American physicist, inventor, and professor Robert Williams Wood receives an honorary degree from Johns Hopkins University during the University's class of 1951 commencement ceremony, in Baltimore, Maryland, June 12, 1951.
Group portrait of Johns Hopkins University President and honorary degree recipients in academic dress following the University's class of 1951 commencement ceremony (left to right): Chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Department Alexander Graham Christie, physics professor Robert Williams Wood, philosophy and professor Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, scholar and English literature professor Raymond Dexter Havens, electrical engineer and professor John Boswell Whitehead, and Johns Hopkins University President Detlev Wulf Bronk, June 12, 1951.
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Robert Williams Wood was an American physicist and inventor. He extended the technique of Raman spectroscopy, a useful method of studying matter by analyzing the light scattered by it.
Background
Robert Williams Wood was born on May 2, 1868, in Concord, Massachusetts, United States to the family of Robert Williams Wood Sr. and Lucy Jane Davis. His father, who was born in Massachusetts in 1803, grew up in New England, and was a physician in Maine until 1838. Then he went to the Hawaiian Islands, where he stayed until 1866 as a physician and pioneer in the sugar industry, after which he returned to New England. He was active in the American Statistical Association. From his childhood Wood, showed an absorbing interest in all sorts of phenomena in natural science, and he soon started finding out for himself what made things work by trying experiments of his own.
Education
Robert Williams Wood studied at Roxbury Latin School intending to become a priest. Later his interest changed to optics instead when he witnessed a rare glowing aurora one night and came with an idea that it was caused by "invisible rays."
By the time Wood attended Harvard, between 1887 and 1891, he knew he wanted to pursue a scientific life. He was a creative and highly independent thinker, and his personality often clashed with the rigidity of his professors. From an early age, Wood wasn’t afraid to question the establishment. For example, when Wood’s geology professor and mentor Nathaniel Shaler described his glacier theory - in which Shaler posited that high pressure at the bottom of a glacier would convert the ice to water - Wood didn’t hesitate to construct an apparatus to test Shaler’s conclusion. Wood’s device was made from a block of aluminum and a tightly fitted moveable aluminum cylinder. Inside the bore, Wood placed snow that contained a lead bullet that had been suspended off the bottom.
Wood put the device in subfreezing temperature and then subjected the cylinder to pressures that greatly exceeded those at the bottom of a glacier. If the ice formed water, as Shaler had predicted, the bullet would fall to the bottom of the bore. However, when Wood disassembled the frozen apparatus, the bullet remained suspended in the ice above the bottom of the bore, thus debunking Shaler’s theory. Wood published the result in the American Journal of Science.
Wood also wasn’t afraid to delve into unconventional areas. After conferring with Professor William James - a pioneering psychologist - Wood decided to test the psychological effects of cannabis indica - a plant containing the same psychoactive molecule as marijuana. He wrote his personal account of the experience, which was published in the New York Herald on September 23, 1888, and excerpted in James’ Varieties of Religious Experience.
Wood graduated from Harvard with an honorable mention in chemistry and natural history.
Wood’s next stop was Johns Hopkins, where he began his studies for a doctorate in chemistry. There, he frequently performed spectroscopic experiments in the laboratory of Henry Rowland. In 1892, following his father’s death, Wood decided to leave Hopkins and get married. He then applied for a position at the newly founded University of Chicago. Wood’s job was to clean the apparatus following the lectures and demonstrations of Professor Henry Stokes. Most importantly, the position gave him access to the chemical laboratories and the library.
Within two years, Wood had completed enough research to qualify for his Doctor of Philosophy in chemistry - or so he thought. Just as he was finishing, he was told that he would need to meet new graduation requirements, which included a number of exams in math and physics. Wood objected to the new rules but did not succeed in convincing the university president to change them. He left the university without a doctorate.
In 1894, Wood left for Germany to work in Leipzig with Wilhelm Oswald, the world’s most eminent physical chemist. He also worked at the University of Berlin (1894-1896). When he and his family returned to the United States, Wood, now 29, obtained a position as a junior instructor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
When asked to lecture on physical optics - a subject that Wood had never studied - he dove into a year-long self-study program. At the end of this period, he realized that the standard textbook, Thomas Preston’s Theory of Light, did not cover the modern advances of the subject, so Wood decided to write his own book. Physical Optics took five years to complete. It became a seminal volume in optics that was translated into German, French, Russian and other languages. The Optical Society reprinted the third edition in 1988.
After Henry Rowland died in 1901, Wood was offered the position of full professor in experimental physics at Johns Hopkins. Using a ruling engine that accurately cut sets of parallel grooves into a metal plate, Rowland had ruled the world’s best diffraction gratings at Hopkins. When Wood joined the faculty, he further improved upon the construction of Rowland’s ruling engine, resulting in the fabrication of higher resolution diffraction gratings for spectroscopy.
Wood taught three lectures per week on physical optics and thus was able to concentrate on research. He initiated a series of investigations with ultraviolet light photography. He photographed scenes as widely divergent as lunar landscapes and terrestrial vegetation.
Wood was a clear communicator who would enthusiastically demonstrate his experimental findings to anyone interested. During a trip to Cambridge to attend a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Lord Rayleigh invited him to visit his Terling estate and laboratory. Wood was thrilled, as he held Rayleigh in high regard and considered his collected works as his personal Bible.
Wood arrived at Terling with a suitcase that contained his demonstration apparatus of the resonance radiation of sodium vapor as well as his diffraction apparatus for making color photography: glass tubes and bulbs, rubber tubing, various prisms, lenses and a gas burner to vaporize the sodium. During the visit, Wood demonstrated his key findings on resonance radiation. He also discussed his results with H. Kayser of Bonn - the leading spectroscopist in Germany - and Otto Lummer, a famous physicist from Breslau University.
Upon his return to Hopkins, Wood moved his spectroscopic apparatus to a room in the astronomy tower that contained the Johns Hopkins astronomical telescope. Lacking sufficient intensity in his electric arc light source, Wood thought he would try sunlight. The sun has been used as a source in many developments in physics and medicine: Newton spectrally dispersed sunlight with a prism; Raman discovered his effect with a heliostat; and the German ophthalmologist Gerhard Meyer-Schwickerath used the sun as the light source when developing the first retinal photocoagulators.
In his new laboratory venue, Wood designed and constructed a spectrograph; it had three large prisms of flint glass and large achromatic lenses. He mounted a heliostat on the window sill and focused the sunlight on the entrance slit of a monochromator. The emerging light from the exit slit was then focused on the sodium vapor in the quartz tube, and the fluorescence from the sodium vapor was directed onto the entrance slit of his newly constructed monochromator with a mirror and condensing lens.
Wood could then alter the excitation light by turning the prisms in the excitation monochromator. He could either visually observe the spectrum of the sodium vapor or capture it on a photographic plate attached to the spectrograph. With this apparatus, he would make a major discovery: He could detect and measure various groups of widely separated lines in a complex spectra that consisted of thousands of closely spaced lines.
Wood was a creative experimental physicist and author. Aside from his remarkable corpus of spectroscopic studies on resonance radiation, he produced photographs in both infrared and ultraviolet light. He invented a filter that transmitted ultraviolet light but was opaque to visible light. It came to be known as Wood’s filter. He also developed Wood’s lamp, a useful source of ultraviolet light that is used in clinical dermatology and analytical chemistry and geology.
In addition to his masterpiece, Physical Optics, Wood and Arthur Train co-authored a science fiction book called The Man who Rocked the Earth. Wood showed his humorous side in a book of nonsense verse that he also illustrated: How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers and Other Woodcuts. Wood continually found joy and playfulness within science.
In 1938, at the retirement age of 70, Wood changed his appointment at Johns Hopkins University from head of the physics department to research professor of physics. Wood died in Amityville, New York, on August 11, 1955, at the age of 87.
Robert Williams Wood was Christian, supposedly Protestant, and intended to become a priest in his youth.
Politics
Robert Williams Wood wasn't involved in politics and preferred to give his tome to science.
Views
Wood began his work on the optical properties of sodium vapor and continued this line of research throughout his career. He also investigated the spectroscopy of iodine and mercury. (Niels Bohr cited his work on sodium vapor in his first paper on the structure of atoms.) In addition, Wood initiated studies on the nature of diffraction gratings. While at the University of Wisconsin, he invented a new technique of color photography.
One of Wood’s first discoveries was an apparent exception to Stokes’s law of fluorescence, which states that the fluorescent emission always occurred at a wavelength longer than the excitation wavelength. Wood observed that, in sodium or iodine vapors, the fluorescence wavelength coincided with the excitation wavelength; he named the phenomenon resonance radiation, which is defined as the re-emission of absorbed radiation without a change of wavelength.
Wood gained a reputation as a skeptic and debunker of theories that did not hold up to close scientific scrutiny. Perhaps the best example is his work to disprove Blondlot’s theory of so-called N-ray radiation. That story began in 1903 when the French physicist René Blondlot was investigating whether X-rays were particles or electromagnetic waves. Blondlot was the chair of the department of physics at the University of Nancy, a noted expert on electromagnetic radiation, and a member of the French Academy. Wood submitted a paper to Nature (London), in which he summarized his conclusions on N-rays. Without naming Blondlot, he stated that he visited the laboratory in which most of the N-ray experiments were carried out and that he had removed the aluminum prism from the spectrometer. He stated that this act "did not seem to interfere in any way with the location of the maxima and minima in the deviated ray bundle," and concluded "that all the changes in the luminosity or distinctness of sparks and phosphorescent screens (which furnish the only evidence of n-rays) are purely imaginary." Finally, Wood proposed experiments that could be used to settle the issue beyond doubt; they were never performed. Wood’s report was published in Nature on September 29, 1904. The fallout was severe, especially for Blondlot. Subsequent to Wood’s failed verification, only two papers on N-rays were published in Comptes rendus.
Membership
Robert Williams Wood was a member of the Royal Society, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Royal Society
,
United Kingdom
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
,
Sweden
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union
,
Soviet Union
German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
,
Germany
National Academy of Sciences
,
United States
Personality
Wood was not only inventive and independent; he was also extremely productive. For example, in order to advance his studies of sodium vapor, he procured a $500 grant from the Carnegie Institute and $1,000 from his mother to construct a Michelson interferometer. With this instrument, he rapidly gained international recognition. In the words of a German physicist, "Wood produces like a rabbit." Later, when OSA recognized Wood with the Ives Medal, the citation included the definition of a “Wood experiment” as that which is distinguished by unusual ingenuity and efficacy, especially if done by simple means.
Wood was a strong lover of pranks. There was one time when he played a part of Satan in some play. He was passing along Afro-Americans who were settled on the benches next to their stores. He faked coughing and without being noticed Robert spitted in the puddle, secretly adding a little bit of sodium to the puddle. All of a sudden the thunder roared, puffs of steam floated into the air and bright sparks flashed by. The audience was shocked at this, everybody nearly believed Robert to be a true real-life devil and the owners of the stores drove away the gapers so that they could flee and be ‘out of danger.’
Interests
pranks
Philosophers & Thinkers
John William Strutt
Connections
In 1892, Wood married Gertrude Hooper Ames in San Francisco. There is no information on whether they had any children.