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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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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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Here's the link to the interview with the author... http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfI d=1146217
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
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.
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...?
"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.
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.