Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II by Jennet Conant. Simon & Schuster, $26, 330 pages.

The Chapel Hill News

October 30, 2002

A Passion for Science

By Phillip Manning

In their monumental series of books, "The Story of Civilization," historians Will and Ariel Durant identify three authors whose books shaped modern Europe. They were all scientists: Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin. However, people who can effectively harness science (as opposed to creating it) to achieve their goals can also have enormous impact. Bill Gates of Microsoft is an example, as is Craig Venter of the human genome project and Alfred Loomis. The first two are household names, but who was Loomis? In her meticulously researched book, "Tuxedo Park" (Simon & Schuster, $26), Jennet Conant answers that question and recounts the crucial role he played in the Allies' victory in World War II.

"Anyone meeting Mr. Loomis casually might find it hard to distinguish him from the great mass of men of distinction who are reared in the best families, processed by the best schools, groomed by the best tailors, and put in the vice-presidential windows of the best firms," gushed a "Fortune" magazine article in 1946. In many ways, the subject of this flattering profile, was hard to distinguish from other "men of distinction." He built a highly profitable investment banking concern, sold out near the peak of the stock market in the 1920s, and bought bonds, thus escaping the market crash that ruined many other white-shoe rich. But some wealthy, well-bred tycoons escaped unscathed, too. No, the thing that distinguished Loomis from his friends was a passion for science, a discipline that most well-bred businessmen avoid.

Loomis's contribution to the war effort began in late 1940, when the winds of war shifted. Aided by its chain of radar stations, which gave advance warning of German air attacks, the RAF had been winning the Battle of Britain. Then, Hitler changed tactics. To avoid the swarms of Spitfires that rose to meet the incoming bombers, the Luftwaffe began night bombing. British radar could detect the bombers, but it was too imprecise for fighter pilots to home in on the German planes. The night bombing devastated Britain. And if Germany invaded a disheartened Britain, the war could be prolonged or even lost. Better radar was desperately needed.

Fortunately, a year earlier, two British scientists had invented the magnetron, a palm-sized device that could produce the high-energy microwave radiation needed for precision radar. The problem was how to turn this invention into the thousands of radar sets needed to equip British planes and ships in the face of the incessant bombing that was destroying British factories. The answer, Churchill concluded, lay on the other side of the Atlantic.

A British team set out for America, taking with it a box containing six prototype magnetrons. The Americans and British met at Loomis's posh Tuxedo Park, New York, estate. With his customary assurance, Loomis assumed responsibility for the American radar effort. Drawing on his contacts in academia and industry, he formed a microwave committee. Within a month, he had selected a building on the MIT campus for a laboratory and used his own money to equip it. He staffed the lab with some of America's best physicists, including Nobel Prize winner Ernst Lawrence; Isidor Rabi, who would win the prize in 1944; and Luis Alvarez, who would later propose that a meteorite strike wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Thus began MIT's fabled Rad Lab. Loomis challenged the physicists, pushing them hard for results. Then he lobbied equally hard for money to support them. What came out of the Rad Lab under Loomis's stewardship was spectacular, and the many types of radar developed there did, indeed, help win the war.

The first microwave radar was mounted in a plane less than six months after the meeting in Tuxedo Park. It proved so effective at detecting U-boats that a German admiral attributed his defeat to microwave radar. Other devices from the lab - automatic tracking radar for the antiaircraft gunners defending London; blind bombing radar that enabled the Allies to bomb in any weather; a microwave early warning system that could detect enemy planes over 100 miles away; and LORAN, a long range navigation system - also played important roles in the Allied victory.

By the end of the war, microwave radar was used in almost every military operation. After observing its capabilities, General George Patton said, "This is the way that wars not only can, but must be, run from now on." Loomis shunned the spotlight, but his accomplishments were not overlooked. Ernst Lawrence supplied this tribute: "He had the vision and courage to lead his [microwave] committee as no other man could have led it." Alfred Loomis had used science to shorten the war and save lives, and his love of science never diminished. When he died of a stroke in 1975 at age 87, he was learning programming tricks on the new Hewlett-Packard handheld computer.
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