Robert Wood Johnson is a great specialist in organizing and staging scientific experiments. This famous American physicist was mainly engaged in work with optics. However, he conducted many fascinating experiments in other areas of scientific knowledge. Robert Wood's contemporaries called him "the father of the experiment."
Early years
Wood Robert was born on May 2, 1868 in the provincial American town of Concord. At the age of 12, he was enrolled in the Rockbury School, which at that time was considered one of the most prestigious in the country. Here he studied Latin in depth. Then he went to a classical school in Boston. Upon graduation, he successfully passed the entrance exam at Harvard.
It is noteworthy that Wood Robert began to organize peculiar tricks from early childhood. Spending time with peers in the yard seemed too boring for a gifted child. Ordinary children's toys were replaced by ingenious equipment from a blower factory located near Boston, to which the boy's father was related. At the age of 10, Robert received the right not only to freely walk around the production workshops, but also to study the principles of operation of industrialdevices. The objects of his interest were casting molds, hydraulic presses, various machine tools for processing parts.
As a child, Wood Robert regularly set fires during his experiments. Already in adolescence, he gained a reputation as a dangerous person who is fond of working with explosives. Later, Wood's experience as a child was of benefit to the New York police. Investigators have repeatedly turned to Robert for help in order to conduct an examination of the explosives that were used by the criminals.
Surprisingly, the teachers rated Robert Wood as an ordinary bully and even considered him stupid. And this is not surprising, because he was expelled from the Rockbury School for developing mechanisms for riding on the railings of spiral staircases installed in the building. Unpleasant incidents also accompanied his studies at Harvard. Here, Wood Robert became even more interested in working with explosives. In chemistry classes, he was able to safely combine substances that scientists had previously considered incompatible. The guy repeatedly used his unique chemical recipes to organize small explosions in order to disrupt classes.
Work for the army
With the outbreak of the First World War, the American army was seriously interested in Robert Wood. The scientist's experiments were supposed to benefit the soldiers who were at the front.
Cooperating with the army command, Wood Robert proposed the use of bromobenzyl gas during one of the military campaigns in France. His coupleswere to completely neutralize the enemy, who was actively advancing along the entire Western Front. According to the assurances of the scientist, all that remains to be done after that by the Allied units is to capture the Germans, disoriented under the influence of tear gas. However, the French abandoned the idea. A few months later, the Allied army paid the price for its decision when the Germans themselves attacked the enemy with toxic chlorine.
Wood Robert was the author of the signal telescope, which made it possible to pump up military balloons with hot air at a considerable distance. Later, the scientist managed to convince the British command to allocate funds for organizing a project to train seals, which were supposed to detect enemy submarines. As practice has shown, the animals coped rather badly with the task, since they were often distracted by chasing schools of fish. However, the experiment made it possible to find out that seals perfectly distinguish the quietest, most distant sounds underwater. The results of the experiment created the basis for the modernization of hydrophones - devices with which the noise of submarine propellers was identified. For such an original contribution to military affairs, Robert received the rank of major, despite his status as a purely civilian scientist.
Scientific discoveries
Robert Wood is a physicist who became famous for the following scientific discoveries and achievements:
- explored optical resonance;
- constructed a telescope using mercury parabolic rotating mirrors, proved the benefitsinventions;
- made an opaque light filter that let in ultraviolet rays;
- takes clear ultraviolet images of the Moon for the first time in history;
- improved the diffraction grating;
- developed mechanisms for performing infrared photography;
- explored how vibrations generated by ultrasound affect solids and liquids.
Writing activity
In 1914, Robert Wood turned to his friend, the author of exciting thrillers, writer Arthur Tran, with a proposal about co-creation. Soon friends wrote the novel The Man Who Rocked the Earth ("The Man Who Rocked the Earth"). The work, for which Robert developed the storyline and described pseudoscientific incidents, was ready in a few weeks. The book was accepted for publication in 1915. Soon, the comrades wrote a sequel, where Wood inserted a series of photographs allegedly taken from the surface of the moon.
Robert Wood: experiments with infrasound
One day, while staging a play in a London theater, one of the directors turned to Robert Wood for help. The author of the performance needed to create effects that would cause an inexplicable feeling of anxiety in the viewer. A well-known scientist suggested that the director use rumbling, extremely low sounds. For this, a special pipe was designed, which was attached to the organ and emitted vibrations that were indistinguishable for human hearing.
Already the first rehearsal brought everyone intodelight. The instrument did not make any sounds. However, while pressing the keys of the organ in the hall, the walls began to tremble, the sound of glass and chandelier pendants was felt. It is noteworthy that not only the spectators who were in the hall during the performance experienced inexplicable anxiety, but also people living next to the theater.
Later, in the course of numerous experiments, Robert Wood proved that infrasounds produce strong winds, thunderstorms, earthquakes. In industry, they are emitted by slow-running machines, factory fans, air compressors.
In closing
As you can see, Robert Wood was a rather controversial figure in the scientific community. During his life, he did not defend a single dissertation, because it seemed to the researcher too boring and useless. Despite this, Wood had the status of an honorary doctor of a wide range of universities, and was also a member of reputable scientific societies, and was repeatedly awarded prestigious awards for his contribution to the development of science.
