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Tuxedo Park
Loomis, a Harvard lawyer from a well-to-do WASP family, went from practicing law to doing artillery research in WWI to one of the most spectacular accumulations of Wall Street wealth in the go-go 1920's. He personally drove the creation of the electric utility industry and helped form or run most of the major Wall Street banks of the day (nearly all of which are still with us in original or merged form). Smart enough to see the 1929 crash coming, he sold his stocks early and entered the depression worth $50-100 million, all in cash.
How did he use this money ? By retiring to his real love, science and inventing, eventually being elected to the National Academy of Science. A brilliant man, at parties he would often play several games of chess simultaneously, with his back to the boards and while maintaining lively conversation with his other guests. When tackling scientific problems, he generated dozens of ideas to try and had dozens of teams running down these ideas, setting the stage for the Manhattan Project, which pursued all available avenues simultaneously.
During the Depression, Loomis built a huge laboratory in Tuxedo Park, a very wealthy enclave 40 miles northwest of New York City. The first gated community, it was largely populated by the Rockefellers, Morgans, and other rich scions of industry and finance. Considered the premier research establishment of its day, a typical day at the lab featured visits by Fermi, Lawrence, Einstein, Bohr, and scores of others, all helping Loomis work on important problems of the day.
Not content to be an observer, Loomis himself ran many of the experiments and published dozens of papers on a very wide variety of subjects. He would typically solve some major stumbling block in an area such as ultrasonics, microwaves, or biology and then leave others to work out the details.
Called to action in WWII by patriotism and is famous cousin, Henry Stimson, the War Secretary, he personally made RADAR a reality (borrowing heavily from British, who he convinced to give us all they knew), building the MIT Rad Lab from scratch into a war-time R&D lab of 5,000 people.
I had always thought RADAR played a minor role in WWII, but it turns out to have been extremely important, with nearly 25,000 units produced. It was conceived to help stop the German night raids on Britain, but beyond that helped end the U-Boat menace since Loomis' system could detect subs on the surface and even periscopes. Bombing RADARs guided bombers over the Continent and LORAN, which Loomis personally invented, guided all aircraft navigation in Europe, the Atlantic, and Pacific for the second half of the war.
Loomis helped kick off the hunt for the atom bomb more than a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, largely via his close friend the brilliant Nobel Laureate Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley (for whom the Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore labs are named). While Loomis did not actually work in the atom efforts (he was too busy with RADAR), he mobilized the money, scientists, and political will to make it happen. He foresaw in the 1930's how nuclear fission and Germany's war-mongering would spell bad news for the world.
The book itself paints all of this in very concrete ways, moving back and forth between Loomis' private and public life, including quotes from nearly all involved. The author is related to many players in the story, including some of Loomis' closest friends, and thus had access to personal papers and numerous family members through the ages.
Writing in a witty and sometimes humorous style ("[T]he RADAR scientists knew they needed a single transmit/receive antenna. The trouble was, no one knew how to build one.") the book is an engaging read all the way through. A fair amount of scandal is mentioned, as the book opens with the suicide of one of Loomis' closest friends (the author's great uncle) and moves from there to gradually expose all that was going on through three of the most exciting decades of this century.
The book left me very impressed with Alfred Loomis and motivated to work even harder pursue more advances in technology and science, not to mention finance. I hope none of are called to support a war effort in the manner he did, but there are many discoveries that remain for us all; if we are one-forth as productive as Alfred Loomis, we'll do very well indeed.
You can purchase Tuxedo Park from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
but in the Korean War, he got promoted to Corporal, and could hear incoming medevac helicopters.
A. Rightmann
inventor of RADAR
I might be wrong, but I thought the Brit, Robert Alexander Watson-Watt invented radar.
You can pick it up at amazon and save a few bucks
we invented RADAR! in Cambridge. I only know this because my girlfriends great grandfather worked on the project. He was also a lecturer at Cambridge University.
You mean Jackie Chan kicked off the race to build the atom bomb ?
That explains the broken foot...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
This seems to be one of the more interesting books that's been reviewed on Slashdot. One I might actually go and look for at a book store.
~S
long-range radio navigation
It's the Amazon review. I see you doing this in every book review thread. Fuck off already.
Silly boy, don't you know the Americans invented and achieved everything? The first computer was not invented by Charles Babbage, Sir Isaac Newton didn't discover the laws of Physics, it wasn't Crick and Watson who discovered DNA and, most importantly of all, it was the Yanks and not the Brits (or even the Poles) who first captured working Enigma machines during World War 2!
Why, even that less than stellar inventor Al Gore came up with the internet! That Tim Berners-Lee guy (and the folks at ARPANET) were a figment of everyone else's imagination!
Anyone else fed up of revisionist history? Is is right that the version of Microsoft Encarta sold in the US credits Bell as inventing the telephone but that the one sold in Italy says it was Marconi? And that neither version even mentions the other guy, even in passing?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Until his book ends up on Slashdot and then *EVERYONE* knows his name... =)
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
I'm always amused by this type of nationalist history where, people of various nations "adjust" the facts to take credit for work that isn't entirely their own. The Russian's are exceptionally good at this, as they claim to have invented the telephone, television, flight and probably RADAR too.
Englishman, Watt, was most definitely the inventor of RADAR. The Americans knew nothing about it until they were approached by the British regarding the need for a process to manufacture a single component in high volumes. This process, developed at Westinhouse, turned out to be the simple lamination of copper plates to make the part. The information about RADAR that was learned by the Americans lead to further R&D on Loomis' part as well as Westinghouse's development of the Microwave oven, the RADAR Range.
Loomis did contribute a lot of R&D to the further advancement of RADAR but, he most certainly did not invent it.
Imagine that, the inventor of RADAR from Tuxedo Park, NY..... HAHAA..
I always thought RADAR was developed by the Scottish scientist Robert Watson-Watt.
Alfred Loomis, "one of the most powerful men on Wall Street in the 1920's, a brilliant physicist, inventor of RADAR, LORAN, and the man who kicked off the race to build the atom bomb."
Alfred Loomis? Are you sure that's not Ron Popeil?
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
Not quite the same thing as "inventor of RADAR", as the reviewer stated. Credit where it's due .....
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
It was conceived in order to see at night, actually. Radar will up show coastlines and cityscapes clearly at night, through cloud cover. The resolution was very poor, but it allowed the RAF to attack Germany. It was not so much a defensive gadget, it was more for a primitive night vision. Plane mounted radar was a decisive factor in the war in the air over Europe.
Seeing German planes coming wasn't a problem, they could be detected by noise (they had to bomb from low down) and only stopped by launching bad surface to air missiles (there were of course plenty of coast stations armed with guns and launchers) or launching the RAF squadrons to attack them.
Accuracy was the key really, and that is what RADAR allowed at night, or from above low clouds during the day.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
in terminus illic est tantum opes
Depending on your definition of 'invent', you can go as far back as 1880 (finding that radio waves reflect) or 1924(first succesful radio ranging) for the invention of radar.
Practical radar systems were first built in 1935 by Watson-Watt.
AFAI can determine, Loomis didn't get into the radar business until 1939, when he copeid all the information the British had.
He was obviously a time-traveller who went back to stop the Nazi.
The reviewer said he made RADAR a reality not that he invented it, even stating that he got information from the british. The summary said he invented it.
Watson-Watt Invented it
"Watson-Watt became the superintendent of the radio division of the National Physics Laboratory in Teddington. In 1936 his radio stations were able to detect aircraft up to 70 miles away."
"He persuaded the government to set up a network of radar stations to provide early warning of aircraft attacking over the English Channel. "Radar" was short for "radio detecting and ranging." It was due to radar that the over-stretched resources of the RAF were able to be in the right place at the right time as Luftwaffe aircraft streamed over during the Battle of Britain from August to October 1940. The Germans could not understand why the defending aircraft (such as the Spitfire, illustrated above) were so often there to meet them."
Loomis helped mass produce it for mobile use and developed it
"In the 1930s, British scientists were at the cutting edge of radar technology. While crude by modern standards, their systems could spot Nazi bombers up to 150 miles from the English coast, enough of a warning for Royal Air Force fighters to intercept them. But the radar apparatus was too bulky to mount in planes, and the equipment was not sensitive enough to detect a U-boat's periscope. That changed in early 1940, when physicists at the University of Birmingham invented the magnetron. This plump copper disk was only four inches across, but its glass horns emitted short-wavelength pulses of extremely high power--just the ticket for small radars that could probe much farther and resolve details far finer than any previous system."
"When Prime Minister Winston Churchill learned of the magnetron, he sensed that it marked a turning point in the war. Given the state of British industry, though, he needed U.S. help in refining the magnetron and, most of all, producing them in volume. That August, he sent a mission to Washington, where it presented a top-secret magnetron to astonished U.S. researchers."
So, as usual, a joint effort.
BigTom
To keep the Germans in the dark (pun intended) about the invention of RADAR, the British fed the Germans a clever disinformation story to explain the Royal Air Force's superior performance combatting the Luftwaffe's night-time incursions into British airspace.
The reason spoon-fed to the Nazis (via British double agents) for the RAF's sucess was that their pilots were being fed lots of carrots, which helped to improve the aviators' eyesight and hence improve their accuracy.
Of course, this was all rubbish but the myth that eating carrots can dramatically improve your eyesight still lives on today.
The ruse played its part though - by the time the Germans discovered the true story, the Battle of Britain had been won.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
and LORAN, which Loomis personally invented, guided all aircraft navigation in Europe, the Atlantic, and Pacific for the second half of the war.
It even guided the Germans and Japanese? Bloody sell out!
I realise this may come as a shock to some US readers, but the Second World War started in '39, not December 7th 1941. Half way through therefore being 41/42 as opposed to 1943. At that point the Germans were very definitely still bombing a lot and the Japanese (who'd been fairly busy for a decade already) were just getting started on Pearl Harbour.
Don't get me wrong, everyone (well, except possibly the Germans and Japanese) appreciate you turning up at all, just stop taking so much damn offence when all the Europeans turn up to your wars (like Iraq) two years late.
Actually, I'm thinking he's Data, or perhaps Dr. Bashir. These extra-temporal/terrestrial visitors have to keep a low profile. When do we get the transparent aluminium?
...sold their stocks right before the stock market crash of 1929. Lots of people. They were the smart ones. Yep.
Here's the link to the interview with the author... http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfI d=1146217
I realize this may come as a shock to some Western readers, but the Second World War started in '37, when Japan invaded China, not September 1st 1939. Or do Chinese deaths and war not count?
Infuriate left and right
A link to purchase the book being reviewed is modded as offtopic? That's a little strange.
Roosevelt helped as much as he could, within the constraints of American politics. The United States may have been "neutral" on paper, in practice it provided substantial assistance to the UK and USSR. Roosevelt conceived, and pushed through congress, the Lend-Lease Act, and ordered the Navy to patrol and escort merchant ships in the Western Atlantic.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That's par for the course for a slashbot.
My dad was in the US Army after Korea, and was a service technition on some of the guns they were developing at that time. Recently, he was telling me about some of it. Apparently, the prototypes had an analog computing element that was essentially mechanical. Those never made it into production because they wouldn't work well unless you kept the mechanism moving (probably either or both static friction and followers making little dents and getting stuck). The vaccume tube based stuff worked better. The first models could only track a straight line path.
The MIT Radiation Lab did an immense amount of work during World War II in research, development, design, testing and training for radar systems. It was second only to the Manhattan Project as a concentration of scientific and engineering talent. Their contribution to the war effort was very significant.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
How can you say KDE is offtopic in an article about Miguel de Icaza?
The problem was that the wavelengths used were not sufficiently well reflected by smaller objects such as periscopes or to give the resolution neccessary for bomb navigation. Hence the invention of the magnetron by the British which produced RF at 3cm or above at high power. Unfortunately British industry couldn't produce the device cheaply enough (a magnetron dpends upon a very precisely engineered cavity). Loomis was responsible for the ideas for mass production of the magnetron in the mid 40s.
The magnetron was used in warships and by planes (such as night fighters) but it was not permitted over German held territory until towards the end of the war so it didn't help bomber command much (the Americans flew by day, so they had less problems with navigation). It was decided that the wreckage of a magnetron (it is basiclly a precisely machined lump of metal) would give German intelligence enough information to be able to duplicate it.
See my journal, I write things there
I realize you are making a joke here, but if the information is accurate, he was a genius and a particularly gregarious one at that. He obviously could keep many lines of thought going at once and quickly engage in any of them and produce deep insights. All of this would seem very self-promotional if he wasn't also intensly private about much of it. Seems like a lot to accept, but genius can be truely remarkable.
I'm pretty disappointed. The Jackie Chan joke could have been done so well with a little effort. "Wow, sounds like a good book. I didn't like the movie much, but then again I'm not a huge Jackie Chan fan." Bam, 20 seconds; you're still in the running for first post, and you might even get some positive mods. Such a waste.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Here's one credible referance, "Confound & Destroy - 100 Group and the bomber support campaign" by Martin Streetly:
"During the 1930s, as Europe prepared itself for a seemingly inevitable war, Britain and Germany began the practice of 'seeing' with radio energy. Radar, as this branch of electronics would later be known, was not new; the principle had been laid out by a German, Christian Hulsmeyer , in a patent of April 1904. "
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Great Britain comprises of England, Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom (the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to give it its full name) comprises of those three nations and Norther Ireland.
By definition, if you're from any of those four countries then you're British - there isn't an equivalent adjective for the United Kingdom so it applies to the Northern Irish too. For example, the British Olympic Association is made up of athletes from all four nations.
(Please, no unnecessary debating about the Northern Ireland situation - this isn't a political posting, it's a geographical one.)
Saying that someone who's Scottish isn't British is ridiculous. It's like saying that someone who's a Californian or Floridian isn't American. Just because you're associated to one place doesn't mean you're not associated to a larger place that encapsulates it.
Of course, being Scottish doesn't make you English, as so many American sitcoms seem to think (Suddenly Susan springs to mind as a particularly guilty party). Saying that it does is about as stupid as suggesting that someone from Alaska is a Texan.
So, to recap:
Glasgow > Scotland > Great Britain > United Kingdom > European Union > Europe
and;
Los Angeles > California > United States of America > North America
Hope that's useful for future reference.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
This is not flamebait, stoopid moderator. Somebody mod this guy up and the parent down (sorry, I don't have any points to play with today).
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Actually, I thought the "fuck it, it's friday" segue into an intentional mixing up of Tuxedo the movie and this book was much funnier. It sort of had the feel of "It's friday, I'm too lazy to even read the entire title of this article, so I'll just go with the first thing that comes to mind from the first word". Well done.
The approach you were suggesting is actually kind of tired and overused.
I thought the research was done at cold spring harbor in LI NY!!
Nikola Tesla Invented(discovered) radio waves. All Marconi did was figure out how to market 1-way radios to the public. He "invented" radio stations that got paid by airing advertising during radio shows. Before Marconi, 2-way radios were used for communication only, Marconi figured out how to use them for entertainment. Marconi was not an inventor, he was an entrepreneur...and the first corporate pirate...and a big bastard.
I do remember, however, some dictatorial regimes that US have installed and/or supported, all along the XX century. Just a few of them are:
- Batista @ Cuba.
- Trujillo @ Republica Dominicana.
- Perez Gimenez @ Venezuela.
- Pinochet @ Chile.
- Stroessner @ Paraguay.
- Argentinian "Junta Militar" (military board) after the coup of 1976.
- Uruguayan idem in 1973.
- Somoza(s) @ Nicaragua.
- Royal Families in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, etc.
I mean, come on! US does not 'export' Democracy, don't be naive! All they care about is BUSINESS, you know?
Should i recall that Saddam (yes, DEVIL HIMSELF!) was a US Ally when fighting Iran in the 80's?
Okay, you got me on the meta-humor.
Really, I was just jealous because by the time I saw the article and thought of the Jackie Chan joke, it had already been made. I still think it could have been better, though.
W.Germany (post WW2)
Japan (after WW2 and MacArthur military goverment)
S. Korea ? (may be on dodgy ground)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
You are absolutely right. Tesla was the inventor or radio and radar, among many other things. He also discovered AC over DC, which caused Edison quite a bit of grief. Tesla is perhaps one of the ultimate "mad scientists." He (last time I knew) held the most patents for a single individual within the U.S. patent office. Some of his discoveries we cannot explain even today, and others are veiled in secrecy by the U.S. government. Margaret Cheney's book on Tesla is a great look into the life and works of Tesla. It can be found in many libraries or even at many book outlets.
Why do people get themselves all bent out of shape over nationalities? Do they think it somehow makes *them* look smarter? Reflected glory, riding coattails -- what a load of shit. As others have pointed out, most inventions are, in reality, entirely collaborative efforts, anyway, with work contributed by researchers, scientists and engineers from all over the globe. When somebody jumps up and down because somebody else has neglected to attribute some credit to the country the whiner happens to hail from, I smell an inferiority complex. Is that really as good as you get...?
6.) PROFIT!
Try the following links:A R
a lhiscen.h tm
m
http://www.nrl.navy.mil/content.php?P=RAD
" In the autumn of 1922, NRL made the first detection of a moving ship by radio waves and, as a result, discovered the radar principle. Eight years after the initial discovery of the radar principle, NRL scientists noted that the reflections of radio waves from an airplane could also be detected."
The first US production prototype shipboard antenna, the XAF, from the battleship NEW YORK, is preserved at the Washington Navy Yard museum.
http://www.museums.simonides.org/usa/nav
http://www.de220.com/Electronics/Radar/Radar.ht
" 1904: 30 April. The "telemobiloscope" (radar) patented and demonstrated by German engineer Christian Hülsmeyer. Telefunken refuses to buy his patents.
1916: February. German Richard Scherl produced the 10cm wavelength "Strahlenzieler" (Raypointer). German Navy rejects it as "not important tot he war effort."
1920s: British Dr. Robert Watson-Watt discovers the theory of radar just after WW I while trying to find a way to detect thunderstorms.
1933: Germany develops the "seetakt" carrier wave (CW) radar that operates at 50 centimeters on 50 watts. It can detect a 500 ton ship at over 7 miles. It is used exclusively as a range finder."
Not mentioned in any of these links is the 'iceberg detector' carried by the French liner NORMANDIE from about 1935 which was also a radar.
There is plenty of evidence for independent development of the radar principle: The arguments come on significance of each country's work and the producibility of the sets.
Brooks A Rowlett
Another stupid American who thinks that, just because his fucking country was late in joining the war effort, (just like the Great War), the war couldn't have been raging since September, 1939. What's more, he couldn't even get the date of that late arrival...it was nineteen-forty-ONE, you half-wit!
I guess you Yanks are going to be really punctual for WWIII, considering you're the ones with the psychotic idiot running the country who's hell bent on finishing Daddy's dirty work from a decade ago, just so you can all drive tractor-trailer based station wagons.
Wasn't he the same guy that started Ninnle Linux?
Conant, the chick who wrote the book, was on CSPAN's "Booknotes" this summer talking about it. She just happens to be a descendant. Loomis was an incredible character but....
For more on the real story of technology and this time in it's context of politics, read "A Man Called Intrepid". It's a best-seller from 20 years ago. It's a wonder we yanks came into the war at all, but the reason we came out on top afterwards was that all of the best tech minds of Europe had either fled or been relocated to our shores during the earliest days of the war. The Brits were working on their version of Manhattan, as were the Germans, in the early days of the war. The big deal between Roosevelt & Churchill was that the Brits would send their best minds to the states to accomplish two things: keep them safe from German capture, and expedite a joint US/GB atom project. Who knew that they'd stay after the hostilities?
I was sure that Linux got it's own park. :)
Why is it I keep seeing messages proclaiming celebrities dead in these threads? Get out more.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
"DRM is a mandatory buggy whip in every car." MadAhab (40080)
Ooo... you mean Zero Point Energy is real, and the Gubbermint is covering it up to keep the OilPigs in power?!
Seriously though, there's no Tesla conspiracy unless you want to believe in one. Anything he invented couldn't be so advanced as to have not been independently rediscovered in the many decades since.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Isn't it funny that while RADAR was invented in Cambridge, Enlgish it was perfected in Cambridge, Massachusetts?
Isn't it also suspicious that Loomis's secretary's name was Watson-Watts, and Watson-Watts secretary's name was Loomis?
Coincidence, or just a freak event of the statistically unlikely?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
In 1901 Marconi made the first successful radio transmission across the Atlantic in 1901. In 1904 the US patent office reversed its previous decisions and granted Marconi a US patent. In 1909 Marconi received the Nobel prize for "contributions to wireless telegraphy". This apparently frosted Tesla's shorts, and he filed suit for infringement. In 1943 the US patent office finally upheld Tesla's earlier patent.
It seems to me that it is reasonable to honor both Tesla and Marconi as inventors of radio. If you really want to get picky, it seems to me that Marconi's British patent gives him priority (which bring us back to the start of this sub-thread).
As shown above Tesla and Marconi made their contributions almost simultaneously. Before Marconi (and Tesla), there weren't any 2-way radios. Radio as entertainment didn't arrive until 1920 (KDKA). This is 25 years after Marconi began his work on radio, and 11 years after he was awarded the Nobel prize.
So when Germany invaded Poland, that somehow made it a world war?
Or when Britain and France declared war, that made it a world war?
Or when Italy joined in, that made it a world war?
Or maybe when Germany invaded the European part of Russia, that made it a world war?
Or maybe when Italy and Germany invaded nearby North Africa, when it finally reached a continent outside Europe, that still wasn't quite the 3 or 4 continents you claim necessary?
So, exactly how does Europe equal the world but China, a much bigger area, not?
Infuriate left and right
So where does all this leave our friend Loomis?
The article that started this thread claimed was that Loomis invented RADAR and LORAN, not radio, the invention of radio came up as a digression.
From the quick checking I did, it looks like Loomis did invent LORAN, and he made major contributions to the managment of the MIT Radiation laboratory, but he certainly didn't invent RADAR. The best claim to the invention of RADAR seems to be Robert Alexander Watson-Watt. He was granted a British patent for locating aircraft using radio reflection in 1935.
Because I've never heard the "Russian's" (ps - plural is not the same as possesive, you silly "American's") claiming to invent anything you describe. Now, as far as space exploration and advanced avionics, that's a whole different story.
It's not a doll, it's a toy. Don't you keep up with tax court cases*?
*and X-Men stuff in general
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Kennedy's secretary Lincoln and Lincoln's secretary Kennedy both agree that you're reading way too much into it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.