In January 1927, the New York American carried the headline “Super-Rays Discovery of Rich Banker.” The story provided a breathless account of their work: “Alfred L. Loomis, Wall Street banker and scientist, with a beautifully equipped research laboratory at his Tuxedo Park residence where he cooperates in pure science necromancy with his friend, Professor R. W. Wood, of Johns Hopkins University, made public yesterday details of a new form of sorcery—super-audible sounds. . . .” In his first public interview as a scientist, Loomis, who was more cautious than Wood, tried not to overplay their discovery: “We cannot tell yet, of course, where this will lead to in the future. Our discoveries with these super-audible sounds may bring about highly valuable results in biological research . . . what we have discovered will no doubt be useful to science, but not to warfare or to medicine in the treatment as disease, as far as we now know.”
In September 1927, Loomis and Wood published their findings, which they entitled “Communication No. 1 from the Alfred Lee Loomis Laboratory,” in the highly respected British Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. Their classic paper “The Physical and Biological Effects of High-Frequency Sound-Waves of Great Intensity” inspired related studies that kept researchers all over the world busy for years. They also received a patent for their methods and apparatus for forming emulsions through powerful high-frequency compression waves in liquid. That same year, working with William Richards, who was then a young chemistry professor at Princeton, Loomis published a second paper, “The Chemical Effects of High Frequency Sound Waves.”
Loomis wanted to be published in scientific journals, primarily because he felt that other research scientists should know about his findings and would naturally be as fascinated as he was. At Wood’s suggestion, he often submitted his scientific papers simultaneously to journals in the United States, Britain, and the Continent, which saw to it that word of the Loomis Laboratory’s research studies would quickly spread.
In the coming years the Loomis Laboratory would publish twenty more papers on the effects of high-intensity sound waves: Loomis was a coauthor of the first four and, several years later, another four papers. Together, he and Wood did the first major work in the field now commonly known as ultrasound, and their names still appear in some textbooks as the “fathers of ultrasonics.” The field has since grown enormously, and the applications extend from industrial cleaning and emulsifying to medical imaging, with ultrasonic scanners now in use in hospitals to observe fetuses, watch the motion of heart valves, and detect tumors.
By the autumn of 1927, Wood’s own research in spectral studies was opening up new fields for study. For the past several months, he had been absorbed in the study of fluorescence in various gases. He had found that by shining a light of a specific wavelength through a gas, he could obtain a series of bands called a “resonance spectrum.” The spectrum varied as a function of the wavelength of the illuminating light. The results of his experiments had profound implications for theories of the atomic structure of matter being debated at the time, particularly Niels Bohr’s theory. Wood’s discoveries in spectroscopy led to his being nominated that year for a Nobel Prize in physics. While the prize went to Arthur Compton, Wood’s research was attracting prominent scientists to the Loomis Laboratory; in all, ten papers in optical spectroscopy would come out of the laboratory, including one by Loomis and George Kistiakowsky. But spectroscopy was relatively well-trodden ground, and Loomis set out to do pioneering work in new fields.
Loomis continued in his capacity as vice president of Bonbright five days a week, devoting nights, weekends, and vacations to an expanding array of research experiments under way at Tower House. He was now thoroughly committed to his second career as a scientist and piled extra work on himself, spending every spare hour reading the journals and books Wood recommended as part of his ongoing education. “He used to drive into Wall Street every day and do his business, and then come back to Tuxedo Park where he had this marvelous laboratory,” said Alvarez. “In fact, he had a much better laboratory than any university laboratory at that time—better equipment, more expensive equipment. He hired R. W. Wood as his private tutor, and Wood came up and spent every summer at Tuxedo Park doing the experiments that he couldn’t do at Johns Hopkins because they didn’t have enough money. R. W. Wood taught Alfred Loomis physics.”
The single-minded zeal with which Loomis pursued his research meant that he absented himself from the house on Club House Road. Repeating the Yankee tradition in which he was reared, he packed all three of his boys off to boarding school from the age of seven: first to the Fay School, then to St. Paul’s, and finally to Harvard. Ellen Loomis had been more or less always “unwell” for years, and Loomis saw to it that she underwent the latest experimental “radiation treatments,” though they seemed to do her no good (and may well have done her real harm). Ellen admired and supported her husband’s passion for research, and while she took pleasure in arranging the elaborate dinners and soirees at Tower House, she increasingly felt an outsider to his new world. At the Tower House, he had set up an independent household removed from Club House Road, where women were tolerated but not welcome. In a letter to Stimson in August 1927, Ellen apologized for being unable to make their annual visit to Highhold, Stimson’s Long Island estate, and described how much life had changed at Tuxedo Park:
Alfred’s work in the laboratory fills me with pride—just thinking of doing it seems to me rather wonderful—just the business part of planning and arranging that house, and starting it, has been quite a performance. But his work has blossomed out, the results of his years of lonely study are showing so suddenly, it is very thrilling just to be me, and watch. It is even more thrilling to be Alfred, and do. It has required a quality of fierce absorption that has shut out many important things from his life temporarily. I think it is worth it.
Determined to be cheerful, Ellen wrote she was confident that she had found “a number of ways in which I can help him, as housekeeper, and hostess, and doer of odd jobs.” She hoped they would manage to get away the following year, but at present they were too distracted by the publication of Loomis’ first scientific papers, including the one with Wood in the Philosophical Magazine and another, written with E. Newton Harvey of Princeton, on the biological effects of high-frequency sound waves, in an upcoming issue of Nature. She urged the Stimsons to come to them in Tuxedo for a few days so they could show him “the Tower.” She added reassuringly that she was certain calm would soon be restored: “This white heat of Alfred’s work is somewhat due to the extra things that come of a new venture. A certain amount of routine will develop presently, and that is always easier.”
The following winter, at Wood’s suggestion, Loomis hosted “a congress of physicists” designed to be the new laboratory’s official coming-out party. The conference, “Certain Aspects of Atomic Physics,” was in honor of James Franck, professor of physics at Göttingen University, who along with Gustav Hertz had won the Nobel Prize in 1925 for their work on the laws governing the transfer of energy between molecules. Franck had agreed to give his first lecture in the United States at Loomis’ laboratory, and dozens of leading scientists traveled to Tuxedo Park for the event. Papers were also presented by Wood and a young MIT physicist named Karl Compton, brother of the recent Nobel Prize winner, who had struck up a close friendship with the unconventional financier. Held in the library at Tower House, a room of “cathedral-like proportions with stained-glass windows,” the conference proved such a success that they immediately made plans for another one the following year.
Loomis discovered he enjoyed the role of host, and in his own autocratic style, he began regularly holding large house parties, complete with honored guests, designated lectures, music recitals—often featuring virtuoso performances by one of the visiting scientists—and lavish formal dinners with a liveried servant standing behind each chair. “I gave a series of weekends, thirty and forty people were invited guests,” Loomis later recalled. “When Bohr first
came over to this country he’d give a series of talks, what we now call seminars. In those cases, all kinds of people came. Marconi came over and came out. For a time it got to be if any distinguished European scientists came to America, Tuxedo was so near, they were met at the boat and came out.” Loomis’ private laboratory was rapidly acquiring world fame as a center of research. It had truly become, in Einstein’s phrase, a “palace of science.”
Chapter 4
PALACE OF SCIENCE
A group of men were seated in a straggling half-circle in the large upper room which served as lounge, game room, and occasionally as auditorium. Broad foreheads, sparkling spectacles, and one van Dyke beard gave the gathering an appearance which was convincingly scientific.
—WR, from Brain Waves and Death
BY the summer of 1928, Loomis was the subject of frequent and sensational press reports. In his gusto to put his Tuxedo laboratory on the map, he had become more of a public figure than he had anticipated, and he found he lacked Wood’s taste for the limelight. Newsmen had fastened on to the Tower House as a story and Loomis as an eccentric, would-be Einstein—the “fantastic dreamer incarnate”—and were having a field day writing about his ghoulish experiments with the silent sound waves they dubbed “the whisper of death.” He had wanted only to join the priesthood of the nation’s men of research, and his quest for recognition had opened the gates of the temple for all manner of undignified and unseemly inspection.
In the 1920s, science was enjoying a tremendous popular resurgence, and the burgeoning mass-circulation press, aided by the advertising industry, had become propagandists for the advances of modern technology, daily trumpeting such marvels as Einstein’s “revolutionary” theory of relativity—locked in the atom, reported the Saturday Evening Post, was “a source of power inconceivably greater than any possible requirement of the human race”—to the latest high-powered vacuum cleaner. Einstein was front-page news, and reporters followed his every move, documenting his self-effacing mannerisms and utterances as further evidence of his genius. He was “the world’s most celebrated scientist,” noted the historian Daniel Kevles, and his cult status “not only helped enlarge the prestige of pure science,” it endowed the entire profession with a kind of awesome glamor. By 1925, the New Republic wrote that scientists were regarded as members of an exclusive and powerful fraternity: “Today [the scientist] sits in the seats of the mighty. He is the president of great universities, the chairman of semi-official government councils, the trusted adviser of states and even corporations.”
If Loomis found his new high profile uncomfortable, there was little he could do to restrain the tabloids. Every time he gave a lecture or presented his research to a gathering of his peers, the local press picked up on it and ran an overblown account of the wizard of Tuxedo Park, “an expert performer of sleight-of-hand tricks,” and his “magical” laboratory. He soon became such a fixture of the columns, Popular Science Monthly devoted a breathless feature story to his double life, called “A Scientist of Wall Street”:
It is the peak of a rush day on the New York stock market. In the office of the vice president of a large Wall Street banking house, a dynamic, boyish-looking man sits at the throttle of a high-speed machine of finance. About him seethe the hubbub and excitement of the world’s money market. Quick decisions, hurrying messengers, the steady grind and chatter of the stock ticker—each moment is crowded with feverish activity.
A few hours later, on a broad estate at Tuxedo Park, N.Y., miles from the city frenzy, this same high-powered business executive may be seen hard at play. In white apron, surrounded by curious test tubes, chemicals, and electrical apparatus, he is taking his recreation—in a physics laboratory!
The man is Alfred Lee Loomis, physicist, business man of science. The laboratory is his private playground. . . . The Loomis Laboratory is known to scientists the world over. For, from his playtime research in collaboration with technical men of note, who accept his hospitality and the use of his fine equipment, have come some of the newest marvels of discovery in physics and biology. . . . Through a high-powered microscope, Loomis has seen waves of silent sound twist and shatter human blood corpuscles into a thousand bits, or hurl cells of living protoplasm into a mad, whirling dance of death.
A fascinating hobby, this—to turn from the rumble of Wall Street to play with “whispers of death.”
Loomis declined to be interviewed for the article. He was deeply embarrassed by the emphasis on his financial success and, more to the point, worried that the story might be interpreted by his scientific colleagues as self-aggrandizing at a time when Einsteinian humility was the academic uniform. He was also concerned that any undue credit attributed to either himself or his laboratory might alienate the serious researchers he was courting for future projects. He did not want the carefully calibrated team play at Tower House disrupted by frivolous publicity. “Loomis, hard-fisted man of affairs, is reticent about his laboratory,” the magazine noted in the last paragraph of the story. “He likes best to pursue his pastime with his friends, without the public eye upon him.”
Inevitably, the Tower House was becoming the focus of all kinds of strange rumors. Tuxedoites took note of the odd comings and goings at the big house on the hill, and the ill will it engendered was tinged with anti-Semitism: “Strange outlanders with flowing hair and baggy trousers were settling down for weeks and months on end. They were performing all kinds of crazy experiments—cooking eggs and killing frogs with sounds that nobody could hear, clocking time to the ten-thousandth of a second, making turtles’ hearts beat in a dish, and similar enormities.”
There had been a number of large gatherings of scientists, and a veritable parade of foreigners from all over the world had been allowed past the massive stone walls of Gate Lodge, the imposing, isolating guardhouse that Lorillard’s architect Bruce Price designed to protect the gated colony from trespassers and the public at large. Known as “the world with a fence around it” for the eight-foot-high barbed-wire fence that had originally encircled the colony to keep out the riffraff, Tuxedo had always been famously inhospitable to outsiders, especially Jews. “Woe to the unlucky stranger who strays across the posted boundaries,” warned the New York Herald. Leaving no room for error, Lorillard had spelled out the restricted membership list of his club as “a guide to Who is especially Who in the Four Hundred.” Once the exclusive stomping ground of Astors, Juilliards, Goelets, Tuckermans, and Pells, oldtime Tuxedoites took a dim view of Loomis’ imports and complained there was now no telling who would arrive on the five o’clock special from New York. Perhaps as a precaution against this attitude, Loomis often privately reserved the famous Tuxedo Club Car and arranged to have Erie trains make unscheduled stops at Sterlington, where his driver and Rolls could regularly be seen waiting to whisk his guests up to the Tower.
Kistiakowsky, who was a frequent visitor at this time along with Richards, always had the uncomfortable feeling he was trespassing: “It was a strictly WASP community, minorities of all kinds not being welcomed,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Many square miles of fenced and patrolled hilly terrain, a large private lake with wonderful sailing, a golf course and so on, including lovely rocky forest scenery, owned by quite a selection from the ‘New York 400’ families. . . .”
At the broad-verandahed Tuxedo Club, where members gathered to drink and play cards, it was whispered that Bonbright’s brilliant vice president was neglecting his Wall Street business “to putter around at all hours in the laboratory.” The clubhouse was the center of life in the park—and, in the minds of many residents, the world—and some perceived Loomis’ self-imposed absence as a slight. After all, many newly minted millionaires would kill to make the rosters of the storied club, which had helped establish the popularity of court tennis, racquets, and golf—it boasted the second oldest course in the country—as well as the abbreviated dinner jacket called the “tuxedo.” (Legend has it that Griswold Lorillard, Pierre’s son, once attended a ball in a
dinner jacket without tails, a style he had copied from the Prince of Wales, and it was adopted as the club’s informal uniform.) Loomis and his wife put in an occasional appearance at Tuxedo functions, and their three sons actively partook of club life, but he made it a rule never to mix science with society. They received friends and neighbors at their home on Club House Road and reserved the Tower House exclusively for their learned guests.
While most Tuxedoites, who came from banking and railroad fortunes, relaxed with a round of golf or a game of court tennis, Loomis “was all business all the time,” recalled John Modder, who worked as a bellhop, waiter, and bartender in those days. “You’d never see him down at the club on a Saturday. He was always up in his laboratory.” Modder was on friendly terms with the butler at the Tower House and occasionally had a chance to visit the lab. “Now I used to laugh, because he had a great big painting on the wall, and at the bottom of the painting he had a pool with fish in it, like an aquarium. You could see the reflection from the painting in the water. And Mr. Loomis would say, ‘You look in the water. There’s a dead lady in the bottom of that lake.’ Well, I looked for hours, but I couldn’t find it.”
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