Science and Security

In 2002, the story of Alfred Lee Loomis–lawyer, Wall Street tycoon, patron of science, and ultimately member of the National Academy of Sciences–is an exceedingly timely historical reminder that, however unique Loomis may have been, many policy issues we face are not new. The intertwining of the research enterprise with powerful new technologies, a brooding quasi-war atmosphere, and a divided country and administration give rise to complex and difficult issues. U.S. society and scientists are no better at addressing those issues in 2002 than they were in 1939-1941, a point that should lend some perspective to our current conundrums about the roles of scientists and engineers in national security–a widely debated issue then and now. All these issues exist, whether up front or as an undertone, in the familiar cast of characters assembled by author Jennet Conant, niece of Loomis’s senior scientist Bill Richards and granddaughter of Harvard’s James B. Conant, to tell this story of the frontier discoveries of physics in the 1930s and their application during World War II.

The essential story of Henry Loomis is that of a child from a patrician American family, educated at Yale and Harvard Law School in the family tradition. The only clue that he would later devote his life to scientific research is that he spent the World War I years at the U.S. Army Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where he rubbed shoulders with some of the country’s best chemists and physicists and earned a reputation for having an instinctive, if uneducated, experimental mind. After his education and the war years, he was determined to rebuild his family’s recently depleted fortune by turning to Wall Street. Working with his brother-in-law, he developed the nation’s most successful bond house for the utility industry. Utilities in the 1920s were like the computer industry in the 1990s. The country was being wired from coast to coast, and Loomis was in the perfect position to profit from the industry’s rapid expansion. Loomis’s interest in technology served him well by helping him choose the most innovative companies in the industry. He demonstrated his financial savvy by cashing out all his investments in 1928. With his own and his family’s finances secure against any conceivable demands for a generation, Loomis began in the 1930s to indulge his long fascination with the frontier areas of physics.

Lean times for science

In the pervasive financial distress of the 1930s, there was no shortage of bright scientists unable to support themselves, and Loomis began to move in their circles, giving out small amounts of research support to bring them into his orbit. He recognized the special problems of émigrés from Nazi Europe, where excellent scientists were fleeing persecution and hoping to establish themselves in the United States. Loomis was ready to support them as well. Loomis’s circle of scientific colleagues included many familiar names: Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, Bohr, Compton, Conant, and DuBridge, among others. All eventually spent time, whether days or months, at Loomis’s private laboratory. Loomis’s contacts also included key figures in government. For example, he lobbied his uncle Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s secretary of war, to give scientists a more prominent role in wartime Washington. With his own deep roots in the financial world of New York, Loomis turned out to be in the right place at the right time to address simultaneous needs of science, finance, and government.

Loomis saw that the financial crunch of the 1930s was taking its toll on the universities and corporations accustomed to buying and maintaining their own research infrastructure. Such investments were out of reach as institutions sought to balance their budgets, so Loomis decided to create his own state-of-the-art physics laboratory. Thus, the unlikely story of Tuxedo Park was launched.

In the early 20th century, the town of Tuxedo Park, 40 miles north of New York City, was a favorite summer retreat of the city’s social and financial elite. They spent their time at an endless succession of formal social events at the Victorian mansions that surrounded Tuxedo Lake. Indeed, the formal evening suits favored by the men at the time came to be called tuxedos. When Loomis took up summer residence in Tuxedo Park, he was welcomed to this privileged and highly ordered society. His later activities were not so warmly received.

Eager to create a space where his physicist friends could work with the best research equipment, he bought a second mansion at Tuxedo Lake. The “Tower House” had been empty for many years and was reputedly haunted. Loomis converted it into a research lab and dormitory, which became a temporary home for scientists who worked on experiments in brain waves and hypnosis (using the Loomis-invented electroencephalograph), high-energy physics (for which he tried to build a particle accelerator), architectural engineering, and radar. One can easily imagine the reception Loomis received from his neighbors after creating this palace of science in their midst. The scientists themselves were not interested in acquiring the Edwardian manners of their neighbors. They took more pleasure in designing clever pranks to “entertain” the local residents than in polite drawing room conversation; for instance, they passed word among neighbors that the electroencephalograph they invented was the same as the execution device used at Sing Sing Prison. In one sense, Loomis was following in the footsteps of other private research facilities such as Thomas Alva Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park and John Hammond’s castle in Gloucester. What was most distinct, however, was that Loomis did not focus on invention initially; he funded basic research.

Loomis’s scientific achievements took off in the 1930s, when he merged his experience with high-voltage transmission technology (from the utility industry) with the desire of physicists to create particle accelerators or cyclotrons. At this time, he formed his partnership with Ernest Lawrence of Berkeley, which over the next 20 years became an incredibly productive mix of vision and means. Loomis brought the world of New York finance (both corporate and foundations) to underwrite the world of high-energy physics, and Lawrence with his charisma brought the best physicists from around the world. As long as the Tuxedo Park facility could accommodate the experiments, Loomis imported his scientists into his Tower House for very extended stays that sometimes lasted years. When the research began to outgrow the house, Loomis worked with Lawrence and others to build world-class physics labs at Berkeley and MIT, among other places.

The call of war

With war spreading in Europe, Loomis wanted to help England prepare the United States for possible involvement by supporting civilian scientists to do research in radar to develop its military applications. The U.S. government was indifferent or even hostile to the idea. Still under the influence of the Neutrality Act, much of Washington officialdom saw no need to accelerate radar development, and the armed services saw no role for civilians in the development of military technologies. The dithering in Washington in 1939-1940 perplexed Loomis, who proceeded to throw his own fortune into research at Tuxedo Park, Berkeley, and Cambridge simultaneously. He also tapped Vannevar Bush’s funds at the Carnegie Institution for $10,000 to support Tuxedo Park. Bush and Loomis were convinced that air power would determine the outcome of the expanding war, both immediately for Britain and eventually for the United States, and they saw radar playing a critical role.

Working with Bush and Karl Compton, Loomis lobbied the government, including his uncle Henry Stimson, to give civilian scientists a more prominent role in war preparations. They eventually convinced the government to create the National Defense Research Committee, which allowed scientists to do military research in their own labs. Loomis used this authority to scale up his radar work at Tuxedo Park, and he eventually had to look for a larger facility. After failing to find a site near Washington, he founded the Rad Lab (a name coined to cover its actual wartime purposes) in Cambridge near MIT. Freedom from Washington red tape, combined with the 24-hour enthusiasm of first-rate scientists, led to record-time innovation and refinement of a critical technology: radar. Loomis and his colleagues showed what could be done with it against the German bombers in the initial Battle of Britain and later against the V-1 buzz bombs (85 percent of which were detected, and half of which were destroyed). Radar was eventually used to counter the German U-boats, to provide critical information to invasion fleets in Italy and Normandy, and to guide bombing missions over Germany.

Jennet Conant doesn’t draw lessons from that experience with mobilizing scientists, but her summary description of Loomis as the “last of the great amateurs” conveys well the nonbureaucratic, results-oriented mood established by Loomis in his work. The fact that he could do so even before war had reached the American shores reflects his indomitable drive, sweeping up everyone from top physicists to financiers in this enthusiastic quest. His story makes clear that he believed that credible results from his attempt to create and deploy radar for the defense of Britain and the United States would persuade the skeptics about his approach to science. He was right, and his research leadership had a decisive impact.

U.S. scientists are as unclear today about their role in the global conflict with terrorism and its threat to the security of Americans as most scientists were before Bush, Loomis, and Lawrence gave them direction. The author shows that such a condition isn’t so unusual, and indeed, that the American penchant for pragmatism will allow people with the right qualities to rise to positions of influence where they can mobilize talent to address the most pressing issues successfully. The challenge for today is to recognize that a new threat requires new approaches. The nation’s researchers should not be confined by a structure designed for a different purpose and should be encouraged to develop new modes of cooperation between the research and national security communities. Empower the right leadership, and U.S. preeminence in science and invention will rise to the occasion.