Tuxedo Park

by Jennet Conant

  It was during one of these leisurely afternoon sessions that Loomis asked if there was any research Wood could contemplate the two of them doing together, perhaps an area “which required more money than the budget of the Physics Department could supply.” Loomis added that he “would like to underwrite it.”

  Wood had become interested in physical optics, especially spectral studies. In the barn, he was busy putting the finishing touches on a forty-foot grating spectrograph—then the largest and most powerful in existence and capable of giving better results than anyone had ever seen before. While it appeared crude, in Wood’s capable hands it performed superbly, and Loomis was transfixed. As unconventional as Wood’s methods were, the results were always near perfection. For example, his preferred method for cleaning the giant spectrograph—which when unused for any extended period became clogged with spiderwebs—was to simply drop the family cat in one end. In order to escape, the poor animal had to make its way through the whole length of tubing, effectively running a fur duster through the works.

  Wood had a keen eye for social opportunities, and like most scientists, he was always short of funding for his research. He knew of Loomis’ wartime interest in Professor Paul Langevin’s research in Paris in the field of supersonics. Langevin had developed a method for detecting submarines by sweeping the sea with a narrow beam of high-frequency sound waves and picking up the echo or reflected sound with special electrical apparatus. During the war, Wood had gotten himself assigned to Langevin and had gone with him to the naval arsenal at Toulon, where his apparatus was in operation. He saw that when fish swam across Langevin’s beam of high-frequency sound waves, they turned belly up and died, and when a hand was held in front of it in the water, there was a painful burning sensation.

  Wood outlined an elaborate course of research he knew Loomis would find impossible to resist: “I told him about Langevin’s experiments with supersonics during the war and the killing of fish at the Toulon Arsenal. It offered a wide field for research in physics, chemistry, and biology, as Langevin had studied only the high frequency waves as a means of submarine detection.” Wood suggested that he and Loomis continue Langevin’s work and investigate some of the biological and chemical effects of high-frequency sound. In return, he knew he could count on Loomis’ generous support of his own research in optics.

  Loomis, of course, was impatient to get under way. The two arranged a trip to General Electric’s research laboratory to purchase the high-powered vacuum tube oscillator they would require for their research. Loomis returned home and began making plans to equip an improvised laboratory behind his house in Tuxedo Park. After the birth of his third son, Henry, Loomis had purchased a much larger Tudor home on Club House Road in Tuxedo Park, which was designed by the fashionable Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre. The stately brown stucco mansion was nestled on the side of a steep incline, with three acres of lush gardens and rolling lawn spreading out behind it. Just down the road, at the bottom of the hill, was an old barn that served as a garage.

  It was there that Wood proceeded to train his wealthy protégé in his methods and in the process achieved some amazing results, beginning with the development and redesign of a far more powerful model of the General Electric oscillator. It was originally built in Schenectady, and together Loomis and Wood dismantled it and then installed their reconfigured model in the largest room in Loomis’ garage. Wood described their first project:

  The generator was an imposing affair. There were two huge Pliotron tubes of two kilowatts output, a huge bank of oil condensers, and a variable condenser with intersecting wings of the type familiar to every amateur radio operator, but about six feet high and two feet in diameter. Then there were the induction coil for stepping up the voltage and the circular quartz plate with its electrodes in an oil bath in a shallow glass dish. With this we generated an oscillatory electric potential of 50,000 volts at a frequency of from 200,000 to 500,000 per second. The oscillating voltage applied to the electrodes on the quartz plate caused it to expand and contract at the same frequency, and generate supersonic waves in the oil. . . .

  Using their pliotron oscillator, similar to the high-frequency oscillators then used in radio broadcasting, and “stepping up” the voltage from the usual two thousand watts up to fifty thousand watts, Loomis and Wood were able to produce “super–sound waves” with a frequency of over two hundred thousand per second—more than ten times beyond what is audible to the human ear. To protect their eardrums from damage, they plugged their ears with cotton and donned earmuffs for protection while performing their research. When they passed the oscillating electric current through a natural quartz crystal, it caused the crystal to expand and contract sometimes up to half a million times a second—which could hurl the quartz to pieces. To prevent this, they immersed the quartz in oil, which absorbed the vibrations and rose up in the form of an erupting volcano two inches high, producing a fountain of oil drops that shot a foot or more into the air.

  Experimenting with their super–sound waves, they took a small glass tube and drew one end of it out into a thread of glass as thin as a hair. The other end they dipped into the oil, and the tube was shaken by the vibrations. When Loomis held the thread lightly between his fingers, he felt no trace of the turbulence caused by the waves. But when he pressed the thread tightly, it burned a deep groove in his skin. They discovered that that same thread could burn through a piece of wood and bore a hole through a plate of glass like a power drill. Transmitted through water, sound waves of this frequency caused the water to churn furiously as though boiling, but with little increase in temperature, kicking up a disturbance, or “pulse wave,” very like the cloud of white spray that used to arrive on the surface of the ocean after a depth charge was exploded.

  But that was only the beginning. Upon investigation, they found the sound waves produced other strange chemical tricks: applied to the contents of a test tube, they shook two fluids immediately into a mixture, even breaking down mercury into such fine particles that it hung suspended in water and formed an emulsion. They brought about the so-called clock reaction, in which a transparent solution quickly changes to dark blue, and also appeared to be able to change paraffin into a crystalline form.

  The work Wood and Loomis were doing at Tuxedo was garnering attention in scientific journals in the United States and abroad, in no small part due to the sensational way Wood had of presenting his scientific data. He had P. T. Barnum’s touch for creating the excitement and publicity that guaranteed that his talks were always well attended. The day before he was due to read a paper on his experiments on sound waves before the National Academy of Sciences in Washington on April 26, 1926, The New York Times trumpeted the first of many breakthroughs at Tuxedo Park: “Dr. R. W. Wood, Professor of Experimental Physics at Johns Hopkins University, today made public the results so far attained in the experiments conducted on the estate of Alfred L. Loomis, a New York banker, at Tuxedo, N.Y., with treatment of diseases by high frequency sound waves sent through water. Mr. Loomis assisted in the experiments.”

  The Times went on to explain that the possibility of applying the discovery to medicine lay in stimulating circulation, which could be achieved in any part of the body that was submerged into water in which the sound waves were then introduced. The discovery was thought to be particularly helpful in the treatment of arthritis or gout. Some physicians believed that arthritis was caused by organisms that left chalky deposits on the bone at the joints, and it was thought that the sound waves might stimulate circulation and help carry off the deposits. “Dr. Wood said that while the experiments had not gone far enough for him to claim the cures might be accomplished, it had been found that a method for stimulating circulation without injury was valuable to medicine.”

  As the scope of their research expanded, they became pressed for room in the garage, and Loomis began hunting for a larger building in which he could house his workshop. By now, Pierre Lorillard’s planned resort—“a short season pl
ace between New York and Newport”—which had welcomed three trainloads of fashionable visitors in a gala opening celebration in 1886, had swelled to a prosperous suburban community of the social elite. After selling his grand Newport mansion, “the Breakers,” to the Vanderbilts, Lorillard had wanted to simplify his life and commune with nature. He had envisioned Tuxedo Park as an isolated community carved out of the rocky cleft and had hired the architect Bruce Price to build a colony of rustic, shingle-style “cottages” that would blend in with the beautiful wilderness setting. Since the beginning of the century, when the upper classes began indulging in transatlantic travel and seeing firsthand the castles of the European aristocracy, a more ostentatious style had been in vogue. Over the next two decades, Tuxedo Park had become a greenbelt of extravagant mansions, the bigger the better. Many of them were monuments to vanity—and folly—and Loomis had his choice of architectural extravaganzas, ranging from Tudor, Gothic Revival, Spanish Mission, Georgian, Jacobean, and Queen Anne.

  In 1926, after a survey of available properties, Loomis settled on the Tower House, as it was known to locals, a huge, crumbling mock Tudor pile of stone and masonry built on a high thrust of land lying between Crow’s Nest and Ant Hill Roads, on the farthest southeastern tip of Tuxedo Park. Of course, “huge” was a relative term in Tuxedo, and Loomis’ acquisition was dwarfed by many neighboring properties, including Henry Poor’s gargantuan redbrick mansion and the sprawling Brook Farm, which belonged to the chairman of the National City Bank. Tower House was modest by comparison, a large three-story stone-and-timbered mansion constructed on solid bedrock, complete with a steep gable and crenellated stone tower, patterned brick chimneys, and elaborate stained-glass and leaded diamond-pane windows. Though it had been derelict for more than a decade, the house had a craggy charm and a lodgelike simplicity that appealed to Loomis. Everything about the place, from its name to the panoramic views of the wooded hills and shimmering lake below, spoke of history, legend, and myth—what better foundation for a great laboratory?

  The house had originally been built by Spencer Trask, a prosperous investment banker, for a rumored $500,000 at the turn of the century, when Tuxedo first flourished as a fashionable resort for millionaires. But after a series of long illnesses and the death of their firstborn child, Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina, a poet, decided to move to Saratoga Springs, New York—it was said that Katrina Trask could not bear to return to the house where she had borne so much unhappiness—where they built an even more magnificent mansion they called Yaddo, after a word their daughter made up to rhyme with shadow.

  The Trasks’ Tuxedo home took its name from its subsequent owner, one Joseph Tuckerman Tower, a New York businessman who bought the property in 1907 and immediately began extensive renovations. Unfortunately, Tower’s improvements extended to blasting the vast cellars of his new home, apparently in an ill-advised attempt to rid the place of field mice. “[He] must have been a somewhat bizarre character because he had a phobia about mice,” said Paul Klopsteg, who was a frequent visitor and heard the details of the house’s strange history from Loomis. “He had all the ground floors made of reinforced concrete so that the mice couldn’t get in.”

  As the mice would not be deterred, Tower blasted out a new basement subsequent to the house’s construction. He kept up a steady drumroll of explosions until his blue-blooded neighbors gathered rank and, in the name of the almighty Tuxedo Park Association, ordered him to stop. And the Tuxedo Park Association, vigilant watchdog of the park’s territorial integrity and social purity, was not to be ignored. Tower was so outraged by this public censure that he stormed out of the house and, as legend has it, “called for his carriage and four, and drove off—never to return.” After his death, the property became a frozen asset of his estate. For years, the Tower House stood empty and abandoned. Its solitary tower and weather-beaten battlements barely visible above the heavy mists, the wind whistling through the broken stained-glass windows and sixteen master bedrooms, the Tower House gave rise to all sorts of ghostly tales, passed down to Tuxedo children by their nurses.

  When Loomis bought the unmanageable white elephant in 1926—picking it up for $50,000 or, as he later put it, “for a song”—local Tuxedoites just shook their heads. But even Loomis, who thoroughly enjoyed frightening his boys with tales about the haunted house, was momentarily spooked by the sight that greeted him when he unlocked the doors and stepped inside. Tower had apparently been in such a hurry to close up the house, he must have ordered the workmen to drop what they were doing and leave at once, herding them out the door himself. When Loomis walked into the house for the first time, said Klopsteg, “there were all the lunches the workmen had brought in.” The mice had eaten the last crumb, and all that remained were the shredded sacks and scattered cups and knives.

  As it turned out, the concrete floors were ideal for scientific instruments, so Loomis converted the cavernous basement into an enormous elaborately equipped experimental room. Much of the first floor, including some twenty servants’ quarters, pantries, and storerooms, was turned into office space. He even installed a machine shop complete with a full-time mechanic. Loomis restored the impressive exterior of the house, refurbished the stately upstairs bedrooms and lounges, and preserved the chapel and splendid grand salon and ballroom with their dark wood paneling and heavy furniture. He also left the small theater, which Tower had reportedly built for his wife, who liked to put on dramatic performances.

  When Wood arrived to inspect their new headquarters, he described the building as almost palatial, “a huge stone mansion with a tower, like an English country house, perched on the summit of one of the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains in Tuxedo Park. This he transformed into a private laboratory de luxe, with rooms for guests or collaborators.” Loomis had moved Wood’s forty-foot spectrograph from the barn in East Hampton and installed it in the basement, as Wood put it, “so I could continue my spectroscopic work in a better environment.” But to Wood’s surprise, Loomis had taken the liberty of making a few minor adjustments on his famous invention:

  [He] had a new tube made for the instrument, since there was no point in digging up the underground sewer pipes which had served formerly. He packed the tube in boiler felt with an arrangement for keeping the entire tube at a constant temperature, had a new and better camera made, installed motors, revolution counters, etc., for rotating the grating, which was housed in a small closet built around the brick pier on which it was mounted, and arranged other substitutions and gadgets, until I told him there was nothing left of my celebrated spectrograph but the forty feet. It had experienced a “reincarnation,” and required no pussycat as housemaid.

  In the meantime, Loomis was eager to meet some of the celebrated European physicists and visit their laboratories. He asked Wood if he would go abroad with him. In the summer of 1926, the two men set off on a grand scientific tour of Europe, which they would follow up with a second trip two years later.

  They sailed for England on the Île de France in early July and were met at Plymouth by a Daimler, in which they were driven to Hereford for a visit with Wood’s friend Thomas R. Merton, a professor of physics at Oxford and later treasurer of the Royal Society. The visit turned out to be particularly memorable because his estate bordered on the river Wye, and their arrival coincided with the salmon fishing season. As Wood recounted in his biography: “Merton had a fine private laboratory behind the house and some interesting experiments to show, but for once Loomis was excited over something other than physics. He waded in the Wye and landed a fifteen-pound Salmon.”

  They continued on to Paris, where they toured a number of “superb laboratories,” including that of Dr. Jean Saidman, who was investigating the medical applications of ultraviolet light. Saidman was enthusiastic about Lumiere Wood, the name the French had given his wartime invention, and proudly offered to give them a demonstration of his state-of-the-art X-ray machine with a fluoroscope. Loomis leapt at the chance to witness firsthand the work
ings of the human stomach. So with Wood acting as the guinea pig, and after a dose of barium carbonate, Loomis got his wish—with Wood holding a mirror so that he could “witness the process too.”

  On the voyage home on the Olympic, Loomis began making ambitious plans for a princely private laboratory of his own. He was tremendously excited by what he had seen in Europe. He took particular interest in Merton’s estate, which followed in the tradition of Terling Place, the famed residence of Lord Rayleigh, born John William Strutt, the English physical scientist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his successful isolation of argon, an inert atmospheric gas. Rayleigh had constructed his laboratory adjacent to his manor house, and it was there that he had carried out practically all of his major scientific investigations. Loomis now had a blueprint for the kind of research facility he envisioned at Tuxedo Park, where he hoped to do the kind of significant scientific work accomplished in the first Loomis Laboratory built by his grandfather. Never one to doubt himself, he purchased an enormous leather guest book with gilded pages in which to record the names of all the famous scientists who would make the pilgrimage to the Tower House in the years to come. The first name, signed in flowing black ink, was that of Robert Williams Wood, whom Loomis appointed as the laboratory’s eminent “director of research.”

  Thrilled by their initial success, Loomis was eager to continue where they had left off, and he and Wood moved on to a series of experiments to explore the effect of their discovery of supersonic sound waves on living organisms. For this they called in Dr. E. Newton Harvey, professor of biology at Princeton and a national authority on living cells. Looking through a high-powered microscope, Harvey saw that the waves had the faculty of breaking down blood vessels and would therefore have a deadly effect on small animals and fish eggs and even on certain kinds of plant life. Spirogyra, or the familiar bright green scum found on pond surfaces around Tuxedo Park, died and vanished completely after being exposed to the supersonic rays for five and one half minutes. Over the next two years, recalled Wood, they experimented with the supersonic “death rays”: “We worked together, killing fish and mice, and trying to find out how and why they were killed, that is whether the waves destroyed tissue or acted on the nerves or what.”