Tuxedo Park

by Jennet Conant

  “We knew Alfred Loomis had bought the old Tower House and was doing experiments up there,” said John Jay Mortimer, whose father, Stanley Grafton Mortimer, was a member of one of Tuxedo’s founding families and whose mother, Katherine Tilford Mortimer, the daughter of Standard Oil founder Henry Morgan Tilford, was one of the leading arbiters of park society. “People thought him pretty eccentric. Absolutely nuts, really.”

  But even if his more narrow-minded neighbors had wanted to stop him, it is unlikely they would have tried, let alone succeeded. Loomis’ research had important medical and therapeutic applications and had won the respect of scholars from Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Harvard. He was also one of them—he “belonged” in Tuxedo society, as did his mother, whose social credentials were impressively attested to when she was elected president of the Colonial Dames of America and the exclusive Monday Opera Club (the latter was limited to two hundred members). And while the Tuxedo Park Association ran the community as a feudal estate—operating all utilities and assessing its own taxes—Loomis was in some sense lord of the manor. He had negotiated the shrewd real estate deal by which four thousand acres was annexed from the many warring heirs of the Lorillard estate and organized into the Tuxedo Park Association, with every family owning shares in accordance with the value of their property. He was one of the most powerful members of the association, at one point serving a term as president, and certainly knew how to use his influence to get his way.

  As time went by, Loomis had less and less time for Tuxedo’s stifling society. Even compared to the cashmere crowd in Newport and Saratoga, Tuxedo’s tribal clannishness distinguished itself for its complacency and stilted formality. Even the doyenne of etiquette Emily Post, who grew up in the park and whose father was the architect Bruce Price, eventually tired of life behind a fence and departed. “Tuxedo people are not living from excitement to excitement,” she once remarked sarcastically. “The fact that someone can and will give marvelous entertainments does not interest them in the least.” Of course, Tuxedoites could afford to be unimpressed by most things, an attitude they evolved into a lifestyle. As Price Collier, one of the park’s original residents, put it: “The best society of Europe is success enjoying an idle hour or so; the best society here is idleness enjoying its success. . . . Society, to be permanently interesting, must be made up of idle professionals, not professional idlers.”

  Tuxedo’s virulent snobbishness did not appeal to Loomis, who never cared for fancy airs or anything artificial. “The beauty of it was that while he may have been born a WASP, he didn’t think that way,” said his grandson Tim Loomis. “Alfred was very curious about everything and everyone. He didn’t have a belief system that bound him to anything. He was very much his own person at a young age.”

  For the scientists Loomis imported regularly, life at Tuxedo Park was as exotic and thoroughly peculiar as the prancing poodles and giant mastiffs they spotted roaming the grounds of the great estates. It was as if Loomis and Wood, who were both unabashed Anglophiles, had taken their lead from the great English savants and their turreted country estates and together created their fantasy of a private research laboratory with no luxury spared. Kistiakowsky fondly recalled the comforts of Tower House, which included an Italian chef, a Greek butler, and an English steward who claimed to be a Northumberland Percy:

  Some years before I ever got there Alfred Loomis bought an older estate, with the main building the size of a large English manor house, located on the brow of the highest inhabited Tuxedo hill with the most spectacular view of Tuxedo Lake down below. This building became the Loomis Laboratory, owned, I believe, by a Loomis Foundation, the research rooms occupying the lower part of the building while the palatial common rooms and a dozen or so large guest rooms being in the upper stories. All of this was presided over by a major domo, a younger son of the Duke of Northumberland (it was a duke but which one I am not sure) who misbehaved himself in England so consistently as to have been dispatched on remittance to Canada; eventually he made his way to the Loomis Laboratory in Tuxedo Park. He treated us regularly to English country squire food, including English breakfasts and small fried filet steaks for lunch, the beef so well aged that they reeked to high heaven even after frying, but melted in the mouth. The duke’s son was eventually fired for regularly embezzling the housekeeping moneys. . . .

  The two senior regular guests were the great American experimental physicist Robert W. Wood . . . and a biologist from Princeton—Newton Harvey. The biologist was the great authority on fireflies and other luminous things and seldom talked about anything else than bioluminescence. Robert Wood was transformed from his professional self whenever pretty ladies were about, which was not frequent since the laboratory was an essentially male enclave, the wives being mostly only weekend guests.

  The mainstay of the laboratory was Mr. Miller, a skilled mechanic but also jack-of-all-trades, who lived with his wife in one of the lesser buildings on the estate. . . . Stimulated by Wood, I got involved in spectroscopic work, using a very large (40 feet!) grating spectrograph built by Wood. Later, together with Alfred Loomis we designed a refined version of it, Mr. Miller and I built it and I photographed and measured the ultraviolet absorption spectrum of formaldehyde, as well as some spectra with which I had less success. . . .

  We all worked industriously in the laboratory and then adjourned for a late afternoon high tea with English cookies and dainty sandwiches. After the tea some of us went back to the laboratory and then adjourned to one of our bedrooms to have some gin or beer. Later we had dinner in the dining hall, seated at several tables with four settings of real silver on each and finally had demi-tasse coffee back in the great hall. The mammoth reception room next to it was seldom used. The laboratory provided no liquor, it being the prohibition era. Expeditions down to the village for beer and gin at the bootlegger’s were a standard distraction. Weekends, some of us went sailing, others playing tennis and golf (those I did not, but Bill did and was tops in tennis). Occasionally we all were invited to dinner at the Loomises where I got to know Ellen and their three sons. . . .

  The village of Tuxedo Park provided few diversions for the young scientists. The narrow roads meandered through sixteen hundred acres of parkland, and they quickly tired of peeking through iron gates at the odd Italianate palazzo or French château. The hamlet itself resembled a quaint English village and consisted of little more than a train station, post office, and library. The latter featured the occasional speaker and had once even pressed into service Mark Twain, who had rented a house during the summer of 1906. According to the story told by Ellen Loomis, who served on the library’s board of trustees, even this rare cultural offering failed to draw a crowd, and the author had gone home angry: “The Park people thought it was for the hamlet’s benefit and the hamlet thought it was for the Park residents, so neither came.” Ellen, like her husband, did not involve herself in Tuxedo’s social swirl and had few close friends in the community. “Partying was not her recreation,” observed one acquaintance, adding that because of her education and intellect, “many of the ladies in the Park were nervous in her presence.”

  Not surprisingly, the Loomises and their coterie of scientists were left pretty much to themselves. “The Tuxedo Park residents mostly regarded us as a leper colony or at best as Alfred Loomis’ private toys,” recalled Kistiakowsky. “Therefore, we spent much of the nonworking time in chitchat at the laboratory or reading.”

  Kistiakowsky’s frequent visits to Tower House with Richards led to an invitation to spend the summer of 1930 as a research fellow at the Loomis Laboratory, and he would return for several more years. He later recalled that two entire summers were devoted just to the formaldehyde project Loomis had agreed to sponsor. The spectroscopic photography was “a lot of work,” he wrote in his memoirs: “Each exposure lasted hours, during which time I had to watch that the formaldehyde vapor was at the chosen (constant) pressure and did not condense on the windows of the long absorption tube. And as
often as not something went wrong with the spectrograph or the exposure was not properly chosen and so the photographic plate was useless.” The measurement of the spectrum—“more than 100,000 individual measurements with the traveling microscope”—he did later at Harvard. He converted the readings to wavelengths or frequencies of the absorption lines, plotted these on rolls of graph paper, and looked for empirical regularities. These he then sent to Gerhard Dieke at Johns Hopkins, who had functioned as the theoretician on the project at Tower House and worked to fit the readings to the predictions of the still very youthful quantum mechanics. “We had considerable success,” Kistiakowky noted, “for the first time the rotational spectrum of an asymmetric polyatomic molecule was used to calculate the interatomic distances and bond angles of the molecule.”

  During this same period, Loomis had Richards, who by then had participated in a number of different research projects, working on an apparatus that utilized short-wave radio to produce artificial fever and was used for medical treatment. The research came about as a result of an accident at the General Electric laboratory, where Loomis had many friends. Men working on a six-meter short-wave set had inexplicably fainted or become ill, and it was found that they were suffering from a high fever. The fever was traced to the effect of the short-length radio waves. Loomis was intrigued, and after further experiments at the Tower House laboratory, he and Richards discovered that the short waves had the power to increase the temperature of salt solution—but not pure water—and apparently acted on the salt in the bloodstream. Based on their experiments, which were later published in a paper, Loomis and Richards constructed an apparatus that would induce fever in carefully measured dosages to patients suffering from paresis, or partial or complete paralysis. The value of fever in curing certain infections had long been known, and it was not uncommon for patients to be exposed to malarial mosquitoes for such a purpose. The value of Loomis’ “artificial fever,” noted the New York Tribune, “is that it is more controllable and less harmful than the malarial fever, which had to be checked with quinine.”

  Loomis himself was a large, but by no means constant, presence at Tower House. He was at his Bonbright office in the city during the week and was often away for extended periods on business trips and holiday excursions. The day-to-day running of the laboratory was left to Garret A. Hobart III, the grandson of McKinley’s vice president by the same name and a Tuxedo Park neighbor. Hobart, whom Richards describes in his novel as “a weedy young man of conventional good looks,” was never particularly robust, and after graduating from the Choate School, he had become seriously ill. He enrolled at Johns Hopkins but was in and out of the hospital and completed only about a year of college. While he was there, however, he became an avid admirer of Wood’s and stayed on as the physicist’s research assistant for another year before being forced to leave because of his frail health. He spent most of his twenties apprenticed in the laboratories of General Electric in Schenectady.

  Hobart was painfully shy and nervous but very bright, and he was passionate about electrical gadgets, an obsession he shared with his father. He passed most of his time building microscopes and tinkering with his short-wave radio sets in a workshop in his home. As he was heir to a sizable fortune, he had no need of regular employment, and on Wood’s recommendation, he went to see Loomis in Tuxedo Park. Loomis took an immediate liking to him and made Hobart his protégé and secretary at the laboratory, where he proved extremely handy at all sorts of wiring and repairs. He and his lovely wife, a Belgian named Manette Seeldrayers Hobart, took a house only minutes from the Loomises in Tuxedo Park, and the young couple became a fixture at Tower House.

  In the early days, the laboratory was very much a family affair. Many of the young researchers who came to stay earned their keep by acting as part-time tutors and companions to Loomis’ energetic brood, who were becoming something of a handful for their mother. Ronald Christie, a medical student from McGill University in Montreal, spent several summers at Tuxedo Park and became virtually a member of the family. Christie was specializing in lung diseases, which appealed to Loomis, because it had been his grandfather’s field, and he took the young doctor under his wing. The mornings were spent doing research in physiology—they published several papers together—and afternoons and weekends were taken up with swimming, sailing, and fishing for trout on the lake with Lee, Farney, and Henry and any other lab hands who cared to tag along.

  With so many young men about, and so many idle country evenings, an inordinate amount of drinking went on. Prohibition had made alcohol a thriving cottage industry, and no self-respecting scientist could resist whipping up a bathtub batch of ethanol and juniper drops. Christie loved to tell the story of the time, shortly after first arriving in Tuxedo, that he became quite ill from the effects of the homemade hootch. Being a medical student, he was sure he recognized the symptoms of serious alcohol poisoning, including extreme dizziness and flickering vision. Thoroughly alarmed that he might have downed something lethal, he sought out Loomis and told him it was “not two hours after the cocktail hour that he had started seeing the flashes of light.” After hearing him out, the much bemused Loomis informed Christie that the spots before his eyes were in fact lightning bugs and suggested the young Canadian might want to study the indigenous insect when he was sober.

  Christie, like many of the young men who congregated at the Tower House, regarded Loomis as a mentor and second father. Loomis had an ease and warmth with them that he seemed to lack with his own boys, and over the years he attracted a devoted coterie of brilliant young scientists he came to call his “other sons.” Almost fifty years later, when Loomis was old and beginning to fail, he would ask Christie, by then an eminent lung specialist at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, for a very personal favor. His loyalty and affection for Loomis undimmed by the years, Christie would oblige.

  LOOMIS’ business often took him to Europe, and in 1928, with his laboratory up and running smoothly, he felt free to take off on another scientific tour of the Continent with Wood. It was essentially a shopping expedition, and Loomis had an unlimited budget when it came to gadgets and experimental gear. At the top of his list was one of the famous astronomical “Shortt clocks,” a new instrument for improving accuracy in the measurement of time invented by William Hamilton Shortt in 1921. Loomis’ fascination with exact timekeeping was probably an outgrowth of his interest in navigation, a hobby he had cultivated since his boyhood days sailing the waters off Long Island. The Shortt clock had a “free pendulum” swinging in a vacuum in an enormous glass cylinder and was reportedly accurate to one-tenth of a second a year. It was so expensive that only the five biggest, best-endowed observatories in the world could afford to own one. But this only heightened Loomis’ interest.

  They made a beeline for London, where Wood took Loomis to the workshop of F. Hope-Jones, who made the clocks. When they climbed up the dusty staircase, they saw little in the way of machinery, but standing in one corner of the room was one of the superb clocks. It was almost completed, Wood recalled, “which made the total production to date six”:

  Loomis asked casually what the price of the clock was, and on being told that it was two hundred and forty pounds (about $1,200 at the time, which was roughly what the average American worker earned in a year), said casually, “That’s very nice. I’ll take three.” Mr. Jones leaned forward, as if he had not heard, and said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “I am ordering three,” replied Loomis. “When can you have them finished? I’ll write you a check in payment for the first clock now.”

  Hope-Jones, who up to then had worn the expression of a man “who thinks he is conversing with a maniac,” was taken aback. He immediately became extremely apologetic and insisted that no payment was necessary until he had made good on delivery of all three clocks. But Loomis insisted on handing over the check, much to the other man’s amazement.

  While in England, they paid a visit to Sir Oliver Lodge, the eminent British phys
icist known for his pioneering research in radio frequency waves, who presented each of them with an autographed copy of his latest book, Evidence of Immortality. They then called on Sir Charles Vernon Boys, another noted physicist, who was famous for his highly sensitive instruments, including his invention of the radiomicrometer for measuring radiant heat, and an automatic recording calorimeter for testing manufactured gas. Loomis took an instant liking to Boys and invited him to return with them to the United States and spend the remainder of the summer in Tuxedo. Boys, who was then seventy-three years old, protested that he was pretty feeble to make such a journey. But Loomis urged him to accept and reassured him: “All you have to do is be in Plymouth on July 4, and I’ll arrange everything else.” They spent the last few weeks motoring around England, presented motion pictures of their experiments with super–sound waves before the Royal Society, went to the Derby, dined with “celebrities,” and then flew to Copenhagen, where they met with Niels Bohr.

  Their last stop was Berlin University, where they again showed the motion pictures of their experiments, and Wood introduced Loomis to “most of the other famous scientists then alive in Germany,” including the botanist Nathanael Pringsheim, the physical chemist Walther Nernst, and two Nobel laureates in physics, Max von Laue and Max Planck. They also stopped by the University of Göttingen, and as Wood recalled, during the visit they were invited “to see a student duel.” Wood was eager to accept the offer, but dueling was against the law, and Loomis politely, but firmly, declined. They began their voyage home on the Paris. Loomis had sent Boys his first-class steamer ticket, and sure enough, when the ocean liner slowed in Plymouth to allow the English passengers to board, Boys was waiting for them: “There he was waving his hand joyfully and all ready to scramble up the gangplank, looking as relieved at finding us really on the steamer as were we at seeing him on the tender.”