armistice of the World War. We trained for a month, and were all set for the Mott-Haven games with Yale, but learned on the eve of our departure that the event had been abolished for good and all, the day before, on account of its dangerous nature. We pulled on a plank walk, lying flat on our sides with our feet braced against high wooden cleats, the rope passing under the shoulder where it was gripped by the heavily rosined armpit of our heavy canvas jackets. The anchor sat with his feet against a cleat and the rope, with one turn around his waist, held in both hands. It was the stupidest contest to watch, as neither team moved forward or back, the only movement visible to the spectators being that of the scarlet rag tied to the center of the rope. Moreover, it was extremely dangerous, many internal and other injuries having resulted from the straining of the muscles to the limit, when practically lashed to rope and wooden cleats. We were listening to “Information Please” on the radio one evening, and a question which stumped every one of the group at the microphone was “What team wins its event by moving backwards?”. Of course I instantly said to my family and guests, “Tug of war or boat crew,” forgetting at the moment that we never moved at all. “Tug of war” was the correct answer, all the same! Transportation between Cambridge and Boston was by horsecars, the first electric trolley arriving about 1890, celebrated by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his poem “The Broomstick Train.” It took about an hour to get into Boston for the theater or other places of diversion. There was a persistent rumor that Professor Blank was sometimes seen at the “Maison Dorée”, and that any student fortunate enough to catch sight of him there was sure of high marks in his course. This may have been an advertisement of the resort designed to attract collegiate custom.
The course of experimental lectures on electricity given by old Professor Lovering was attended by crowds of freshmen, chiefly because it was well known that a large glass marble, dropped on the top step of the long flight of stairs which led from the bottom to the top row of seats in the lecture hall, would roll slowly to the bottom, going bump, bump, bump. The experiments were apparently those which he had shown in his first lectures, possibly a half century before — dancing pith balls, electrical chimes, electrified wig, etc., many of which I had done years before in the Sturtevant factory. They were amusing, however, and he was a delightful old gentleman, and it was an easy way of removing a condition in Latin composition. My future roommate “took” the electrical course, but never attended the lectures. I coached him for three evenings and he got an A, while I got a B, which shows that he was smarter than I was, for he gave the answers in as few words as possible, while I tried to show off by writing too much, which always infuriates the examiners.
When Rob left Harvard in June, 1891, safely graduated with honorable mention in chemistry and natural history, despite the fact that he had doubtless “infuriated” more than one examiner, it was a relief and surprise to his family — and probably to some of the faculty as well.
Chapter Three.
Alarms, Excursions, and Explosions at Johns Hopkins — Ending in Early Marriage and a Job at the University of Chicago
The legend that our Promethean poltergeist spat fire and crepitated flames when fate later made him a full professor — as did the unhappy bear beyond the mountain — is not untrue but garbled. The error is merely one of chronology and is readily understandable, since Wood regarded most professors as purple cows and might well have been upset when he became one.
Time embalmed the error when it wrote him up a couple of years ago, and there appeared in print another chronological mix-up concerning the period when he set fire to the boardinghouse hash. Both these Pantagruelian episodes occurred actually while he was still a student, doing postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins. He’s done even more outrageous things in his full professorial maturity, but it’s only fair to keep the record straight.
In the autumn of 1891, after his graduation from Harvard, he went to Johns Hopkins with the idea of taking a Ph. D. in chemistry, working principally with Professor Ira Remsen. The first thing he did was to find a boarding-house to live in — and the next thing he did was to set the hash on fire. There had long been in that college boarding-house an up — to — then unverifiable suspicion that the breakfast hash was made from scraps scraped from the boarders’ dinner plates the night before. It was a plausible suspicion because morning hash always followed on the heels of steak the night before. But how to prove it? Wood scratched his ear and said, “I think I can prove it… with a Bunsen burner and a spectroscope.” He knew that lithium chloride was a harmless substance which happened to resemble common salt, both in appearance and taste. He knew also that the spectroscope was capable of detecting the minutest traces of lithium in any material burned in a blue flame. Thus treated, it would show a crimson line. So the fiendish plot was hatched against the landlady, and when next they dined on beefsteak, Rob left some large and tempting scraps on his plate, liberally sprinkled with lithium chloride. Fragments of next morning’s hash were pocketed, carried to the laboratory, and cremated before the slit of the spectroscope. The telltale crimson lithium line appeared, faint but unmistakable. The story followed Wood throughout his whole career, and now has a number of international variants. One piece of embroidery places the episode in a German pension to which a distinguished American professor of chemistry was refused admission — because Wood and his lithium had been there first.
The fire-spitting episode occurred one day after a January thaw, as Wood was on his way back from the laboratory to that same boarding-house. The shortest route for the students was through a Negro section which had a grocery store where colored crowds collected every day at noon to sun themselves on the sidewalk. The street just then was flooded with water from curb to curb. Wood had learned that sodium, a soft, silvery metal, when thrown into water, will take fire spontaneously with a loud explosion and burn with a fierce, baleful yellow flame, emitting showers of sparks and clouds of white smoke. The next time he and his fellow-boarders were starting home for lunch, he carried in his pocket, in a small tin box, a ball of sodium about the size of a large marble. The big puddle spread in the street, and the Negroes were assembled as usual, sitting on boxes and old chairs in front of the grocery store. As Wood passed, he cleared his throat loudly and spat ostentatiously into the puddle, at the same time flipping the sodium ball, unnoticed, in the same direction. There was a terrific bang as they strode on, sparks flew, and a great flash of yellow fire blazed on the surface of the water. Behind them pandemonium broke loose — howls, prayers, overturned chairs, and one voice louder than all the rest: