Tuxedo Park

by Jennet Conant

  In his roman à clef, Richards, who was a good friend of Hobart’s, caricatured Manette as the “brazen hussy” Leone Allison:

  Her wide-set brown eyes and amiable expression were photogenic. The sun had bleached her hair until it was almost white and had turned her skin, most of which was visible, to a rich brown. She wore a rudimentary halter of robin’s egg blue, tiny shorts of the same color, and rope-soled sandals. A wire-haired fox terrier with a handsome moustache and an aristocratic vacant expression trotted past her into the room. Every one turned as she halted in the doorway. . . .

  Not only was her informality of dress “deeply shocking,” her sexual frankness, for a woman of her day, was so surprising that it made grown men blush and left them “sputtering incoherently.” She enjoyed playing “cat and mouse” games with various prey, but occasionally those she toyed with ended up falling in love with her, only to have their hearts broken. Throughout the novel, she boasts of having had affairs and admits to having an ill-considered fling with Bill Roberts, Richards’ fictional alter ego, whom she “slept with . . . a couple of times.” Roberts, she explained, had moved back to Boston and was unhappy and “drinking.” But he could be very charming and persuasive, and she fell for him: “I was the only person he’d ever cared for, he said, and not having me was wrecking his life.” After he had bedded her, however, it turned out he was not in love at all but had wanted only to add her to “his collection,” and the two had a bitter parting of the ways.

  In the novel, which Richards populated with cardboard cutouts of the famous scientists who frequented the laboratory, Leone Allison’s husband, Charles Allison, the laboratory director (Garret Hobart) was portrayed as a weak-kneed, tremulous nerd who married a woman many times out of his league. As Leone (Manette) confesses in the book, her husband was aware of her infidelities, but there was nothing he could really do to stop her: “When I married Charlie I told him he wasn’t the first, and he wasn’t going to be the last.” Nevertheless, she felt sorry for him and tried to protect him. “He thinks he just has to suffer if he doesn’t like something. Why, even when he’s making love, poor kid, he’s sort of shy and all by himself.” The only man who was truly her match, she admitted in a moment of candor, was her husband’s boss—the wealthy owner of the laboratory. “Nobody else around here appeals to me . . . I’ve always been goofy about him, but he’s happily married.”

  Even if Richards had lived long enough to insist that his novel was not intended to “represent persons living or dead,” as he wrote in his author’s note, his thumbnail sketch of Manette was entirely too vivid not to be instantly recognizable to the denizens of Tower House. By all accounts, it was dead on. “Oh, it was her all right,” said Evans. “As soon as you read about her parading around in short shorts, you knew.” When the novel was published in the spring of 1940, Loomis was appalled at the way Manette was depicted and outraged that Richards had dared suggest in print that there was anything between them. Beginning with the laboratory setting (using a private research facility housed in a mansion as the site of the murder and a vehicle for an in-depth look at the science of brain waves) to the catalog of familiar characters and painfully personal details, Loomis knew Richards had hardly invented a single element of his story. “Alfred hated that book,” said Evans. “He absolutely hated it. He wished that it had never been published.”

  Exactly when Loomis became aware of the book is not clear, but Richards’ stunning suicide just weeks before its publication apparently cut short any legal action Loomis might have contemplated taking to quash the inflammatory novel. Although Richards’ family worried that Loomis might still sue for libel, it seems unlikely, as it would surely have attracted further publicity, which was the last thing he wanted. Besides, Richards had disguised the Loomis Laboratory well enough, and nothing was ever written in the newspapers about the fictional story’s surprising similarity to his Tuxedo Park establishment or the important brain wave research being done there. As far as Loomis was concerned, the best thing to do was to bury the book along with its author. He never spoke of either again. There was a rumor at the time, according to Richards’ nephew Ted Conant, that Loomis bought up every copy of the novel available in New York bookstores, just to make sure that as few friends and acquaintances saw it as possible. But as the deeply chagrined Richards family also wished the book would disappear, no one would have stopped the powerful Wall Street financier from doing as he saw fit.

  In all fairness, Richards’ suicide must have been deeply shocking to Loomis and his family. He had been a close friend and colleague. He was among the very first of the young scientists Loomis had recruited to work with him at Tower House, and their association had lasted over fourteen years. He was still working for Loomis on a part-time basis at the time of his death, and they must have been in regular contact. Certainly, Richards had suffered bouts of depression, had occasionally drunk to excess, and had often been physically unwell, but none of those things had made him decidedly more peculiar than any of the others in Loomis’ company.

  Kistiakowsky, who was at Harvard by then, had been very close to Richards since their Princeton days and had known more about his “mental troubles” than anyone. Richards had confided to him in intimate detail about his tempestuous personal life. He had had a series of failed love affairs, including one with Christiana Morgan, the beautiful but volatile daughter of a Boston society family. Morgan had become a protégé of Carl Jung, and Richards, who was very taken with her, had followed her to Zurich and had even consulted Jung about his sexual problems, which he blamed on his repressive Puritan background. When Richards quit his teaching post at Princeton, he had told Kistiakowsky that his emotional state was worse and he was moving to New York to undergo intensive psychotherapy. (It is probable that Richards was manic-depressive: his father, the Harvard Nobel laureate, had suffered from myriad phobias and “nervous attacks” and had died at the age of sixty after being laid low by chronic respiratory problems and a prolonged depression; years later, Bill Richards’ brother, Thayer, a prominent Virginia architect, would also commit suicide, lying down on the railroad tracks near his home.) On the last page of his novel, Richards has a character ask one of the doctors at the laboratory, “You have all heard the expression ‘Genius is close to insanity.’ Do you believe, as a psychiatrist, that this is essentially a representation of fact?”

  After Richards’ suicide in January 1940, Kistiakowsky could not duck the guilt he felt over the role he played in his friend’s increasing dependency on booze. “He was an excellent conversationalist, well-versed in cultural and artistic matters, a gay companion in all the drinking parties we used to have,” Kistiakowsky later recalled in his memoir. “Meanwhile he became an alcoholic. I fear that our joint drinking of bootleg alcohol that we used to doctor up into ‘gin’ was a critical stage on that road. . . .”

  It is doubtful Loomis ever suffered any such misgivings about Richards’ death. He had already moved on. The past was done with, and all that mattered was the future. By then, he had met his new protégé, Ernest Lawrence, and was impatient to see what they could accomplish together. Paulie Loomis always admired her father-in-law’s relentless quest for scientific truths but could never completely ignore its ruthless quality. “Physicists are single-minded in the pursuit of what interests them,” she observed. “As people go, they can be pretty cold.”

  WORLD events also conspired to distance Loomis from the lofty pursuits and low intrigues at Tower House. By the late 1930s, as the Nazi assault on Europe gained momentum, Loomis’ scientific interests began to change. He once again became obsessed with Germany’s artillery and machinery of war, just as he had in the years before World War I. He had also had disturbing reports of the staying power of Mussolini and Hitler from the physics grapevine and his many foreign guests, including Bohr and Fermi. Loomis made several trips to Europe, and in 1938 he traveled to Berlin and visited Bohr more than once in Copenhagen. He was very troubled by what he learned about the hi
ghly developed state of applied scientific research in Germany. From Kistiakowsky and others who were interested and knowledgeable about Germany’s efforts to rearm herself, he heard unsettling things about advanced weaponry and the work German physicists were rumored to be doing in nuclear physics.

  From his regular conversations with Stimson, who had returned to private life and his law practice, Loomis knew that Congress, reflecting the general sentiment of the country, was determined to stay out of the mess in Europe. He also knew that his cousin was of the opinion that the best way to avoid war was to remain alert and not abdicate responsibility, that isolation, in the modern world, was impossible. As Stimson had argued in a letter to The New York Times on October 11, 1935, and reiterated in a radio address on October 24, “The real problem is to decide what methods of action will best keep us out of war” at a time when “civilized life has suddenly become extremely complex and extremely fragile,” when “the world had suddenly become interconnected and interdependent.” While Stimson had never publicly come out against the administration’s position on neutrality, in private he maintained that the existing policies at home and abroad, if continued for long, would surely lead to catastrophe.

  In 1936, exactly one week after Roosevelt had signed the second Neutrality Act, Hitler marched into the Rhineland. It was a flagrant violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which had established the Rhineland as a buffer zone between Germany and France. In the ensuing months, civil war broke out in Spain. After Japan renewed its aggression against China, Roosevelt delivered his famous “quarantine speech” in October 1937, a first cautious call for the reining in of “lawless aggressors.” Stimson, roused by the president’s preference for talk over action, wrote a letter to The New York Times calling for leadership and faulting the administration’s “ostrich-like isolationism” and “erroneous form of neutrality legislation [which] has threatened to bring upon us the very dangers of war which we are now seeking to avoid.”

  Loomis had overheard enough of his colleagues talking to know that most Americans felt they had done their part to save democracy in the First World War, and now it was Europe’s responsibility to solve its own problems. Einstein made headlines when he immigrated to America in 1933 to escape the Nazi tyranny, and since then many Jewish physicists who worried that they might soon be forced to leave their teaching positions had fled the war-torn continent. In December 1938, Enrico Fermi, whose wife was Jewish, left Rome to go to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize and never looked back, traveling to New York, where he took up a position at Columbia University. But for scientists in the United States, without close friends or relatives abroad, foreign problems were a matter for politicians and policy experts—and they generally shared the cheerful view that if Germany wanted to let its brightest minds leave, it was their loss and America’s gain. Loomis was not as sanguine. He had talked to his old friend Compton and had seen Conant at Harvard, and both were very pessimistic over the fate of scientists in Germany, Austria, and Italy. He could not help but share his cousin’s view that the country had crept into a hole and was trying to forget the world.

  Loomis believed that if Europe was going to fall apart, it was far better to be vigilant. It was a lesson he had learned back in his days at Aberdeen, testing Edison’s theories on the best ways to cope with the deadly U-boats. After the shock of the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915, the famous old inventor had exhorted the country in The New York Times that Americans were “as clever at mechanics . . . as any people in the world” and could defeat any “engine of destruction.” Edison had advocated preparedness without provocation, and to Loomis, it seemed as wise a course in the present as it had been then.

  When Hitler rolled into Austria in 1938, and then decimated Czechoslovakia, Loomis made note of the tank models, the destructiveness of the field artillery, and the brutality of the bombings. His exposure to army procedure at Aberdeen, the antiquated cannons and hidebound bureaucracy, had left him convinced that the military could not be counted on to develop and build a stockpile of modern weapons for defense. At the start of the last war, Edison had recommended that the government create “a great research laboratory” whose purpose would be to develop new weaponry, so that if war came, the country could “take advantage of the knowledge gained through this research work and quickly manufacture in large quantities the very latest and most efficient instruments of war.” In the months to come, these accumulating influences would move Loomis to adapt Edison’s ideas to his own laboratory.

  A call from Compton in early 1939 helped crystallize his plans. Compton had correctly sensed that Loomis was at loose ends and was casting about for a new direction for his research. He had told Compton that his work on brain waves with Hallowell Davis, while far from complete, needed to be carried on under the auspices of a hospital, and to that end he had donated most of his equipment to the Harvard Medical School. Compton suggested that, given the portentous events in Europe, it might be useful if Loomis looked into the present state of microwave radio technology, or radar (though the latter term had not yet been coined). Loomis was intrigued by the idea and began exploring the subject on his own.

  Compton, of course, had his own reasons for wanting to involve Loomis. MIT had for some time been doing exploratory work in the study of microwaves, but their program needed additional financial support if it was to continue, and both he and Vannevar Bush were hoping that Loomis would step up and provide the funds for a joint research project. Earlier that spring, he had arranged for Edward Bowles, the MIT radio specialist who was largely responsible for the university’s research program, along with several of his top investigators, to meet with Loomis at Tuxedo Park. Bowles was bright but temperamental, and had managed to alienate a number of colleagues over the years, including Bush. But he was also a keen enough promoter to have kept MIT’s blind-landing radar operation going from grant to grant, including one from the Sperry Gyroscope Company, and was employing some fifteen MIT investigators, all working on ultrahigh-frequency microwave projects. Bowles and Compton together convinced Loomis that the field showed great promise, and he signed on, offering his laboratory as a research facility.

  In their correspondence that winter and spring, Loomis and Bush discussed “the matter of distance finding by radio.” In early February, Loomis wrote to Bush that “Mrs. Loomis has been quite ill with undulant fever,” necessitating a trip to Honolulu, but that on his return he planned to stop over in California and “am wondering what scientific laboratories, etc. you would suggest that I visit.” After Loomis’ Hawaiian vacation was canceled because his wife was too sick to travel, he invited Bush to meet with him in Tuxedo. Afterward, Bush wrote Loomis:

  I will take up with Bowles the possibility of developing some simple equipment for approximate distance finding at the same time that precise equipment is being developed . . . thus that we may be able to start the program a little more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.

  A few weeks later, Bush followed up with a long letter, addressed “Dear Loomis,” explaining in great technical detail his idea of “how we might make a plane detector,” including “a fairly simple computer, which would control the gun directly.” Bush, who was mechanically inclined, and while at MIT had invented his famed “differential analyzer”—an early computer that did intricate mathematical calculations—clearly felt he and Loomis spoke the same language, noting at one point, “The trigonometry involved is not bad.” At the end of the letter, he asked Loomis to “keep it confidential,” adding, “This is all very sketchy, but it may have a lead in it somewhere.”

  That summer, Loomis joined Compton at a conference on ultrashort-wave radio problems held at MIT. The symposium was attended by the representatives of all the major companies doing research in the field, but they were so excessively guarded and tight-lipped about the details of their patents that Compton dismissed the formal presentations as “pathetic and amusing.” However, that evening at dinner, after a consi
derable amount of teasing, and no doubt drinking, they were gradually induced to tell their stories and reveal some of the real progress that had been made.

  In the 1930s, microwave research was heavily cloaked in secrecy and was simultaneously being developed under wraps in military and industrial laboratories in America, England, France, and Germany. The basic principle, that radio waves had optical properties and could “reflect” solid objects, had been demonstrated in 1888 by the German scientist Heinrich Hertz. A working device for the detection of ships, based on his experiments, was tested in the early 1900s. But little was done to exploit the discovery, even though as far back as 1922, Guglielmo Marconi had urged the development of short radio waves for the detection of obstacles in the fog or darkness. It was not until the 1930s, when airplanes came of age as a military weapon—a threat made terrifyingly real by the damage inflicted by German and Italian bombers on Spain between 1936 and 1938—that the technology of radar finally began to be developed in earnest.

  Most of the countries exploring radar concentrated their early efforts on “the beat method,” or the Doppler method, which used ordinary continuous radio waves and required at least two widely separated and bulky stations, one for transmitting and one for receiving. Airplanes that penetrated between the transmitter and receiver were detected by the Doppler beat between the direct signal (from the transmitter to the receiver) and the signal scattered by the target (which traveled a longer route from the transmitter to the plane and then to the receiver). Unfortunately, the equipment was fairly limited in its effectiveness. The sharpness of the system’s vision—its ability to distinguish separately the echoes from two targets close together and at the same distance from the radar—depended on the sharpness of the radar beam. For a given antenna, the beam width was proportional to the wavelength and would become sharper as the wavelength decreased. Loomis realized that if sharp radar beams were ever to be produced by an antenna not too large to carry in an airplane, they would have to develop a generator of much shorter wavelengths than was then known. It was speculative, to be sure, but the unexplored microwave spectrum promised not only to allow radar sets to become much smaller and more portable, but also to prove better at locating low-flying aircraft and to be able to distinguish targets with far greater accuracy.