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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.
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Well, the review does mention that Loomis borrowed heavily from the British. Like many things in life, one thing is who invents something, and another who applies that technology for mass production. It doesn't have to be the same one, and I think the review correctly states this.
Signatures are supposed to be funny?
Hey, moron, read the rest of the review:
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.
Actually, the basic principles of RADAR were discovered by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz in 1887.
I've also read that the Germans were working on RADAR applications at the same time the Brits and Americans were -- it just so happens that the Brits built the first application from the research. And, technically, the man who was mainly responsible for developing RADAR into a usable application was actually a Scot, not a Brit -- Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt. You can talk all you want about how Great Britain includes England, Scotland, and NORTHERN Ireland, but most Irish and Scots I know would say a Scot!=Brit.
Like most other inventions (airplanes or cars, anyone?) nothing is "invented" without the cooperation of scientists from ALL countries. There's no such thing as a single man inventing any of these things -- we may have been taught that in elementary school, but we all have to grow up and realize that things are quite a bit more complicated than that.
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...?
As someone else has already pointed out there are quite a few countries where the US played a vital role in creating democratic regimes.
In some countries the US literally manufactured democracy from whole cloth, right down to writing new constitutions for them (Germany, Japan, and a few more, maybe including Afganistan, although the verdict isn't in yet).
In some countries the US restored democracy after invading and ousting foreign powers, or domestic dictatorships (Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Grenada, Panama, and many others).
In some countries the US took indirect military action to establish democracy (Nicaragua for example).
Of course you are right that they also installed many dictators, and once or twice even took action that looked a lot like overthrowing democratic governments (the most obvious example is Chile where they had a hand in overturning a Socialist government that was actually elected). But even looking at those countries is instructive - all (at least all the one's you mentioned and I can think of) countries where the US got the government they wanted are now democracies (Nationalist China, S Korea, the Filipines, Chile, and so on). In the places where they failed to get the dictator that they wanted, dictatorship still prevails (Communist China, N Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc). Which suggests that the the US really was trying to pick the lesser evils.
Anyway, it is not hard to find democracies that have "Made in USA" stamped on them, even if there are (or were) many dictatorships with the same label.
Most US foreign policy from 1945 to 1990 revolved around the defense of Western Europe, and as I noted earlier, most of the democracies in Western Europe were either created by or re-established as a result of US military action.
So now explain to me how the whole of Western Europe is just a big scheme by the US to exploit natural resources and cheap labour. What resources? What cheap labour?
Marxist explanations (i.e. the kind of explanation you just tried to give) don't even fit the facts very well for 19th century imperialist powers, let alone the US in the 20th century.
Oh, and in case you forgot the pre-WWII German democracy was also created by Allied military action.