During his time in Washington, D.C., he attracted the interest of the Carnegie Institution for Science and they would eventually employ Wood to establish a small seismic network that would ultimately grow into the Caltech Seismological Laboratory.
He would serve as Wood's mentor who took his advice and went to work at the Bureau of Standards in Washington D. C. where a relationship was developed with George Ellery Hale, the director of Carnegie's Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena.
[3][4] In March 1921, the Carnegie Institution accepted a proposal from Wood to provide financing for a long-duration program of seismological research in Southern California.
As a researcher for the Institute Wood worked in a partnership with John A. Anderson (an instrument designer and astrophysicist from the Mount Wilson Observatory) to pursue the development of a seismometer that could record the short-period waves from local earthquakes.
In September 1923, with the successful completion of what became known as the Wood-Anderson torsion seismometer, the focus became establishing a network of the instruments throughout the region that would be able to pinpoint earthquake epicenters and eventually allow mapping of the corresponding fault zones.
One of the first uses for the new scale was in a report Wood furnished to the Seismological Society of America regarding the effects of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake where its intensity was placed at VIII (Severe).