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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.
I have a LONG penis!
:(
That's the one in my mouth though... the one on my body is small
Fuck it, it's Friday! Tuxedo? Wasn't that Jackie Chan?
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
What the fuck does this have to do with linux, anime, RMS, RIAA, blah blahblah?
Anyone know the projected dates for when Sarge will freeze and Debian 3.1 is prepared? Really looking forward to it -- what with GCC 3.2 and all.
Completely OT, but then again, most comments are.
I figure so and so sells such and such amount of stuff in a year. They take in X amount of money, so unless they are losing money it can only cost them such and such to make this. I am getting ripped off if this is the case.
I think that no one on earth is better qualified to fill me in on the validity of my logic than a company that loses money hand over fist and has changed its core business at least a dozen times since it was founded a few years ago, backed up by the minds of thousands of people just like me, who have never owned anything more valuable than a semi-rare Greedo doll and who spend the majority of theie time debating the relative merits of elves versus hobbits. Please let me know what you all think of my logic.
No, I don't plan to start a competing company so I can put these guys out of business. I think I'll just go back to masturbating to hentai porn and complaining about shit all day. The Man would just hold me back anyway.
Cunning linguists
This isn't karma-whoring, it's karma-consolidating.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
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.
So who was Alfred Loomis? "He was too complex to categorize--financier, philanthropist, society figure, physicist, inventor, amateur, dilettante--a contradiction in terms," writes Conant. Loomis established a private laboratory in New York and hired scientists whose work in the 1930s wound up making possible both the radar and the atomic bomb. These developments were essential to Allied victory in the Second World War. Conant is perhaps the only person who could have pierced Loomis's obsessive secrecy and written this book; she grew up with Loomis's children and other members of his family. Her grandfather, Harvard president James Bryant Conant, was one of Loomis's scientists
--Rosie
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.
Invite Jesus into your heart today!
I am writing on behalf of myself and a few of my friends to state that Mr. Alfred Loomis deserves to be punished. Although not without overlap and simplification, I plan to identify three primary positions on Loomis's expositions. I acknowledge that I have not accounted for all possible viewpoints within the parameters of these three positions. Nevertheless, I have one itsy-bitsy problem with Loomis's words. Videlicet, they destroy that which is the envy of -- and model for -- the entire civilized world. And that's saying nothing about how his smear tactics are not pedantic treatises expressing theories or extravaganzas dealing in fables or fancies. They are substantial, sober outpourings from the very soul of larrikinism. If I have a bias, it is only against whiney egotists who abuse science by using it as a mechanism of ideology. If we let Loomis muzzle his critics, all we'll have to look forward to in the future is a public realm devoid of culture and a narrow and routinized professional life untouched by the highest creations of civilization.
Someone once said to me, "Loomis's perorations are exemplary of the forces minorities must fight in their struggle to achieve equal footing with the rest of the community." This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. I, hardheaded cynic that I am, wonder what would happen if Loomis really did deprive people of dignity and autonomy. There's a spooky thought. Generally speaking, the most perceptive members of our society respond positively to my message that we need to stand up for our rights. And let me tell you, I'm willing to accept that evil individuals are acting in concert with other evil individuals for an evil purpose. I'm even willing to accept that it is a dangerous folly to ignore the threat to democracy posed by officious popinjays. But either he has no real conception of the sweep of history, or he is merely intent on winning some debating pin by trying to pierce a hole in my logic with "facts" that are taken out of context. Loomis can write anything he wants about how things would be different were we to give into his demands and let him blame our societal problems on handy scapegoats, but he is careless with data, makes all sorts of causal interpretations of things without any real justification, has a way of combining disparate ideas that don't seem to hang together, seems to show a sort of pride in his own biases, gets into all sorts of villainous speculation, and then makes no effort to test out his speculations -- and that's just the short list!
To put this in context, his sycophants believe that "the most valuable skill one can have is to be able to lie convincingly." First off, that's a lousy sentence. If they had written that it is cowardice on Loomis's part to crush the will of all individuals who have expressed political and intellectual opposition to his grievances, then that quote would have had more validity. As it stands, his cop-outs are based on two fundamental errors. They assume that profits come before people. And they promote the mistaken idea that his mistakes are always someone else's fault. The problem with Loomis is not that he's abusive. It's that he wants to annihilate a person's personality, individuality, will, and character. It's not necessary to go into too long of a description about how he plans to insist that our society be infested with negativism, expansionism, incendiarism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms" when you least expect it. Suffice it to say that there are two related questions in this matter. The first is to what extent he has tried to lower our standard of living. The other is whether or not this is not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, where the state would be eager to demonize my family and friends. Not yet, at least. But Loomis wants to reopen wounds that seem scarcely healed. Why he wants that, I don't know, but that's what he wants.
Because of Loomis's eagerness to participate in riots, I have a hard time trying to reason with people who remain calm when they see Loomis make it virtually impossible to fire incompetent workers. I don't need to tell you that I, hardheaded cynic that I am, cannot conceive of any circumstance under which his tirades could be considered appropriate. That should be self-evident. What is less evident is that if we take his generalizations to their logical conclusion, we see that by the next full moon, he will teach militant concepts to children. Loomis wants nothing less than to confuse, befuddle, and neutralize public opposition, hence his repeated, almost hypnotic, insistence on the importance of his ignorant press releases. He spouts a lot of numbers whenever he wants to make a point. He then subjectively interprets those numbers to support his excuses while ignoring the fact that if he bites me, I will bite back. In general, Loomis says that anyone who dares to challenge the present and enrich the future can expect to suffer hair loss and tooth decay as a result. Yet he also wants to subvert time-tested societal norms. Am I the only one who sees the irony there? I ask, because I recently received some mail in which the writer stated, "I shall make every effort, especially in this limited space, to break the mold and stray from the path of conventional wisdom." I included that quote not because it is exceptional in any way, but rather, because it is typical of much of the mail I receive. I included it to show you that I'm not the only one who thinks that in the genesis of Loomis's publicity stunts, birdbrained begat shiftless, which begat silly, which begat self-serving. In fact, I have said that to Loomis on many occasions, and I will keep on saying it until he stops trying to conjure up dirt against his fellow human beings. In a nutshell, Mr. Alfred Loomis is battening on us.
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 ?
who gives a fuck? Debian blows. FreeBSD forever!
I invited him into my ass just the other day.
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
Fuck you asshole! First of all, I already posted the cheaper link to amazon. Second of all, I believe that the Associates program from amazon strictly forbids this type of public spamming. You are only allowed to post associate links on your own website, NOT on public message boards. I am going to check this out. Ah yes, here is the agreement. I am reporting your spam to amazon right now and I hope that your membership is terminated post haste. Furthermore, I'd like to see your Slashdot account disabled. Advertisers pay good money to advertise on Slashdot, unlike you.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
long-range radio navigation
KDE has so many vulnerabilities, and no binary patches, that I've decided to give up on the security of my KDE system. Discuss.
It's the Amazon review. I see you doing this in every book review thread. Fuck off already.
I like you. Bend over, please.
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.
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.
...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
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
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
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
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); }
OK, I admit it, this was good. Even knowing what I was going to find when I clicked, I ledol.
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
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?
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...?
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. :)
"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.
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.
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