Locusts hummed metallically in the distance, and the horizon wavered under a cloudless sky. Externally, the Laboratory was an idyll of summer peace.
—WR, from Brain Waves and Death
BY early 1940, Loomis was so caught up in his work with Lawrence that he had decided to purchase a home in California and accept a position as a research scientist at the Rad Lab. The experience of working at the Berkeley lab was intoxicating for Loomis. The sixty-inch cyclotron, after numerous delays, was finally up and running, and it was a marvelous sight. With its big, powerful magnet, it promised to be productive of exciting discoveries in nuclear physics, and Loomis could not resist the chance to be a part of it all.
He had also decided that his next big project would be to back the new research being done by Enrico Fermi, the brilliant young professor of physics at Columbia who had won the Nobel in 1938—a year before Lawrence—for his discovery of new radioactive elements and his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons. Fermi happened to be in Berkeley from January 30 to February 20 as a visiting lecturer, and Loomis, who had known the Italian refugee physicist for several years, was quite taken with him. Fermi was enormously talented, with a lively and highly systematic mind, and he was open and generous like Lawrence. By his own account, he had taken up “the uranium split business with which half the world seems to be occupied . . . as soon as the cyclotron gave a beam.”
Loomis was determined to help advance Fermi’s work and arrange funding for him to build a nuclear chain reactor. Fermi’s proposal was still on the drawing boards, but Loomis, who was always quick to seize on the next new thing, offered to help underwrite the cost of any experiments that might determine how fission could be exploited for atomic energy. If the explosive power of fission could be realized, it would give mankind command of an almost limitless supply of energy. With characteristic confidence and enthusiasm, Loomis plunged ahead into nuclear physics. A scientific race had begun, one with incalculably high stakes, and he was prepared to devote all his efforts and resources to developing the new field as fast as possible.
For Loomis, the discovery of fission by German physicists in the beginning of 1939, in light of the events in Europe, was both exhilarating and profoundly disturbing. The discovery was of great importance to science, yet such an enormous release of energy, if harnessed and controlled, would be a terrible weapon in the hands of Hitler. He had first heard the momentous news from Niels Bohr, upon the Danish physicist’s arrival in the United States on January 16, 1939. Fermi had been at the pier to meet the SS Drottningholm to welcome Bohr, whom he and Loomis had recently visited in Copenhagen, and had promptly driven him to Tuxedo Park, where they both stayed for several days before going on to Washington for the Fifth Conference on Theoretical Physics. Bohr had barely set foot on American soil before announcing that the fission of uranium had been demonstrated by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin.
While he was in Tuxedo Park, Bohr had received a cable from the radiochemist Lise Meitner, a close associate of Hahn’s, that she and her nephew Otto Frisch had confirmed the fission process in their own experiments in Sweden and that they had good reason to believe that when the uranium isotope 235 was bombarded with neutrons, it split into two lighter elements with a loss in mass and an enormous release of energy. “He got a cablegram from Meitner, and they thought it was 235 that was doing the splitting and that energy was coming out of it,” recalled Loomis. “And then a week later he delivered the lecture before the National Academy, and practically before the sun was set it was confirmed in three labs in America.”
The news that the experiments had been verified in American laboratories generated so much excitement that Bohr and Loomis had been able to talk of little else. Hans Christian Sonne, a Danish banker living in Tuxedo Park who had gone to boarding school with Bohr’s brother and was a friend of the family, recalled that one evening after drinks at his house, Bohr and Loomis sat around discussing what the new development might mean for physics. “My father was a businessman, so he did not understand the scientific details,” said his son, Christian Sonne, a real estate executive in Tuxedo Park, “except that it might make it possible to produce enough power to make a mighty big bomb.”
Bohr’s news had spread quickly, and when Leo Szilard heard about uranium fission a few days later from his friend Eugene Wigner, a physicist at Princeton, he was stunned. It was what he had been working toward for years. “When I heard,” he recalled, “I saw immediately that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted in this fission process, then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.” Szilard had immediately understood the implications of such a discovery. Europe was on the brink of another world war, and fission—which might be used to create “violent explosions”—had to be kept from the Germans. His first thought had been to contact Fermi and those physicists in Europe who were most likely to intuit this possibility and begin to organize self-imposed censorship on all nuclear research.
But once Bohr and Fermi spoke publicly about uranium fission in Washington, the cat was out of the bag. At the conference, Fermi, who had himself nearly discovered fission several years earlier, theorized that when a neutron knocked uranium apart, more neutrons might be emitted. He suggested there might be the possibility of a chain reaction—the release of atomic energy—and a bomb. In the days that followed, physicists everywhere rushed to their laboratories to test the process of uranium fission, and within forty-eight hours the key experiments had been replicated in several laboratories, including the Rad Lab, the Carnegie Institution, and Johns Hopkins. Bohr’s information was published in the Physical Review, which later reported verification by Fermi at Columbia. Following a demonstration of uranium being bombarded with neurons at the Carnegie Institution on January 28, the Washington Evening Star carried a front-page story with the banner headline “Power of New Atomic Blast Greatest Achieved on Earth.”
Throughout that spring, Bohr and Fermi continued to appear together at various scientific meetings, and their increasingly candid views on uranium fission, and its potential military use, were the talk of scientific and political circles. In mid-April, Bohr again stayed at Tuxedo Park for the weekend, where, as Loomis wrote Vannevar Bush, “he gave us a very interesting talk” on chain reactions with uranium and other heavy elements. After the American Physical Society’s spring meeting on April 29, The New York Times wrote that the conferees argued “the probability of some scientist blowing up a sizeable portion of the earth with a tiny bit of uranium.” Over the course of that summer, the intense activity and concern in the world of physics prompted the Einstein letter to Roosevelt warning him of the seriousness of atomic weapons. The whole matter came to a head in the fall of 1939 with the formation of a uranium committee, under the chairmanship of Lyman Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards. The Briggs Advisory Committee on Uranium was to be a panel made up of physicists and representatives of the army and navy and would coordinate secret research on a fission explosive. If a bomb was possible, and it unleashed enormous power, it would render the totalitarian war machines of Hitler and Mussolini unstoppable. It was essential that America’s scientists and military organizations stay ahead on nuclear research should it ever prove feasible to build such a device. “Shortly after that,” recalled Loomis, “the thing went underground.”
As Europe slipped deeper into the war, the uranium panel twiddled its thumbs. It was so mired in bureaucracy that by the spring of 1940, it had managed to approve only the $6,000 in research funds earmarked for Fermi and Szilard, so they could purchase uranium and graphite for their fission experiments. A number of leading scientists were increasingly alarmed by the government’s inaction, and chief among them was Vannevar Bush. During the weekend get-together in Del Monte, they had discussed the various possibilities for destruction inherent in fission. At the time, Bush had relayed the expressed concern of British researchers that a fission bomb could be developed. If the Nazis were to succeed first, they would control the world. There was general agreement that there ought to be a preparedness policy. Bush let it be known informally that he was working on a plan. He believed it was vital to find a way to organize the best brains and experts in the country to assist in the accelerated war effort and to help adapt the armed forces to the needs of a highly technical contest.
WHEN Loomis returned east in April 1940 to help Lawrence navigate Wall Street, he was more determined than ever to dedicate his private resources to scientific problems that might have value for defense purposes. Convinced that the United States would inevitably be drawn into the war, he was juggling several disparate projects related to mobilization and believed that priority should be given to things that could yield results in a matter of months or, at most, a year or two. Impatient with the MIT group’s slow progress, he decided that the Loomis Laboratories would no longer muck about with a preliminary long-range exploration of propagation problems. Instead, it would focus on one pressing problem and work to find a practical and efficient solution.
While he was in San Carlos, Loomis had observed some early detection experiments done with a makeshift system that had actually been designed for blind landing tests. Even so, in the course of several tests with the ten-centimeter klystron and a ten-centimeter “Barrow horn” (a galvanized iron hollow cylinder used for transmitting ultrahigh frequencies, named after MIT’s William Barrow), they had actually been able to pick up automobiles and trains a quarter of a mile away, using only a crystal detector with an audio amplifier. Loomis had also observed some of the experiments Hansen and the Varian brothers were performing with one of the first continuous wave Doppler radar sets. Impressed with what he had seen, Loomis proposed to develop a similar airplane locator based on the principle of the Doppler effect. He had brought back several ten-centimeter klystron tubes from California, and he had even convinced Hansen to come back with him to help assemble the setup in Tuxedo Park.
Loomis went up to MIT to arrange for several members of Bowles’ team to be loaned to his laboratory for the summer. At the same time, he wrote Compton another check to help keep the university’s ultra-high-frequency program going. By the end of April, he had assembled a group consisting of Hansen and two young MIT graduate students, Donald Kerr and Frank Lewis, and together they made the drive from Cambridge to Tuxedo Park. There they were joined by MIT’s William Tuller and William Ratliff, now with the Sperry Co. At first, Lewis did not know what to make of Loomis and his lavishly equipped laboratory, and in telling the story later, he joked about his utter astonishment at the exclusive surroundings he suddenly found himself in: “Now this Tuxedo Park is a private enclave where people go who don’t want to be bothered with other people just driving in and saying ‘hello.’ They have a fence around it and they had a gatehouse where you go in and check yourself through. Everybody who was run in and out of there was thoroughly understood by the people that opened the gate. So if they didn’t know you, you didn’t get in.”
As they settled down to work, Lewis began to do “a little inquiring” about the mysterious millionaire who was bankrolling their operation. An enormous amount of equipment was needed, and Loomis “footed the bill generously,” as well as paying the salaries of himself and the other newcomers who were not covered by the original grant. They were joined by several of Loomis’ longtime associates: Garret Hobart; Charles Butt, who was E. Newton Harvey’s research assistant at Princeton and a regular during the summers; Philip Miller, the lab’s manager, machinist, and jack-of-all-trades; and Loomis’ youngest son, Henry, who was in his third year at Harvard but had enlisted in the navy and was due to ship out in six weeks. There was also an impressive stream of visitors, including R. W. Wood, who filled Lewis in on Loomis’ background, how he had made his money, and his close ties to Henry Stimson. As the weeks went by, Lewis came to have a grudging respect for what his wealthy host was trying to accomplish on his own dime:
“Loomis was anxious to have people there who knew about microwaves because he had a feeling microwaves were going to be important,” explained Lewis. “He was a person who loved to be with the leaders of any one particular enterprise. As such he was called a dilettante by people who thought that was a good name for him. So you had to work for him and talk to him a bit and then you found out there wasn’t anything phony about him at all. He was a first-class scientific person, and he had a lot of money. With those two things he could do a lot of things.”
Aggressive and enthusiastic, Loomis insisted on getting started right away. His time on the East Coast was short, and he had to be back in Berkeley before too long. In any case, he was a hands-on experimenter and believed they stood a much better chance of accumulating useful data if they had a system in operation. It was the way he and Wood had always worked, and it was the way he intended to proceed now. They would just have to make improvements on the fly and incorporate new equipment as it became available. Bush, who had kept a close eye on Loomis’ project at Tuxedo Park, felt the work was promising enough that he had told Ed Bowles, the MIT radar expert who had been collaborating with Loomis on microwave research, if he “needed further support, to let me know.” Bowles did, and Bush directed the Carnegie Institution to allot the sum of $10,000 for Loomis’ microwave detection project at Tuxedo Park.
In the beginning of May, Loomis received a letter from Cooksey telling him that Lawrence was down with a “terrible infection” and updating him on the contracts for the 184-inch cyclotron. Cooksey included a bulletin about a possible breakthrough in radar technology: “Professor Marshall of the Electrical Engineering Department, who, you will remember, is working with Dave Sloan on the micro-wave tube, just back of the partition of my office, told me Friday of some of their successes. . . .” They had tested a tube that oscillated at 50 centimeters and at 2,500 watts and were now in the process of running more checks. It looked as though a piece of cyclotron technology had been transformed into a generator of radio waves at a frequency and power suitable to radar. Loomis was elated by the news. It meant that radar sets could be smaller, while the detail of what they could see increased. The Sloan-Marshall tube, or “resnatron,” could well become the basis of a new generation of powerful, airborne microwave transmitters.
At the end of the letter, Cooksey added that the physicist Emilio Segrè, who was attached to the Rad Lab, had returned from New York and “tells us there is a great deal of hush hush around Columbia in regard to the work that is proceeding on uranium isotope separation and uranium bombs. Apparently the army and perhaps the navy are interested. I have no words with which to express my feelings about the conditions in Europe. I merely know that it is what we must expect. . . .”
Loomis responded with a long letter outlining the status of his various negotiations for the tons of steel laminates for Lawrence’s cyclotron. He confirmed that “U-235” had indeed become “very hot” and that Bush was organizing a conference in Washington the following week for all the scientists who were working on it. As for his microwave work, he wrote, “This whole problem has speeded up enormously because of its immediate war demand” and promised more details later. In a subsequent letter to Lawrence, Loomis wrote that he was working on the Sperry people to provide financing for Sloan’s research. “If the tube is as promising as it seems to be, there ought to be no delay in pushing it.” The Sperry company was building a large factory in Hartford and had bought a private airfield and might be using his Tuxedo facilities as well. He had put Bowles “in charge” of the laboratory. He added that while he hoped to return to California with Lawrence after his planned visit to Tuxedo in late June, “I don’t know how long I will be able to stay out there this summer, if this micro-wave work gets very intense.” It was the first hint Loomis had given Lawrence that he might no longer be able to continue carrying on his share of the responsibility for getting the big cyclotron built. Putting his duty to his country first, Loomis had put his plans for a new life out west on hold.
During this same period, Loomis had a visit from his old friend George Kistiakowsky, who wanted to pass along some troubling information that had come his way. Kistiakowsky had heard that the Germans were carrying out extensive uranium research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and feared that with their advanced laboratories and aggressive approach, they might be the first to develop a fission bomb. Kistiakowsky was well aware of Loomis’ reach into the highest levels of science and government and felt sure he would see to it that the facts were communicated to the right people. Loomis decided every attempt should be made to discover the status of the Germans’ uranium experiments, and he enlisted Kistiakowsky to use his network of émigré scientists and European colleagues to gather information and offered to pay for his time and expenses. He then arranged a meeting with Compton and told him what he had learned from Kistiakowsky. On May 9, Compton wrote Bush a confidential letter apprising him of his conversation with Loomis:
As far back as the first suggestion that uranium fission might have a very significant industrial or particularly military significance, he [Loomis] has been very close to groups involved in his work. . . . It is now clear that the German scientists are concentrating major efforts on this problem at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute. It also appears clear that uranium 235 could be a tremendously powerful war weapon if it could be secured in substantial quantity and a fair degree of purity. Alfred makes the pertinent suggestion that we really ought to get together some of the most competent men in the field to analyze the possibilities in the situation and be ready to proceed actively if a promising program develops. . . . George Kistiakowsky is intensely interested in the subject (as a weapon which must not be allowed to develop first in Nazi hands) and he is also making an independent study and will report to Alfred Loomis. . . .
Bush promptly wrote to Loomis in Tuxedo Park on May 13:
The matter of uranium fission is exceedingly active. I rather think that the [Carnegie] Institution should take the lead in furthering and correlating this whole matter. Dr. Jewett and I are to see the Army and Navy today on the subject. If we proceed actively we will of course have to use some of our [MIT] Corporation grant, and this matter will probably come up, therefore, at the meeting of the Executive Committee which follows the Finance Committee meeting on the twenty-third. If it is going to be possible for you to be about, I would suggest to Governor Forbes that you be invited into the Executive Committee meeting when the matter is considered. I will be able to give you further information on this particular subject before very long. . . .
On May 17, Bush sent Loomis a quick note informing him that the governor had authorized him to attend the executive committee meeting, “inasmuch as you are so well informed on the subject.”
Loomis, as always, kept Lawrence abreast of the latest news on the uranium front and the behind-the-scenes effort to organize a campaign to move public opinion in favor of taking advantage of modern scientific developments for military purposes. As Lawrence wrote Loomis on May 20, “I gather from your letter that something along this line may be imminent. We in this country certainly do not want to miss any bets in this direction. Incidentally, Mr. Rockefeller would not like to hear this, but we certainly will not be unmindful of the possibilities of discoveries of military value in the energy range above 100 million volts. I am betting that we will find all kinds of fission reactions in many of the heavy elements.”
Three days later, Bush convinced the Carnegie Institution’s executive committee to give him $20,000 “for a defense research project concerning uranium fission.” Even though he shared the prevailing opinion that an atomic explosion was “remote from a practical standpoint,” he agreed that they should push ahead on exploring the possibilities: “I wish that the physicist who fished uranium in the first place had waited a few years before he sprung this particular thing on an unstable world. However, we have the matter in our laps and we have to do the best we can.”
As far as Bush was concerned, the Carnegie money was only a drop in the bucket. He believed it was vital that science and technology were broadly mobilized for the war, which would provide him with a way to address what he saw as by far the most pressing military problem—the need to rapidly improve the country’s air defenses. He was convinced that airpower was the backbone of military strength. America, which had been isolationist since the First World War, was vulnerable only to transatlantic attack. Radar held the key to revolutionizing warfare by providing a better means to track the enemy and accurately destroy targets. But to date, the army had ignored radar’s potential for defensive action and could not be interested in sponsoring any research. The navy had developed its own detection devices but was woefully short of funds to do further research. As Bush had complained to former president Hoover in a letter a year earlier: “The whole world situation would be much altered if there was an effective defense against bombing by aircraft. There are promising devices, not now being developed to my knowledge, which warrant intense effort. This would be true even if the promise of success were small, and I believe it is certainly not negligible. . . .”
The “intense effort” Bush had in mind would require unprecedented cooperation among three distrustful—at times even hostile—communities: military, science, and industry. It would also require an enormous amount of money. But Bush believed with the right leaders working together, he could create a new military research organization that could exploit the technical advances that were indispensable to modern warfare. “I was located in Washington, I knew government, and I knew the ropes,” he would say later. “And I could see that the United States was asleep on the technical end.” As head of the Carnegie Institution, he was held in high regard by the scientific establishment, and he knew he could count on the backing of four men who figured prominently in its ruling echelon: Compton, Conant, Jewett, and Loomis. Compton and Conant headed major universities; and Jewett was president of the National Academy of Sciences and Bell Labs, easily the most respected industry research center. Loomis was a well-connected banker, but in Bush’s view he had gained acceptance into that brotherhood by virtue of his “real contribution to scientific knowledge.” What drew these men together, he explained, was “one thing we deeply shared—worry.”
On June 12, as the German blitzkrieg attacked the French countryside, Bush went to see Roosevelt to make his case for the creation of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). They were joined in the Oval Office by Harry Hopkins, the president’s closest aide. Bush presented Roosevelt with a single sheet of paper clearly spelling out his plan for mobilizing the scientific community for war. The document, containing a brief four-paragraph outline of his proposed agency, stipulated that the NDRC would be made up of members from “War, Navy, Commerce, National Academy of Sciences, plus several distinguished scientists and engineers, all to serve without remuneration.” Its function would be “to correlate and support scientific research on mechanisms and devices of war.” The NDRC would work in close liaison with the military, but independent of its control.
After months of feeling that his hands were tied by a campaign promise to protect American boys and adhere to the isolationist policy, Roosevelt jumped at the opportunity to take constructive action on another front. He had already had to decline countless requests from Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, and France’s beleaguered premier, Paul Reynaud, calling for America to intervene in the war. If America would not come to their aid, it could at least supply them with arms. What was needed in the present emergency was a massive weapons production program, one that could be up and running in record time. Bush agreed to head up the program and was promised a direct line to the Oval Office and as much money as he needed from the president’s special fund. It took only ten minutes for Roosevelt to approve Bush’s audacious plan, scrawling, “O.K.—FDR,” across the memo.
On June 14, German tanks rolled into an undefended Paris. One week later, France surrendered and was forced to suffer the humiliation of signing the agreement in the same railway coach in which the Germans had signed the armistice of November 1918. The photograph of a triumphant Hitler posing in front of the military convoy was on the front pages of all the newspapers. England braced for a bloody summer. “The Battle of France is over,” Churchill told the House of Commons. “I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin.” Stimson, who was now seventy-two and had spent the past year enmeshed in a difficult and exhausting legal case, could no longer stay silent. On the night of June 17, he gave a radio address laying out seven steps that should be taken immediately in the national defense, beginning with the repeal of the “ill-starred so-called neutrality act.” He also called for the opening of U.S. ports to British and French vessels for repair; the accelerated supply by every means in our power—if necessary, by navy convoy—of war matériel to England and France; and the immediate adoption of compulsory military service. The following day, he received a call from President Roosevelt asking him to become secretary of war.
Upon hearing that Stimson was entering the cabinet, Lawrence immediately wrote Loomis: “I know if I were Colonel Stimson I would certainly be depending on you for all sorts of advice,” he predicted. “In fact, I would create a new job, Under-Secretary of War for Technical Matters, and draft you for the job.”
IF anyone could mold a group of civilian scientists and skeptical military leaders into an all-out American defense organization, Loomis believed it was Bush. He was, by nature, an inventor, a fixer of problems and machines. “I’m no scientist, I’m an engineer,” Bush would often say of himself, and the assertion reflected his impatient, hard-nosed Yankee demeanor. He had a long-standing interest in the applications of science to war that dated back to his days doing antisubmarine research in World War I. Throughout his career, first at MIT and then at Carnegie, he had straddled the worlds of basic and applied research and brokered deals between university and industry laboratories. Every bit as autocratic as Loomis himself, he was not afraid to break the rules or bend institutions to his will. There was a strong personal and professional bond between the two men and a mutual admiration for their ability to get things done. “Of the men whose death in the summer of 1940 would have been the greatest calamity for America,” Loomis would observe a few years later, “the president is first, and Dr. Bush would be second or third.”
Bush, in turn, held Loomis in extremely high regard. He knew of his reputation as a financial genius and knew firsthand of his keen scientific mind. According to Caryl Haskins, who worked for Bush in Washington during the war, the two men had an extremely warm and easy relationship, and when they conducted business it sounded “just like two friends having a conversation.” For two such charismatic, larger-than-life men, they could both be very subtle. They thought along such similar lines at times that they almost finished each other’s sentences, and along with a bone-dry sense of humor, they shared a love of tobacco. Loomis was always lighting up cigarette after cigarette from the pack of Lucky Strikes he always carried on him, and Bush was rarely without his pipe. “Alfred was the same-caliber man as Bush, and they recognized it in each other,” recalled Haskins. “It was simply a great personal relationship. Alfred was more talented than most people, and he had a gift for talented people. Bush respected him, and knew his abilities well enough to ask him to come to Washington to help. And he did come.”
Bush decided to divide the NDRC into five divisions, each to be headed by a member of the main committee. Each division would then be composed of several sections, which would serve as the true operating units of the organization. The section chairmen were therefore key and had to be chosen with great care. They would be respected civilian scientists and required to work at demanding full-time jobs on a voluntary basis. Bush wasted no time drafting his friends, appointing Conant as his deputy and tapping Jewett, Compton, and Loomis for top positions. He also called up Richard Tolman, the respected theorist of physical chemistry, who was head of the California Institute of Technology, and Conway Coe, the commissioner of patents. Together, they would serve as the top scientific generals in the coming war. It would fall to them not only to recruit scores of individual scientists, but also to write hundreds of research contracts with universities, industrial laboratories, and research centers. Each would have the power to vastly enrich his own institutions and friends, which under different circumstances would have given rise to all kinds of questions about conflicts of interest. But the crisis demanded that everyone act decisively and judiciously, and Bush trusted his team to rise to the challenge. No one was more vulnerable to charges of self-interest than Loomis, who had been a prominent Wall Street figure and enemy of the New Deal, and whose cousin, Henry Stimson, had just been named Roosevelt’s secretary of war. Their “kinship,” wrote Bush, “might easily have created a problem but for Alfred’s care to avoid it.” But the threatening world would make for strange bedfellows, and Loomis and Stimson were the first of many New Deal critics the Roosevelt administration would embrace in the months to come.
To deflect any criticism Loomis’ appointment might attract from the ranks of professional scientists, Bush and Compton quickly mounted an effort to have his name put forward in the National Academy of Sciences, a private organization created to provide expert advice to the government, whose membership carried their cadre’s ultimate seal of approval. Lawrence had suggested the idea to Compton in a letter only a few weeks earlier, no doubt at Loomis’ behest:
I hope the microwave work at MIT is being accelerated, as doubtless it is. It is mighty fortunate that Van [Bush] is in Washington to influence the army and navy toward a more scientific approach to the problem of warfare, and I wish that Alfred now were a member of the National Academy in order that he could be more influential in that direction. . . .
With Bush and Compton in on the game, Lawrence enthusiastically championed Loomis’ nomination, and as he promised Compton in a brief note on June 5, “I am going to make it a business to see each member of the physics section.” He added that he would also like to lobby another section but was not sure what field was most appropriate, biology or engineering: “Alfred certainly is well-known to the biologists for all his work, but whether he is known to the engineers is not clear to me.” He suggested Compton talk to various academy members and “find out how they feel about it.” Bush, Compton, and Lawrence then turned to Jewett to help resolve the awkward matter of how best to frame Loomis’ scientific contribution and make sure that it passed muster with the academy members. As the reluctant Jewett warned Compton, someone as eclectic as Loomis would not be an easy sell:
I am returning herewith, signed, the Intersectional Nomination for Loomis, which you sent me with your letter of June 20th. While there is no question Loomis would be a valuable addition to membership of the Academy, and while Bush and I have talked the matter over extensively, I had a bit of uncertainty as to whether it was best for me to sign because of my position as President of the Academy. However, by signing you will see I have resolved my own doubts.
As between the two proposals for nomination, I incline toward the two-section combination of Physics and Engineering because I believe it would be easier to qualify Loomis as an engineer than as a physicist. However, if he can be qualified as a physicist I am sure a large majority of the engineers will support him and it might make it easier getting in more border-field people. . . .
It took months of tireless “electioneering,” as Compton put it, to get Loomis in under the heading of physicist. As he wrote Lawrence at one point, “My defense for presenting Loomis’ case was simply that his activities were so much on the borderline of physics . . . that there was a danger of a man very valuable to the Academy being lost sight of because he fell betwixt and between formalized sections.” Compton also warned Lawrence to step back from too much overt politicking: “I doubt whether it would be advisable for another letter to go out on behalf of Loomis but I do think that a little personal missionary work as the occasion offers, or perhaps a personal letter to a few members of the Section who are such close friends of yours that the letter would not be taken amiss, might be worthwhile. . . .”
In the meantime, Bush had arranged for the NDRC to be given jurisdiction over the Briggs uranium committee and various other subcommittees, all unpublicized. American scientists were asked to comply with wartime censorship and exercise extreme discretion, and scientific journals were instructed not to publish papers on fission and any related subjects. The NDRC immediately began to inventory the country’s research facilities and technical manpower. Compton approached the military agencies to compile a list of critical projects, those programs not yet under way that would be worthwhile, and those needing to be supplemented. As the program began to take form, and Conant assumed more of the burden of administrating the massive effort, he was amazed by the autonomous and far-reaching powers granted to Bush and his deputies at the NDRC: “Scientists were to be mobilized for the defense effort in their own laboratories. A man who we of the committee thought could do a job was going to be asked to be the chief investigator; he would assemble a staff in his own laboratory if possible; he would make progress reports to our committee through a small organization of part-time advisers and full-time staff.”
Bush himself later admitted he had pulled off something of “an end run, a grab by which a small company of scientists and engineers, outside established channels, got hold of the authority and money for the program of developing new weapons.”
Over a period of weeks, responsibility was divvied up among the five main divisions, with Compton assigned to take charge of Division D—the radar division. Compton asked Loomis to be chairman of the special microwave committee (Section D-1). He netted the assignment in part because he had been immersed in the subject for the past year and quite possibly knew more about radio detection than anyone, and in part because of the close relationship he had forged with Compton and Bush. Moreover, Loomis had proven himself a gifted improviser in marshaling support for the big cyclotron, a man who could move mountains if they stood in his way. It also just so happened that he possessed one of the finest facilities in the world to carry out exactly this kind of work and was presently doing pioneering radar research at his Tuxedo laboratory in conjunction with MIT.
Loomis chose the members of his own panel, appointing Bowles as executive secretary. After contacting Ralph Bown of the Bell Telephone Company, and Hugh Willis of Sperry, he proceeded to hold his first meetings at Tuxedo Park on July 14, 1940, before any of them had received their formal appointments from Bush. They set out their administrative needs, methods, and objectives and decided for the sake of speed and efficiency that it was important to keep the group small. They defined their goal in clear terms: “So to organize and coordinate research, invention, and development as to obtain the most effective military application of microwaves in the minimum time.”
From day one, Bowles chafed at working under a man he felt, for obvious reasons, was an interloper. Loomis’ unorthodox and occasionally high-handed methods would further stoke his resentment. “The microwave committee was to me a kind of mongrel gathering at the start,” Bowles recalled, placing the blame squarely on Bush’s shoulders for approving it in the first place. “Loomis had been a rather devious financier, and an operator par excellence. You never knew what the hell he was up to behind the scenes. But he was a driver, and brilliant, too brilliant for his own good in my judgment.” But the British had already established the noble tradition of using “indigent scientists” to help apply modern technology to the military need of the country. “In Bush’s mind, as I read it,” said Bowles, “there was in this country a vast body of highly trained minds in the field of science diffusely spread throughout the country in our educational matrix. Here was a resource scattered from here to breakfast, relatively inactive as it stood, which could contribute material were it organized and well directed.”
Despite their differences, Loomis and Bowles managed to work together fairly well in the beginning. The committee was composed primarily of representatives from industry, including GE, Sperry, Westinghouse, RCA, and Bell Telephone. The army also had a presence, though it was there primarily to raise questions. It was an awkward mix, and not easy to steer, which made for lots of disagreements, according to Bowles, and “a lot of unhappiness.” Early on, the committee members deadlocked on the issue of who should actually produce the radar sets. The corporate worthies felt the MIT scientists should be confined to basic research and kept finding reasons why their great industrial laboratories should be put in charge of the primary development and production. Loomis and Bowles both felt strongly that the bulk of the development work should be done in one dedicated laboratory, and they ought not to depend solely on outside contractors. To overcome the deadlock, a number of decisions were passed up to Compton and the NDRC, which sided with Loomis. When Jewett, the head of Bell Labs, found out, he felt he had been “double-crossed.” This led to “a very hot meeting,” recalled Compton, and some tension between various parties for some time thereafter. But had Loomis not held his ground, Bowles later grudgingly admitted, the radar project certainly would have ended up solidly “in industry’s control.”
The microwave committee’s first priority was to determine what research the army and navy wished them to undertake and to award the contracts to the best candidates. During the summer months, Compton and Loomis toured all of the important radar developments, first paying a visit to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) at Anacostia, and then the army installation at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where Colonel (later General) Roger B. Colton, director of the Signal Corps Laboratories, showed them around. Because both the navy and army research projects were regarded as strict military secrets, no “outsiders” knew of them, so Compton and Loomis had to be officially informed of the significant technical advance known as pulse radar.
The basic principle of pulse ranging, which characterizes modern radar, had been around for some time and had been discovered almost simultaneously in America, England, France, Germany, and Japan. In the United States, it was first used in 1925 by Merle Tuve and Gregory Breit at the Carnegie Institution in Washington for measuring the distance to the earth’s ionosphere, which is the radio-reflecting layer near the top of the atmosphere. The technique consisted of sending skyward a train of very short impulses, a small fraction of a second in length, and measuring the time it took the reflected pulse to return to earth. In 1933, it had occurred to scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory that the pulse technique could be used to detect objects such as airplanes and ships. Over the next few years, they solved the problems of generating pulses of the proper length and shape, developing a common radar antenna for both transmitting and receiving called a “duplexer,” and designing cathode ray tube displays for the received pulses. By 1936, the army, working independently at their Signal Corps Laboratories, had invented a detector for use by antiaircraft batteries. The system not only detected radio pulses from aircraft, but passed on information about their direction, elevation, and range. Even though the British had lagged behind, they quickly took the lead in radio detection under the Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt, who first patented radar in 1935 for his meteorological studies and then, in an environment of impending war, quickly applied it to military defense.
By the time Compton and Loomis were being introduced to pulse radar, the navy had named their system “radar,” a manufactured term that was an abbreviation of “radio detection and ranging,” while the army referred to their outfit as RPF, “radio position finding.” The British, meanwhile, called their closely guarded system RDF. As the war effort got under way, the more convenient term radar would be adopted by common consent by the U.S. forces and subsequently, in 1943, by the British. All the radar development projects were “shrouded with a terrific amount of secrecy,” according to Compton, and they came away with the distinct impression that neither branch was aware of the research being done by the other service. Consequently, they “felt duty bound to avoid being a channel by which information could be conveyed from one group to the other.” The third meeting of the microwave committee was held on July 30 in Washington. The night before, there was a big dinner at the Wardman Park Hotel attended by Bush, Compton, and Jewett, followed by an evening discussion in the large suite Loomis kept there for such purposes. Loomis introduced the senior army and navy officers to the various committee members, and another trip to review the radar equipment was arranged.
In late August, Compton and Loomis were asked to attend the army maneuvers taking place at Ogdensburg in upstate New York and were flown up in Secretary Stimson’s private plane. They were there to observe one of the first field tests of the army’s top-secret pulse radar system, the SCR-268. As Compton later recalled, they “were quite the envy of the high officers attending the maneuvers because not even the generals were allowed to get near enough the equipment to find out anything about its operation.” During two days at Ogdensburg, they saw the chief test, which consisted of a comparison of an airplane detection by pulse radar and by a network of volunteer observers reporting in by telephone. A huge plotting board was set up, and the army had acquired priority phone lines for volunteer observers scattered all over the upper part of the state. On the big board, all planes reported by the observers were marked down and tracked as to the type of plane, location, and heading. A parallel plotting system was set up using information acquired by the SCR-268, which, of course, won the day. They were greatly encouraged by the results with the army radar sets, which detected a flight of army planes at a range of about seventy miles.
Loomis was largely responsible for the committee’s wholehearted sponsoring of microwave radar research. The army was skeptical, believing that microwave radar “was for the next war, not this one.” The army had already worked to improve its transmitting tubes so that the wavelength could be reduced to 11/2 meters and thought anything much shorter than that could not be perfected anytime soon. Given how slow they had been to capitalize on new technology in the past, Loomis regarded the army’s attitude as more of a reflection of their own bureaucracy than those posed by the research challenge. The opinion was also based on the peacetime experience of longer-wave radar and the fact that big companies like GE and RCA had been on the verge of shutting down their microwave work because they could not find any commercial applications. The navy viewed itself as the aristocracy of the armed forces and jealousy guarded its radar technology, making it clear that they wanted as little to do with Loomis’ committee as possible.
But Loomis, from the outset, believed pursuing the field of microwaves was a matter of the utmost urgency. As usual, he was not afraid of advancing an idea that might be unpopular; and he was used to relying on his own counsel. Just before the Battle of Britain in July 1940, he had made a tour of the English radar research laboratories and learned that their most pressing need was for a microwave system for night fighters and antiaircraft guns. Loomis had even talked to the British about ways in which they might cooperate in the area of microwave radar, so that America could carry on the work started in the United Kingdom. Loomis knew from his own research that the chief obstacle to microwave radar was the lack of a vacuum tube capable of generating sufficient energetic radiation at such short wavelengths. Only two tubes held out any immediate hope of providing real power on wavelengths below one meter: the klystron, which they were working on at Tuxedo Park, and the Sloan-Marshall resnatron at Berkeley. Loomis was convinced that if they could just find a solution to this problem, it would lead to an enormous widening of the powers of radar.
Almost as soon as he took charge of the microwave project, Loomis called on Lawrence to help him advance the development of the Sloan-Marshall tube with “the utmost vigor.” They desperately needed an oscillator to produce still shorter wavelengths and a satisfactory power source to go with it. “Can’t you step in and take responsibility for organizing it in a large way and have it the major war research of the University?” he asked in a hasty letter on July 9. “If a tube of 25 to 50 kilowatts at 20 to 35 centimeters were available there are some very pressing problems that could be powerfully attacked.” Loomis promised Lawrence $20,000 from the NDRC; raised $4,500 from the Research Corporation, which had patented the tube; and threw in an additional $1,500 of his own money. He concluded on a wistful note, worrying that he must be missing out on everything at the Rad Lab: “I have been thinking a great deal about the cyclotron, and I can’t tell you how anxious I am to catch up on all the new developments. . . . [Ellen] was talking last night about how wonderful it had been out there last winter ‘before the war.’ ”
Lawrence immediately wrote back that he would take the necessary steps to see that the project proceeded “full speed ahead” and, if need be, would draw on funds from his precious 184-inch cyclotron to get the job done. It was the first microwave contract Loomis would approve, and one of the very earliest of the war effort. Loomis would go on to ask for Lawrence’s help on any number of other war-related devices, and their enthusiasm for invention and shared pleasure in pooling their imaginative ideas and practical skills are evident as they worked out their ideas for various ingenious gadgets. Taking a page right out of one of Wood’s infamous investigations on behalf of the police, as in the bombing of Morgan Bank, Loomis soon invited Lawrence’s collaboration on an important and mysterious “FBI problem” he had been approached about:
Suppose the FBI or the Naval Intelligence Unit would like to mark certain confidential documents for the purpose of catching a person that they suspected of being a spy, especially in the case where such a person was so high up in the organization that they could not afford to make any false accusations and must have absolute and immediate proof. I suggested that a few drops of a radio active preparation could be placed at the exit of the building or other suitable place and that if such a suspected person passed near the counter they would have conclusive evidence on which to arrest and search him, whether he carried a document on his person or in his briefcase. Could you let me know what substance you would suggest and whether you could supply some small amount for test. It should of course be a substance whose radiations could easily be distinguished from those coming from the luminous dial of a wrist watch. I think we can assume that the suspect would not know the method and would not provide a lead container.
Lawrence considered Loomis’ solution to the FBI problem “thoroughly practical” and passed along his own inspired idea for a spy-catching device:
There are numerous radioactive substances suitable for such purposes. One that comes to mind immediately is radio-yttrium, having a half-life of 105 days and emitting a very penetrating gamma-ray . . . the radioactivity can be concentrated into hardly more than a pinpoint of material which would have its advantages if it were to be used for labelling a document. . . . I have gone ahead and assigned an assistant to Luis Alvarez to work out the design and build an extremely portable Geiger counter which could be worn inconspicuously on the person in order that a special agent might carry it and, by walking near an individual, determine whether he was carrying any radioactive material. I suggested that instead of an earphone to detect the Geiger counts that they develop an arrangement whereby the counts produce tiny electric shocks on the skin of the individual carrying the counter so that the arrangements could be kept completely out of sight. I think such a gadget might prove to be very useful.
Loomis heartily approved the idea and wrote back that he would like to pick up the portable Geiger counter and a sample of radio yttrium when he was in California the following month so he could demonstrate the idea before naval intelligence and the FBI in Washington. He added, “I do believe that after the battle for England starts, and after we have universal conscription, this country will appreciate more and more the gravity of our situation.” After Loomis’ trip west was postponed indefinitely because of the intensifying demands of the radar work, Lawrence’s little vest-pocket Geiger counter, which he boasted was now so compact that it “takes about as much space as a New York gangster would allow for his guns,” was shipped to Tuxedo Park. Loomis showed it to “several important people” in Washington and reported that it worked perfectly. But it seemed that “carrying it on the person is not so convenient,” and he had given some thought as to how best to conceal it. He went on to elaborate his idea:
It occurred to me yesterday that a book would probably be the most suitable. If a book was used the high tension source could probably be obtained in a smaller space by charging a group of condensers in parallel. This would involve pressing a button on the side from time to time, but that would not be serious, especially as in that method there would be no danger of a current drain on the batteries. Could you send me two or three of the counting tubes themselves? Would you also think over the best solution to put the radio yttrium in? I should think there would have to be some chemical compound that would unite with the paper in such a way as not to make too noticeable a stain, and yet would hold the yttrium in the paper when it was dry.
In the midst of all the urgent business at hand, the two physicists spent months writing letters back and forth detailing further refinements of the little Geiger counter, each adding his own whimsical embellishments. Lawrence pooh-poohed Loomis’ book idea as impractical and instead reported that he would be sending a new outfit based on a design cooked up by Alvarez and his assistant. The new design “gets away from the mechanical vibrator and transformer and instead uses a tiny radio frequency oscillator from which the voltage was stepped up to about 900 volts from a 45-volt battery,” Lawrence wrote, adding that it would be “compact enough to carry in one’s coat pocket with the necessary batteries in one’s hip pockets. Needless to say, the whole unit including batteries could very readily be incorporated in a book as you suggest.” He also addressed Loomis’ suggestion that they change their approach on another front—namely, the Sloan tube. Loomis had written about Sloan’s idea of producing high-speed electrons by sending powerful waves down a hollow pipe that contained bulges at proper intervals. In this case, the energy of the waves was progressively transferred to the electrons. Loomis had requested they “think carefully of the reverse process, namely, sending high speed electrons down such a tube and taking out power waves at the other end. These waves might never have to see a transmission line and might go right on out from the generator to a hollow pipe to a horn.” Lawrence exercised great care in replying to his brilliant but meddlesome friend, who was in the habit of telling everyone what to do:
As regards your thought about reversing Sloan’s electron accelerator and using it as a micro wave generator, it is, as I can judge, a good idea and completely feasible. I discussed the matter with Sloan and Marshall, and they agreed that it is certainly a feasible idea. They said of course that they had given it much consideration, and they pointed out the Sloan tube is indeed a special case of such an idea, i.e., in which there is but one section—the first resonator. . . . It seems to me, however, that a matter of this sort is not susceptible to complete paper analysis, and I would be in favor of someone’s experimentally developing the multiple resonator arrangement to find out its good and bad points. You know as well as I do that experimental work always brings to light things of which one does not think by any amount of cerebration. . . .
Back at Tuxedo Park, Loomis, having anticipated events, had a running start on the NDRC in more ways than one. His independent investigation of microwave radar was well under way, and as he wrote Lawrence, “We have a big group now going at Tuxedo on microwaves, it means that I am going pretty hard seven days a week.” By the time various members of the microwave committee and the NDRC started beating a path to Tower House late that summer and early fall to see what Loomis’ band of researchers had developed, an experimental apparatus had been constructed in the laboratory and was being tested with a makeshift moving Doppler target that consisted of a row of copper wires on a moving belt. The Doppler target could be run in the lab or set up in a nearby wood and detected by the lab set. Visitors were impressed that it was possible to tell whether the belt machine was running or not when it was remote from the actual detection device.
A second detection device had been assembled and installed in a large delivery van that Loomis bought expressly for that purpose. The staff immediately dubbed it “the didey wagon” because it had been used for delivering diapers. Loomis arranged to have the truck painted the traditional Tuxedo Park colors, green with gold trim, with “Loomis Laboratories” handsomely lettered on the side. Whether this was to impress the dignitaries from Washington or to make the truck less of an eyesore to the neighboring swells, it lent the backyard enterprise a nice official air.
“When we took [it] out to the golf course, the thing was a microwave radar,” recalled Lewis. “It had an indicator system that was capable of showing what we were looking at and getting us a reading on the speed. We took it out there and pointed it down the highway that went through Tuxedo Park. After we’d spent five minutes looking at it, I said, ‘Hey, don’t let the cops get a hold of that. These guys are all going over the speed limit.’ Nobody else had one,” added Lewis, who had immediately recognized the obvious application for their radar gun. “There weren’t any microwave speed measuring sets in those days until we got that one.”
The apparatus they had invented used an 8.6 cm klystron transmitter feeding energy into a novel antenna system called a “Tuxedo horn,” which was a modified version of Hansen’s leaky-pipe antenna. According to Lewis, after a considerable amount of work, they had settled on two so-called leaky pipes along two sides of a triangular horn, to make the radiator mechanically more solid and improve the shape of the beam. The Tuxedo horns were mounted together on a rotating platform, resembling a gun mount, protruding from the back of the truck. The receiver consisted of a crystal detector and audio amplifier. A “wave trap” fitted along the front edge of the two horns prevented the transmitted signal from leaking back into the receiver. According to the laboratory notes, the system’s operation depended on the interference effects between the radiation directly picked up by the transmitter and the reflected energy of the moving target:
A moving object will produce a doppler effect, the signal returning from the moving object beating against outgoing signal, part of which is picked up directly by the receiving horn. The audio note thus received will be proportional to the radial speed of the moving object. Thus, a plane moving at a radial speed of 100 meters per second, thus producing a note of 2,000 cycles per second (assuming half wave length equals five centimeters). . . .
All that summer, Loomis and his team experimented on a variety of moving targets, using whatever was at hand in the sleepy resort. Hobart tried testing the device on balloons he sent floating up over the tree-tops. Outdoor tests were also done on motorboats in the lake, marked by a corner reflector. As their experiments tracking automobiles progressed, they were able to measure the speed of the cars with “considerable accuracy: the Doppler shift being at the rate of 10 cycles per mile an hour.” In late August, they drove the “didey wagon” down to Bendix Airport, where, according to Lewis, they managed “to follow without difficulty the comings and goings of a number of small planes, [Piper] Cubs and the like.” A Luscombe, with its large metal surface, proved to be the best target. Henry Loomis, now twenty-one, often piloted the small Cub, which they learned they could follow at a maximum distance of two miles. Beyond that, the “fourth-power law” began to defeat their efforts and the signals were lost in the noise. At one point, they even tried to track the Goodyear blimp, but it moved too slowly to be detected with their system. Some efforts to do experiments on the movements of the Nyack ferry also failed, though in making their measurements and modifying the set to improve their range, Lewis and his co-workers came very close to the idea of pulse radar.
While they did not know it at the time, their leader had just been informed of its existence during the army maneuvers in Ogdensburg. As Lewis would learn later, Loomis understood full well the superiority of the pulsed radar he had been shown but was not permitted to begin doing similar experiments at his own facility without clearance, so he “had to bide his time with the Doppler system, just to show the principles.” Stymied by the lack of a tube that could supply enough power, the microwave committee had decided to write a report. “A sign,” as one of its members observed, “that we didn’t know what to do next.” But before the end of summer, Loomis’ work was interrupted by the dramatic arrival in Washington of the British Technical and Scientific Mission, led by Sir Henry Tizard, an influential defense scientist. When he hurried off to the nation’s capital to meet with the British, Loomis had no idea his days in Tuxedo Park were drawing to a close.