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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
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 ?
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! (\(-__-)/)
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.
Here's the deal: You give us credit for RADAR, and we don't give you credit for the Spice Girls.
Seems like a fair trade, doesn't it?
"DRM is a mandatory buggy whip in every car." MadAhab (40080)
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.
Zulu invented the radar.
Isaac Zwanda Newton of Zimbabwe discovered gravity.
Albertwanda Einsteingabe of Ethiopia wrote relativity theories.
You white tyrants stole everything from us.
Down with the with the white man!