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\Seabrook, William. Doctor Wood: Modern Wizard of the Laboratory. New York: Brace, 1941.\
I was curious: how would a biographer handle Wood's unkind exposure of Rene Blondlot? How
would a biographer treat the hero who wrote that nasty article in Nature? After all, there are ways
and there are ways of blowing the whistle. This author has it that there was nothing underhanded
in what Wood did. He was in England attending a convention of the British Association, he had a
reputation for exposing fakes (mostly mediums and tricksters), and some British colleagues
approached him about Blondlot. The British had not been able to duplicate Blondlot's work; they
suspected that the Frenchman was wrong but they didn't have proof. The British and an unnamed
German urged Wood to go to Nancy and find out what was going on. This he did. He found that
Blondlot was deluding himself. Wood wrote the article for Nature. The American physicist was
elected FRS shortly after this incident.
Seabrook has it that "The tragic exposure eventually led to Blondlot's madness and death." (The
sentence is misleading as Blondlot survived until 1930, in retirement.) But Seabrook is telling
this story wants his hero a hero. In fact, there was nothing heroic about exposing Blondlot. The
American was a spy for the British in the continuing chauvinistic science of Europeans. It was
the British and the Germans against the French, and the French lost points in this exchange.
(Seabrook does identify the German scientist who urged Wood to expose Blondlot, it was
Professor Rubens of Berlin. "He felt particularly aggrieved because the Kaiser had commanded
him to come to Potsdam and demonstrate the rays. After wasting two weeks in vain efforts to
duplicate the Frenchman's experiments, he was greatly embarrassed by having to confess to the
Kaiser his failure.")
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