He was interrupted by the entrance of a tall and well-rounded blonde of highly unscientific appearance.
—WR, from Brain Waves and Death
ANY visitor to Tower House in the mid-1930s eventually had to submit to the ritual known as “putting on the electrodes,” which was part of the preparation for the measurement of brain waves, the research that would consume Loomis for the next few years. Guests who thought they were being taken on a guided tour of the laboratory would suddenly find themselves being eased into a chair as Loomis cheerfully talked them into undergoing a few harmless tests. Eminent biologists, chemists, physicists, psychiatrists, and neurologists, along with their wives and any other houseguests who happened to be stopping overnight in Tuxedo, were all recruited as volunteers for his experiments.
The preparation itself was not so much painful as disconcerting. It consisted of snipping a few hairs at various places on the scalp, rubbing the exposed skin with ointment to facilitate electrical contact, and attaching small silver disks called electrodes. One electrode was placed high on the forehead, one on the crown, and the third on the occiput, or back of the skull, so the action of the front part of the brain could be registered separately from that of the rear. (After many complaints about the lab’s amateur barbers, Loomis and his colleagues found they could “obtain satisfactory electrical and mechanical contact with the scalp without even cutting a hair.”) Either way, the result looked quite frightful, with the flexible wires previously soldered to the electrodes hanging Medusa-like from the subject’s head so they could later be plugged into connections to the measuring apparatus in the control room.
Loomis would then briskly march his victim to one of the downstairs laboratories, which had been converted into a “sleeping room,” where they would be asked to take a supervised nap. Richards, who collaborated with Loomis on this project as on others, wrote about the experiments in great detail in his novel, Brain Waves and Death. In an author’s note in the front of the book, he explained that electroencephalography was established as a science in 1933 and asserted that the science part of his fiction was wholly accurate. “Far from having no resemblance to anything whatsoever, the facts here given about it represent our present knowledge of the subject, and are false in so far as that knowledge is incomplete.” What follows is his description of the “sleeping room” at Tower House, which corresponds to the more clinical account featured in Loomis’ paper “Electrical Potentials of the Human Brain,” published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology:
It was a cheerful, undistinguished little place, much like hundreds of others in country houses up and down the East Coast. Care had been taken to conceal as much as possible that it was part of a scientific laboratory, for nervous people do not like to be surrounded by electrical instruments. It contained, besides the couch on which the body rested, a comfortable chair, a built-in wardrobe cabinet of modern design, and a large bed with small tables at each side of its head. On the wall were a couple of sporting prints and the curtains framing the shuttered window were gay. Only a sort of gigantic wall-plug above the head of the bed, and three search lights set in the ceiling, were at all unusual. . . .
The searchlights were a source of infrared light. A camera was discreetly mounted in the wardrobe to provide a photographic record and document changes of position. As the rooms were darkened while the subject was sleeping, Loomis used cameras with the fastest lenses then available and a new type of infrared film that the Eastman-Kodak Company made up for him specially and reportedly had flown to Tuxedo Park from Rochester on dry ice when he was doing experiments. The laboratory was equipped with two professional-quality darkrooms where the film was developed.
The wires from the subject’s head were plugged into the wall socket above the bed. The sleeping room was in the far corner of the laboratory, secluded from everything, and soundproofed with copper netting to eliminate any interfering electrical noise. A microphone near the bed was connected to the second so-called amplifier room, which contained the high-fidelity amplifiers Loomis used to magnify the minute electric impulses given off by the brain, making them much stronger, in the same way radio signals are amplified in a receiver. According to Richards, it was packed with black metal filing cabinets filled with radio tubes and meters and “resembled an overgrown radio transmitting station.” The amplifiers were also used in recording heart rate, bed movement, respiration, and sound communication between the sleeping room and the third, or control, room sixty-six feet away.
In the control room, a loudspeaker that was connected to the microphone in the sleeping room picked up even the slightest noise or sigh the subject might make. When they turned it up, the rustle of a sheet sounded “like a forest fire.” Loomis used three amplifiers, so that signals from each part of the head could be recorded simultaneously. Each amplifier was attached to an electronic pen of silver tubing, which recorded the impulses or brain waves on a continuous ribbon of paper on a huge revolving drum. One pen wrote in red and the other two in blue ink. The forty-five-inch round drum, eight feet long, spun around once every minute, each second of “brain current” leaving a wave three-fourths of an inch long. Seven hours’ sleep stretched out to a wave line 1,575 feet long. There was also an oscillator for sending tones of various frequencies to stimulate the subject in the sleeping room. Garret Hobart, who was an amateur radio enthusiast, manned the control room and kept Loomis’ complicated custom-rigged apparatus running smoothly. As all three rooms were soundproofed, making communication between them difficult, Loomis installed an elaborate intercom system like that used in many law offices at the time. Thus his various itinerant experimenters, who generally included Richards, Hobart, and Loomis’ longtime collaborator E. Newton Harvey and his wife, Edith, could monitor the experiment no matter where they happened to be. For the most part, however, they just shouted back and forth.
Loomis and his co-workers found that when the subject was awake, the pens would draw little trains of perfectly symmetrical waves, but as he fell asleep, there would be bursts of faster waves interspersed with little activity, when the pens would move sluggishly, dragging jagged spikes. As the subject fell into a deep sleep, the waves became larger and appeared more frequently. The ink tracing made on the paper was known informally as an “afternoon sleep record,” because the experiments were routinely performed during an after-lunch siesta (though as their studies progressed, they began monitoring their subjects during a whole night’s sleep). Loomis’ earliest subjects included many family members. The Thornes, both their boys, and all three of Loomis’ sons heroically endured being wired to the complicated apparatus for hours at a time so that precise electrical measurements of their brain waves could be made while they were sleeping. Afterward they were rewarded with much laughter and teasing about the gargantuan loudness of their snoring. “Aunt Julia said Alfred was always sticking those things to her scalp, and apparently it itched terribly,” recalled Paulie Loomis. “She loved her brother and would do anything to make him happy. She would sit there for hours while he did experiments on her.”
Loomis had first become interested in the new discovery of brain waves in the early 1930s after reading about the work of Hans Berger, a German psychiatrist. Berger had published his observations of the rhythmic electrical output of the human brain in 1929, but American physiologists had been unable to duplicate his results, and many were inclined to doubt the existence of the low-voltage signals he described. Loomis was intrigued and wanted to see if he could replicate Berger’s observations using an electronic apparatus of his own design. In June 1935, in the first in a series of pioneering studies of brain waves, Loomis excitedly reported his findings in the weekly journal Science:
Recent interest in brain potentials has induced us to put on record the results of experiments carried out in the Loomis Laboratory, Tuxedo Park, in which the new phenomenon in this fascinating field has appeared most clearly—namely, the very definite occurrence of trains of rhythmic potential changes as a result of sounds heard by a human subject during sleep. . . .
Loomis, working with Hobart and Harvey, continued to investigate different aspects of these “trains” of waves, also known as Berger rhythms, which appeared in most adults and were regular rhythms with definite frequencies, usually between nine and eleven cycles per second. A few months later, Loomis reported the preliminary results of experiments performed on eleven human subjects ranging in age from five to forty-eight years old. They had identified four clearly defined states of sleep, or “levels of consciousness,” occurring in the human brain, which produced different wave patterns, that they named according to their appearance, “spindles, trains, saw toothed, and random.” (He later amended this finding to include five “levels of consciousness.”) The brain wave patterns during sleep were so characteristic, Loomis reported, they could be used as a criterion to determine the subject’s state or depth of sleep. The waves changed shape when a drowsing subject was roused, spoken to, or became restless. “In animals (dogs, rats) types of waves appeared quite different from any observed in human subjects.” Deep anesthesia stopped the waves in a rat completely, and they did not start up again until the anesthesia began to wear off.
Loomis proceeded to investigate the pattern of brain waves of hypnotized subjects. He had been fascinated by the art and science of hypnotism since he was a boy and had first seen magicians achieve the strange transformation with the swinging action of a pocket watch. He had kept up a lively interest in the subject, and this gave him a chance to gain firsthand experience. For this series of experiments, Loomis recruited David Slight, a doctor from McGill University in Montreal who specialized in hypnosis. Slight brought with him as his “subject” a ship’s carpenter, who was forty-four years old and had been hypnotized many times. He was first tested awake and then asleep and showed characteristically normal trains of waves. Loomis described the surprising results in Science:
After Dr. Slight had induced the hypnotic state, a sustained condition of cataleptic rigidity ensued. Nevertheless, the trains characteristic of a person awake remained at all times during hypnosis and no spindles or random waves (characteristic of normal sleep) appeared during any of the tests.
Although he was thoroughly hypnotized, his brain waves were just like those of a normal waking person. No wave of the kind associated with sleep was elicited. Loomis concluded, “It would seem that the term hypnotic ‘sleep’ is not a correct one for the hypnotic state, at least not measured by this criterion.”
Loomis wanted to see if the hypnotized person was subject to suggestion. He designed an experiment that would prove if it was possible to produce and record temporary blindness induced by hypnotic suggestion. The subject’s eyelids were fastened open with adhesive tape and he was hypnotized, lying rigidly on the bed and staring fixedly. After giving the subject careful instructions, Dr. Slight suggested alternately, “You can see,” and fifteen seconds later, “You cannot see—you are blind.” This procedure was repeated “a large number of times,” according to Loomis, and “in every case trains appeared when the suggestion was made that he was blind, and in every case they ceased when the suggestion was made that he could see. This was true both when there was a light in the room and when the room was in total darkness.” This enabled them to establish that temporary blindness could be produced by hypnotic suggestion.
In a subsequent experiment, Loomis tested for the effects of emotional disturbance, such as embarrassment or apprehension. His youngest son, Henry, who was sixteen years old at the time, proved to be a particularly good subject for hypnotic suggestion. He recalled that for one experiment, he went to the sleeping chamber and immediately dozed off. His father then whispered in his ear, through a tube, that the Lands’ End, the forty-foot sailboat he and his brother Lee had built, “was on fire.” Henry remembered that he “jumped up” and then “started to climb the companionway ladder—but, of course, there was no ladder.” He was still sound asleep, but the very suggestion that his boat was in danger stopped the normal brain rhythms. The experiment showed that while purely mental or intellectual activity had no effect on brain rhythms, emotional disturbance profoundly altered the wave trains. Loomis was so pleased with the result, he used it as an example in his paper on the subject, though Henry is identified in the paper only as the teenage subject H.L.
To relieve the tedium associated with the afternoon and nighttime sleep records, which required hours of monitoring the electric pens as they drew waves on the continuous paper, the experimenters resorted to all kinds of practical jokes and schoolboy pranks. One of the principal mischief makers was Richards, who, according to Hobart, had “a great sense of humor and was always pulling some sort of gag on someone.” Richards used to complain that Loomis’ EEG apparatus was alarmingly similar to the “technique of electrocution” employed at Sing Sing and always claimed he had to have a drink or two to alleviate both the anxiety and the boredom the contraption inspired. The latter was evidenced by at least one of Loomis’ experimental results on the brain waves on an unidentified subject during “an alcoholic stupor.” The subject had “consumed 500cc. of gin (212 cc. pure alcohol) within 30 minutes,” Loomis wrote, and “showed a marked large alpha rhythm with secondary potentials on the regular rhythm quite different from the rhythm which had appeared before the alcohol was taken. At this stage the frequency of the alpha rhythm was very definitely slower . . . the marked alpha rhythm only began to disappear when the subject had been deeply asleep for one half hour.” Loomis concluded, “Alcoholic stupor like hypnosis does not exhibit the characteristic of sleep.”
The local papers gleefully lampooned what they regarded as Loomis’ strangest obsession yet. “Now picture the latest experiments at the laboratory,” reported the New York Evening Journal on March 6, 1936. “Dr. Slight does a Svengali. His subject loses sensation and will power. His muscles become rigid. He’s hypnotized. But his ‘brain electricity,’ tapped again, fails to register the rhythm of sleep. . . .” Thanks to Loomis, it had been proven once and for all that “the hypnotist’s ‘hocus pocus abracadabra’ doesn’t really put a person to sleep.”
While Loomis’ brain wave experiments were made light of in the popular press, his research was being taken very seriously in academic journals. His electroencephalograph was of a novel and highly efficient design, and his results were having a profound influence on the field, which was still in its infancy. Addressing a packed audience at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1937, Loomis revealed that his most recent experiments indicated that the human brain came equipped with an automatic “electric clock.” Loomis described the “time clock” as a “subconscious cyclic process of some sort going on in the brain, which is no doubt the basis of our perception of time intervals.” It was this subconscious rhythm, according to Loomis, that offered the first scientific explanation for an ancient puzzle: the ability of some individuals to wake from a sound sleep at a given hour, which they had fixed in their mind before retiring.
Loomis, along with Harvey and Hobart, made the discovery while studying the electrical brain waves “of a very sleepy yet conscientious person trying to obey instructions.” The subject was told to open his eyes when a tone was sounded in his ear and a light signal was flashed, then to close them again. The signal lasted five seconds and was repeated automatically every thirty seconds. Eventually the subject grew accustomed to the noise and fell asleep. But a flurry of anticipatory waves shot through his brain two and a half seconds before each sounding of the tone. Although asleep, the subject knew the tone was coming, which according to the experimenters was evidence that the human brain came equipped with its own automatic “electric clock.”
At the same time Loomis was doing his pioneering research in Tuxedo Park, Hallowell Davis, a professor at Harvard Medical School, was also conducting experiments with the electroencephalograph. In 1934, Davis had failed to detect the rhythmic electrical output of the brain and had initially discounted Berger’s observation as an artifact. But when two of his students were testing his equipment on him, they observed Davis’ own unmistakable alpha rhythm. Davis was the first to replicate Berger’s findings west of the Atlantic. Only a few months later, Loomis successfully tapped the electrical output of the brain in a second set of experiments at his laboratory. Davis had immediately recognized the clinical potential of the electroencephalograph (EEG) and in collaboration with other researchers soon identified the characteristic wave pattern of petit mal epilepsy. After hearing about their research, Loomis invited Davis and his wife, Pauline, to Tuxedo Park and offered to fund further studies investigating the clinical applications of the EEG.
Between 1937 and 1939, Loomis, working together with the Davises, made major advances in relating EEG “disturbance patterns” to various “levels of consciousness”—from emotional tension and mental activity to relaxation and different stages of sleep. During these experiments, Pauline Davis was the first to observe cortical electrical responses to auditory, visual, and somatosensory stimuli in waking subjects. As Loomis was now devoting himself to scientific work full-time, his name appears as active collaborator in nearly a dozen papers on electroencephalography published by the laboratory in those years, and several of them were of great importance. In the end, Loomis’ experiments succeeded in validating Berger’s discovery, which became the basis of a new branch of study. He played a major role in the development of the electroencephalograph, which went on to become an extremely valuable diagnostic tool and is used routinely in hospitals to detect epilepsy as well as many other diseases.
At the time, it was believed that the electroencephalograph might be applied to psychological analysis, and Loomis invited an array of distinguished psychiatrists and physicians to Tower House to observe their work. His experiments had shown that hypnotism was something that actually made the brain behave differently despite the evidence of the senses, and some doctors held out hope that this new technique of determining brain wave patterns could help “tell you what manner of man you are” and have unique importance in psychoanalysis. (This theory was later discounted when it was reported that “similar patterns were produced by an eminent scientist and an English water beetle.”) The breathless style of the New York American captured the thrill of discovery generated by Loomis’ “newest diagnostic aid”:
More than fifty years ago, Joseph Breuer of Vienna cured a 21-year-old girl, Anne, of a paralysis of the right arm by suggestion made after she was in a hypnotic trance. . . . Later on the famous Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna proved amply how unconscious wishes or desires brought about actual physical maladies. He dispensed with hypnotism altogether, and started his “psychoanalysis” method. Perhaps some day scientists like Loomis and his colleagues, Prof. H. Davis of Harvard and others, will employ their brain potential methods to investigate not only hypnotism but also psychoanalysis. What actually happens to brain activity rhythms under psychoanalysis? What is this mysterious thing called unconscious mentality? How is it released or inhibited? Will the new electrical instruments unlock these tantalizing mysteries?
Similar potential or action currents are recorded from nerves. Thus a most remarkable method is now available to probe into the mysteries of living tissues, especially nervous and brain tissues. Science has a new way of diagnosing brain tumors and other diseases, and eventually perhaps mental diseases will be thus investigated. . . .
Throughout this period, Loomis kept up his active exploration of a wide range of fields. In addition to electroencephalography, he was absorbed in measuring very small increments of time and was still playing around with his perfect clocks. He was also fascinated by the new field of high-energy physics and had even tried building a particle accelerator, known as a “cyclotron.” Loomis would attack, with the same boundless enthusiasm he bestowed on the most important projects at the laboratory, innumerable other problems that caught his fancy, whether they were apparently frivolous or on the very fringes of science. He was interested in practically everything, and if he found a problem, at one time or another he probably pursued it, if only to try his hand at making some sort of headway.
“It was always about the next thing, the adventure,” observed Caryl Haskins, who first visited the laboratory in Tuxedo Park in the late 1930s. “He never had one idea. He always had dozens of ideas. There were a lot of people working on things Alfred was directing and suggesting. I thought he was quite remarkable—a unique figure.”
In 1937, Loomis embarked on one of his more curious extrascientific ventures when he collaborated with the innovative Swiss architect William Lescaze on the design of a state-of-the-art modern house. It would be the perfect marriage of form and function—embodying Loomis’ ideal of a compact, climate-controlled, self-sufficient existence. Lescaze, who had arrived in New York in 1920, had made a name for himself designing forward-looking buildings that were influenced by the leading modern European architects, including Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and J. J. P. Oud. He was most famous for the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society Building he designed with George Howe in 1932. The sleek, monolithic thirty-three-story tower, which housed one of the oldest and most conservative banks in the country, created a huge controversy, with critics divided as to whether it was an eyesore or heralded a brilliant new era of architecture.
Either way, the result was arresting, and by the mid-1930s, Lescaze had emerged as the leader of the new international style. A sunny stucco box with a steel frame he designed in a wooded enclave in New Hartford, Connecticut, had caused a sensation, particularly since his client, a young Vanderbilt heir named Frederick Vanderbilt Field, had demanded that the house represent a complete break from the dark, ornamental mansions of his childhood. Lescaze’s structure was hailed as a modern classic, and architecture magazines of the day devoted pages to it. In 1934, Lescaze designed a Manhattan town house and office for himself and his family and was the first to incorporate sheer glass block walls and a built-in air-conditioning system in American residential architecture. The stark white house with its horizontal strip windows stood out from the dowdy row of brownstones like a bright beacon of the future, and with its spare interior design and custom furniture and cabinetry, it was as brilliantly functional inside as the cockpit of a plane.
At the time, Hobart, who needed a larger residence for his growing family, hired Lescaze to build a modernist stucco house in Tuxedo Park. During the architect’s frequent trips to the area, he struck up a friendship with Loomis, and the two men found they had much in common. Lescaze, like Loomis, was a fierce perfectionist and was always redesigning common objects—everything from burglar alarms to pool tables—when he found their original form unsatisfactory or, as was more often the case, unsightly. Rather than let it spoil his plans, he redesigned the offending object. Once, when drawing up plans for a new school, he included a sketch of a “dustless blackboard eraser.” Inevitably, the designs he worked out were simpler and more practical. Enthralled by their discussions of industrial design and new advances in technology, Loomis decided to collaborate with Lescaze on the design of a futuristic glass-and-steel house behind the laboratory. According to Lescaze’s notes, the fundamental scheme of the house was dictated by Loomis’ desire “to experiment with a novel system of heating and air-conditioning” and to be able to conduct these tests over a longer period than laboratory research allowed and “in ordinary living conditions.”
The Glass House was to be the antithesis of the medieval Tower House, with its gloomy wood-paneled rooms, cathedral ceilings, and old-fashioned leaded windows. In typical Lescaze style, almost all of the structural components were made by machine, including the steel framing, cork flooring, and metal skylights. The single-story building’s central section opened onto a large living room and conservatory, and from it sprouted a wing with two bedrooms and baths, and a second wing that consisted of a kitchen, utility rooms, air-conditioning room, terrace, and garage. Although the plan included two maids rooms, the Glass House was designed for a “servantless existence” and boasted the ultimate in modern conveniences, some of which Loomis designed himself. “It had built-in tubes for vacuuming, and the first dishwasher I think I had ever seen,” recalled Evans. “I don’t think Alfred ever wanted to see another one of his wife’s meddling housemaids.”
The most remarkable, and probably unique, feature of the structure was its double exterior walls and roof, so that in effect it consisted of one house built entirely within the shell of another house. The space between the double walls was approximately two feet, creating a corridor of air, or “shell space,” that could be heated independently of the inner house. Since much of the house featured large glass panel windows and walls, the temperature of the shell space, if no heat was added, would be only slightly less than halfway between the outdoors and indoors. The object of this construction, according to Lescaze, was so Loomis could maintain a high temperature and humidity within the inner house without creating condensation on the glass. Loomis apparently wanted to try to re-create the balmy conditions of his home in Hilton Head, and according to Lescaze, one of the purposes of the experiment was “to investigate the effect of living in such an atmosphere during the winter season.”
The Glass House was equipped with a special air-conditioning system, including an all-year unit for the inner house and a separate heating unit for the surrounding shell space. The complex duct system, which allowed return air and fresh air to be mixed and thermostatically controlled, and the oil-burning water heater and water cooler were worked out by Loomis and Lescaze and Leslie Hart, a consulting engineer. Owing to the “house within a house” construction, and heavy insulation used to deaden the sound of the mechanical equipment, the interior rooms were virtually soundproof. The worst Tuxedo rainstorms were barely audible within the building. Loomis boasted that the Glass House cost “only $125 a year to heat,” a fraction of the sum he squandered annually to keep the drafty Tower House at a habitable temperature.
In his novel, Richards lampooned Lescaze’s creation, which Loomis spent $125,000 to build, and another $25,000 to furnish, as a trumped-up “garden hot house.” Apparently both architect and scientist forgot to allow for the fact that the miracle of modern air-conditioning could break down—as it often did during the summer months—turning the structure into a veritable oven. Because the double glass windows could not be opened, it took the rooms “days to cool off.”
NOT long after the construction was completed in 1938, Loomis fell hopelessly in love with Hobart’s twenty-nine-year-old wife, Manette. The Glass House, originally intended as guest quarters for visiting scientists, became their secret hideaway. Over time, it became Loomis’ home away from home. Ironically, the house with translucent walls proved ideal for private rendezvous. Tucked away behind the laboratory on a secluded bluff overlooking Tuxedo Lake, and shielded on the other side by tall pines, it was protected from the prying eyes of neighbors. More than one of the lab’s eminent guests was known to bring a mistress there for a “naughty weekend,” according to Kistiakowsky’s second wife, Elaine. “It became quite the place for wild parties, and it was not uncommon for people to bring out their girlfriends and have quite a good time without their wives being any the wiser for it. They were all young, and quite good-looking, and they worked hard and played hard. And I gather they drank like fish.”
Apart from visitors, Loomis allowed only trusted members of his laboratory staff access to the house and instructed his own wife that it was off limits both to her and to her legions of servants. “He left strict orders that no one was ever to go in there to tidy up, supposedly because of all the special equipment that was lying about,” said Evans. “I don’t know if Ellen knew what was going on or not, but she always hated that house.”
Loomis went to great lengths to ensure he and Manette were not discovered, even developing a signaling system that he used to communicate with her from the windows of their respective homes. The Hobarts lived on the opposite side of Tuxedo Lake, and Lescaze had situated the house perfectly on the cliff so that its windows faced the water and offered a fine vista of the mansions on the other side, including the Tower House, rising from the top of the highest hill in the park. Loomis taught Manette how to manipulate a small mirror to catch the light and worked out a series of simple signals they used to alert each other at the appointed hour that the coast was clear. No matter how many times she heard the story, Loomis’ granddaughter Jacqueline Quillen was always struck by the image of the two lovers secretly flashing messages to each other across the lake. “It was a very passionate love affair,” she said, adding, “and despite all the trouble it caused, it remained that way to the end.”
Manette was the daughter of R. W. (Billy) Seeldrayers, a prominent Belgian lawyer and sports promoter, who became head of the Belgian Olympic Committee. She grew up in a world of jocular athletes and, by her own account, learned at an early age “to enjoy male company far more than women’s.” Her father pushed her to excel at a wide variety of sports, and she received instruction in everything from tennis, golf, and field hockey to soccer and even a little cricket. She became an accomplished tennis player and figure skater and briefly competed at the amateur level before giving it up to study music and art. Her family had lost most of their savings during the First World War, and her mother, ambitious for her only child to make a good marriage, tried to introduce her to “better society.”
Manette met Katherine Grey Hobart in Brussels while the latter was on a European jaunt, and when the granddaughter of a distinguished American vice president invited her to return home with her, Manette’s mother packed her bags. The Hobarts were exceedingly wealthy and divided their time between Carroll Hall, their elegant city residence in Paterson, New Jersey, and Ailsa Farms, the family’s 250-acre country estate in Haledon. The Hobarts employed an army of servants, and the household staff alone included a cook, a kitchen maid, a parlor maid, a houseman, a butler, a laundress, an assistant laundress, two chauffeurs, and several chambermaids. They hosted “fancy dress” parties year-round at their stately forty-room mansion, and their table sparkled with Venetian glass and precious Fabergé Russian enamelware that had been designed for the czar. For twenty-two-year-old Manette, who had grown up in war-deprived Belgium and could still bitterly recall having a winter coat cut from the green felt cover of a billiard table, it must have seemed positively idyllic. In the space of a year, her betrothal to the Hobart’s only son and heir was duly accomplished. They were married in Brussels in 1931 and divided their time between Ailsa Farms and Schenectady, before settling permanently in Tuxedo Park.
Never were two people more ill suited than the taciturn Hobart and his bright, athletic, puckish young bride. Garret Hobart was “pathologically shy,” according to family members, and led a quiet, almost cloistered existence. He was quite content in his own little world, and the couple never entertained and had virtually no life outside the laboratory. While his neighbors considered him a bit queer but harmless, they steered clear of his “foreign” wife. Tuxedo Park was very provincial in those days, and anyone with an accent was seen as suspect. Manette’s English was less than perfect, and she retained a thick Belgian accent that lent her a decidedly exotic air that the wives in the young smart set found most offputting. As a result, she had few friends and spent much of her time on her own. A talented artist, she spent her days working on her painting and sculptures, but it could not have been easy. “It was all very new to her, and she didn’t really know a soul or how to get on,” said Paulie Loomis. “I think the early years of her marriage must have been very lonely.”
As her husband had no interest in sports, Manette took to playing tennis and golf with the young research scientists at Tower House, and more than a few became quite smitten with her, including Bill Richards. Very petite and slender, she had a superb figure that she displayed to full advantage. Although she was only passingly pretty, her emphatic sexuality made her captivating to the opposite sex. “Oh, she had a real way about her,” recalled Evans, speaking with the authority of a southern belle who turned plenty of heads in her day. “She had wonderful legs, and always showed them off in little tennis skirts and golf shorts. She knew what she was doing. She was a real flirt.”
Manette had a talent for making men fall in love with her, as her marriage to the unlikely Hobart attested, and she was not above using her sexuality to attract the fifty-year-old Loomis. “She absolutely seduced him,” said Quillen. “I think it was about great sex, which would have been a scarce commodity in his first marriage. I think for Alfred it was an incredible, all-encompassing discovery. She gave him such enormous pleasure, and he absolutely adored her.”
It is impossible to say exactly when the affair began. Both Manette and her husband were an integral part of the Loomis household and remained that way long after their relationship began. After Alfred made Garret Hobart his assistant, Ellen Loomis had taken his young wife under her wing and regarded her almost as a daughter. The two men worked together by day, dined together with their wives on a regular basis, and frequently took their families on holiday together. The Hobarts’ first child, Garret Augustus Hobart IV, was born in 1935, followed by another boy, who was born in August 1937. Manette named her second son Alfred Loomis Hobart, after his beloved godfather.
According to Paulie Loomis, both Alfred and Manette were deeply unhappy for years before they became involved. “I know she was mad about him for a long time,” she said. “Alfred was a wonderful-looking man, and very courtly and gentle. He could be hard to talk to unless he liked you. But once you got to know him, he was fascinating. He could explain the most complicated things and make them simple and understandable. He could unlock the secrets of the world, and it was magical. Manette was nobody’s fool. Here she was married to poor Hobart, who was really an odd duck, and quite pathetic. She knew Alfred had no one, because his wife had taken to her sickbed long before that. And she knew he was the kind of man who just had to be with somebody. So she became his mistress, and she stayed married to Hobart. That was the cover-up, and I think it went on that way for a long time.”
There is a striking black-and-white photograph of Manette and Loomis in a canoe that was taken in the summer of 1938 or 1939. She is happily reclining in the middle of the boat behind Loomis, who is paddling. The photo has been crudely cropped with scissors, cutting out the other oarsman, but in all likelihood it was Garret Hobart. The picture was taken at the Hobart family compound in Rangeley, Maine, the last time they were all on holiday together. “I am only guessing, but I don’t think, at the time, my dad had a clue what was going on,” said Al Hobart. Ellen Loomis’ letters during this period reveal that she was lately “so hampered by illness” that she was not able to get out much or see friends, and it is possible she was unaware of the romance or simply chose to turn a blind eye to it. However, her condition became quite perilous again the following winter, which may have been her way of coping with the competition. As she wrote to Stimson in February 1939: “All my fever seems over now, and I know Alfred has given you the news. There is no cause for worry about me, as you always understood. . . .”
Garret Hobart never talked about the affair between his wife and revered mentor that eventually broke up his marriage. Only once, many years later, in a moment of frustration, did he betray a hint of the anger or bitterness he must have felt. “We were in Maine, and we were getting ready to go fishing, when he said, out of the blue, ‘Alfred Loomis broke the tip off my fly rod,’ ” recalled Al Hobart, who was seven years old when his mother finally left his father to run off with Loomis in 1944. “That was it. Just that one outburst. But I caught the whiff then of a fairly strong resentment.”
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 highly 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 considerable 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.
Loomis, operating in a manner that Compton described as “typical of him,” spent the next few months quickly mastering the new subject and “worked with his little permanent staff at Tuxedo on the fundamentals of microwave until he felt capable of inviting collaboration.” Late that summer, Bowles and a group of MIT physicists arrived at the Tower House and began an in-depth study of the propagation of radio waves. The main feature would be a study of ultrahigh-frequency propagation, to be conducted by J. A. Stratton and Donald Kerr, veterans of MIT’s blind-landing research program, “to determine the practical range that we can expect to obtain with 50 cm waves, which we now have facilities to generate.” As they progressed, they would apply their techniques to shorter and shorter wavelengths.
Bowles was not at all keen on the idea of working for the retired Wall Street banker, with his perfectly pressed white suits and “ideal living and laboratory quarters.” The “Tuxedo Park situation,” as he called it, was more “complex” than he had first reckoned, and he privately suspected the financier had invited them only because it put a small company of MIT scientists, himself included, at Loomis’ disposal, “pretty much to follow his bidding.” Much to his dismay, “Loomis himself was a gadgeteer and pretty much called the shots.” But Bowles was too ambitious to rock the boat and tried his best to humor his new boss. “It was simply that I knew he was a close friend of Karl Compton’s, and, no doubt, this summer’s activities had his benediction. What I got out of it was some knowledge of Loomis, his technical interests, and his manner of operation, [of] which I was later to learn much more.”
Loomis, on the other hand, could not have been happier. Pleased to be of service, and thrilled by the challenge of perfecting this critical new technology, he dropped all of his other experiments to concentrate on the microwave project. In the process, he drastically rewrote the charter of the Tower House. Once a bastion of pure science, Loomis’ laboratory, tucked away in the lush hills of Tuxedo Park, was on its way to becoming a private research center devoted to the development of secret war-related technology—the radar systems used to detect airplanes.