Prince

(See front cover)

Some years ago a scientist walked out into a Baltimore park to take a picture. His fertile brain and nimble hands had produced a "fisheye lens," a hollow hemisphere of glass filled with liquid, which would focus a sweep of 180DEG on one plate. He decided to place himself beneath a bridge, photograph the underside of the bridge's arch from horizon to horizon. By the time he had finished setting up his mysterious-looking device, he had attracted a large crowd of gawpers. He snapped his picture, looked up with an expression of horror, cried:

"Run for your lives!"

The spectators broke and scattered. Undoubtedly, the twinkling-eyed scientist would have been arrested as police arrived, had he not identified himself as Professor Robert Williams Wood, eminent physicist of Johns Hopkins University.

This story is likely to be told whenever U. S. physicists and astronomers get together socially or professionally, but only to very young scientists because all the older ones know it. Today, prankish Dr. Wood is a hale old man with a fine pink skin and clear blue eyes, who scorns an overcoat on the coldest days and goes about like a college boy, with garterless socks drooping over his shoes. He is full of years and honors, and more cognizant of the latter than of the former. But he was 70 last May, and Johns Hopkins requires retirement at that age. This year is his last as a regular member of the University faculty.* He is doing important work, however, and it has been understood that he would go on with it after retirement. At the last moment Dr. Wood persuaded Johns Hopkins' President Isaiah Bowman that since his labors would continue he should have a more active title than Professor Emeritus. So this week, when Dr. Wood appears at the Johns Hopkins commencement ceremonies in his formal academic regalia, Dr. Bowman is to announce his appointment as Research Professor of Physics, for one year beginning September 1938.

This unusual appointment is in line with Dr. Wood's high place in U. S. scientific history. For not only is he one of the most picturesque characters in U. S. science; he is one of its very great and gifted laboratory explorers.

Splitting Light. The important work which Robert Williams Wood is now doing is the manufacture of diffraction gratings. A diffraction grating is a plate of glass, metal or metal-on-glass on which a series of very fine, parallel lines are ruled close together. In combination with lenses, such a grating breaks up a beam of mixed light, such as the light from a star, into its component wave lengths--that is, it furnishes, as a prism does, a spectrum of bright and dark lines which identify the fundamental elements of matter. The iridescence of mother-of-pearl is a diffraction effect, caused by numerous tiny grooves in the smooth surface of the shell. The making of diffraction gratings is a high-precision job. It is done with a complicated ruling engine, carrying a diamond point back and forth across the plate.

Johns Hopkins' first ruling engine was designed and built by Wood's illustrious predecessor in the chair of experimental physics, Professor Henry Augustus Rowland. It ruled 14,400 lines to the inch. Since then two other machines have been built, one of which rules 15,000 lines to the inch, the other 30,000. Dr. Wood has so improved the technique that ghost lines are practically eliminated. "Ghost lines," long a bugbear of spectroscopists, are false spectrum lines due to imperfectly ruled grooves on the gratings.

Astronomers appear to agree that Wood's gratings, ruled in thin films of metal deposited in glass plates, are the best in the world. At Mt. Wilson Observatory one of them was used in the discovery of the element titanium in interstellar space, and in highly accurate measurements of stellar motions. At Harvard Observatory a special wood grating ruled on a concave surface is to be used in a long program of research on stellar atmospheres and gaseous nebulae.

His manufacture of diffraction gratings, of course, is far from enough to measure the scientific stature of Robert Williams Wood. His great monument is his Physical Optics, first published in 1905, in which he bestowed on physics a vast reservoir of experimental data.

Embellishment. In 1933, when Wood was awarded the Ives medal, a coveted honor of the Optical Society of America. Physicist Karl Kelchner Darrow of Bell Telephone Laboratories spoke as follows: "It is ... as a great authority on light that Wood is known universally. Few indeed are the phenomena of light which he has not examined and helped to clarify! . . . One may say of him as Johnson of Goldsmith nullum quod tetigit non ornavit [he touched nothing which he did not embellish]. . . .

"In the wide diversity of Wood's researches, there are half a dozen at least among which it would be hard ... to choose the most important. It is not necessary to attempt a choice; but since the pre-eminence of first mention must be accorded to some one thing, let it be the great sequence of Wood's studies of the fluorescence of gases evoked by light of frequencies rigidly controlled and identical with natural frequencies of the illuminated gas, and to which he gave the general name of 'resonance radiation.' . . . His is one of the few names cited in Bohr's paper of July 1913, with which modern atomic theory commences. . . . The term 'a Wood experiment' has come to be employed of any which is distinguished by unusual ingenuity and efficacy. . . ."

In his 37 years in science Dr. Wood has performed thousands of "Wood experiments." Perhaps none is more indicative of the scientist's artful invention and thrusting imagination than his creation of a mirror with a concave, paraboloid surface by simply spinning a bowlful of mercury.

Fun. But if Dr. Wood has worked long and usefully at science, he has also had a lot of fun out of it--to an extent that makes him a unique character among U. S. physicists. Once he proved that the moon was not made out of green cheese--by obtaining a spectrographic analysis of a piece of green cheese and comparing it with one of the moon. He has always had a passion for making apparatus out of any odd piece of junk that came to hand. On one occasion he made a telescope mounting out of an old bicycle. On another, he obtained a 20-ft. length of iron pipe, about six inches in diameter, which he intended to use as a spectroscope tube. There were cobwebs in the pipe which had to be cleaned out. Dr. Wood obtained a cat, put the cat in the pipe, closed up that end by laying a board against it. The cat saw light at the opposite end, crawled through the tube and emerged, having cleaned out the cobwebs.

Walking across the Johns Hopkins campus one day after a rain, Dr. Wood passed a group of students. As he went by, he spat into a puddle. Instantly, to their amazement, a jet of diabolic yellow flame spurted from the water, fizzled for several seconds before going out. When he passed the same way a quarter-hour later, the students were still arguing about how he did it. What the scientist had done was to conceal a bit of metallic sodium in a piece of paper in his hand. Sodium is so active chemically that it burns on contact with water. Dr. Wood's histrionics while spitting concealed the fact that he simultaneously dropped the sodium into the puddle.

Not the least of Dr. Wood's fun has been exposing sundry scientific quacks and frauds. Most celebrated case: about 35 years ago, the scientific world was excited by the reported discovery of a mysterious radiation, called "N-rays," by a certain Professor Blondlot of France. Professor Blondlot could not explain the source of the "N-rays'' but he declared that if they were passed through a prism they would cause an electric spark to brighten visibly.

Dr. Wood attended a demonstration in Nancy, surreptitiously removed and replaced the prism in a darkened room, succeeded in showing up the rays as a hoax. The scientific excitement about them subsided with extreme rapidity.

Literature. In 1917, Dr. Wood relaxed from his more serious labors by composing and publishing a book of nonsense verses, illustrated by himself. Artistic ability seems to run in the Wood family. The scientist's daughter Margaret (Mrs. Victor C. White of Cedarhurst, L. I.), eldest of his four children, painted a portrait of him which will be presented by a group of friends to the University next week. It appears on TIME'S cover.

Dr. Wood's picture book was called How To Tell The Birds From The Flowers (and other Wood-cuts). In it he professed to find philosophical and pictorial resemblances between the crow and the crocus, the hawk and the hollyhock, the pea and the pewee, the rue and the rooster, the pecan and the toucan, many others. After 21 years and 17 editions, the book is still in print. It sells about 600 copies a year. Dr. Wood occasionally checks up on sales in department stores, to make sure that his publishers (currently, Dodd, Mead & Co.) are sending him enough royalties.

An earlier literary project was a collaboration with Writer Arthur Train on two pieces of lurid pseudo-scientific fiction, The Man Who Rocked the Earth and The Moon-Maker. According to Wood, the venture got under way when he told Train of a fine idea he had for a pseudo-scientific tale. Train offered him $100 for scientific help on it. The story ran in the Satevepost in three instalments, for which Train got $3,000. Train increased Dr. Wood's fee to $300, but after thinking it over, Dr. Wood decided that he had been bilked and said so--jocosely --to Fictionist Train. Said the latter: "Well, it's taken me 20 years to develop my style to the point where I can command 10-c- a word from the Post." Said Wood: "And it's taken me 20 years to learn enough science to fix your story up so that it won't be laughed at by every schoolboy."

Chemistry v. Physics. Son of a well-to-do surgeon, Robert Williams Wood was born in Concord, Mass. His formal preparation for Harvard was in the classics, but on his own hook he worked up his entrance requirements in science. After graduation he went to Johns Hopkins for advance study, was shuttled back and forth between chemistry and physics. The chemistry department thought he would make a good physicist and the physics department thought he would make a good chemist. Even at that tender age, Robert showed himself to be a forthright experimenter, with a tendency to take without formality any apparatus he needed. One day his chemistry superior admonished him to "get the hell out of here," after Wood had ruined a sink by pouring acid into it. Thereupon Wood married Gertrude Ames of San Francisco and went abroad to study at the University of Berlin.

Back in the U. S., he spent a few years at the University of Wisconsin, where he devised a method of thawing out frozen municipal water mains by passing an electric current through them, and made an animated film of an electrical experiment by photographing 300 diagrams. In 1901, he mounted the chair of Experimental Physics at Johns Hopkins. During the War he joined the Signal Corps, went to France, experimented with special means of communication and gunfire control. He suggested that seals be trained to hunt German submarines, a red balloon to be attached to the seal as a surface marker, a destroyer to follow the balloon. This idea was tried out in the Channel but given up when it was found that seals would abandon a submarine hunt to chase a school of herring.

Disappointment. Dr. Wood likes the theatre (he once was active in amateur theatricals), music and social functions, makes a special effort to shine when ladies are present. In science, the great disappointment of his life has been that he has not received the Nobel Prize. His colleagues say that this is because Wood's mind, brilliantly productive in the early stages of an experiment, tends to grow bored and look for something else when the research reaches a stage where long routine labor is in prospect. He once, it is now known, had the Raman Effect** in his apparatus, trembling on the verge of detection, but he did not detect it. The phenomenon was discovered in 1928 by Physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman of India, who received the Nobel Prize in 1930. In his humbler moments, Wood admits that, even had he discovered the phenomenon, he did not have the theoretical background which would have conveyed to him its importance. But in experimental physics, the diverse contributions of Robert Williams Wood have been of immense value, and for them he has been amply applauded. A realist, he manifestly enjoys the applause. Some years ago a British dignitary, presenting Dr. Wood with an honorary degree, called him the "Prince of Experimenters." Dr. Wood likes that title.

*Zoologist Herbert Spencer Jennings is another Johns Hopkins notable who is retiring this year because of age. Dr. William Holland Wilmer, who achieved his greatest newspaper fame as the eye surgeon of Siam's ex-King Pradhjadipok, retired unwillingly in 1934, died a few-months after.

**Raman Effect: multiplication of spectrum lines when light is scattered by molecules of a transparent substance.

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