He graduated from Manchester University with First Class Honours in 1912, where he joined a team of notable scientists led by Sir Ernest Rutherford (later Lord Rutherford), including Henry Moseley, Hans Geiger, Niels Bohr, Ernest Marsden, James Chadwick, George de Hevesy and Charles Galton Darwin.
He joined the Board of Invention and Research in October 1915, shortly after its creation, to help with the UK war effort against Germany.
Following the ideas of Hans Hollmann, he proposed in 1937 a system with "six or eight small holes" drilled in a metal block, differing from the later production cavity magnetrons only in the aspects of vacuum sealing.
[3] Though he formally retired from the Admiralty Research Laboratories in 1950, he returned to continue his work on underwater sound.
In 1939 A B Wood was awarded the title Officer of the Order of the British Empire, in recognition of his work on dismantling a German magnetic mine at the start of the Second World War.