Ward’s expression had not changed; he was very pale and there were blue circles under his eyes.
—WR, from Brain Waves and Death
LOOMIS’ work had placed him at the very center of the atomic bomb debate, but in the wake of the disaster at Pearl Harbor, he had little time for Lawrence and his uranium separation project. The terrible and unexpected defeat showed just how poor the nation’s radar defenses were against an air attack. In the confused and bitter aftermath, Washington was awash in guilt, and half a dozen boards were quickly set up, busying themselves with assigning responsibility for the catastrophe to various military departments and officers. Like most Americans, Loomis was shocked by the overwhelming reports of the carnage, which had killed more than 2,400 servicemen and civilians, wrecked eight battleships, three destroyers, and three cruisers, and left the better part of three hundred aircraft in smoldering ruins. He had felt it all the more keenly because his youngest boy, Henry, a navy ensign, was stationed in Hawaii on the Pennsylvania, and it was several days before he heard that he was safe. But the blow also demonstrated what he had been arguing for months, that the radar systems being developed at his laboratory were vital to their ability to protect themselves against an attack on American territory. Even on December 7, Loomis knew that the months of indecision and relative inaction had finally come to an end. He was no longer exploring the speculative art of radar for possible defense applications, he was in the business of building detection devices for the offense.
On December 10, three days after the strike on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded the Philippines and destroyed Britain’s brand-new battleship Prince of Wales and the famous old battle cruiser Repulse, along with their escort of destroyers. The Japanese launched an amphibious offensive against Malaya, overrunning the British defense with their superiority in the water and the air, and were driving south to Singapore. The following day, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. America was in a shooting war on two fronts, and it was clear that radar—airborne and shipboard—would play a leading role in the conflict. At this point, Loomis’ Radiation Laboratory had been in operation for little over a year and had completed most of the basic research, achieved the important breakthroughs, and carried out field tests. It had an impressive array of prototype systems in operation. But because of the skeptics in the military, and entrenched resistance to new techniques and experimental models, not a single ten-centimeter microwave radar system was in use in combat anywhere. In one stroke, all that had changed. Just as the Chain Home system had played a decisive role in the Battle of Britain, Loomis knew with certainty that the Rad Lab’s powerful radar equipment would be the critical factor in the Allies’ favor.
Among the first systems to be put into service was an RCA production model of an air-to-surface-vessel radar that was salvaged from the wreckage of the USS California in Pearl Harbor and quickly set up at the Oahu radar training school, where Loomis’ son served as an instructor. By December 1941 the Rad Lab ASV radar was detecting ships twenty to thirty miles away and locating submarines at a distance of two to five miles. Thanks to the invention of the circular oscilloscope screen called the “plan position indicator” (PPI), pilots could determine the vessels’ location at a glance and calculate their range and bearing relative to their plane. The U.S. Navy had been sufficiently impressed to order ten experimental ASV sets for their own pilots and had ordered a hundred shipboard microwave search units for their destroyers. The British had been so eager to equip their pilots with the microwave radar device that they had diverted two of their B-24 bombers to be fitted with the ASV sub-hunting system, subsequently dubbed “Dumbo I” because the radar dome in the swollen nose of the aircraft gave it an elephantine look. On December 11, as America went to war in Europe, Dumbo I made its first test flight. That same week, the Rad Lab physicists began converting all the available AI sets into improvised ASV search radar systems to send out after German subs close to America’s shores.
In those first weeks after the United States declared war, while the army raced to install the Rad Lab’s modified microwave radar sets in their B-18s, the country paid a high price for its lack of preparedness. The Allied strategy, agreed upon immediately after the United States officially entered the conflict, was to defeat Germany first and then go after Japan. German U-boats already controlled the waters off the eastern coast and the Gulf of Mexico and were inflicting devastating losses: in February alone, eighty-two U.S. merchant ships were sunk by Nazi submarines. Almost every day of the war brought news of the sinking of two or three more tankers, and their steel carcasses littered the Atlantic floor. Without the aid of radar, army and navy pilots managed to attack only four Nazi submarines in the first two months of patrol.
On April Fools’ Day, the first B-18 with the modified ASV radar search units took off from Langley Field. On its first night patrol, it spotted three U-boats. It gave chase and, zeroing in on the enemy at a range of eleven miles and an altitude of three hundred feet, found and sank one of the submarines.
From then on, America’s scores improved steadily. A few days later, the USS Augusta, armed with the first production model of shipboard search radar, joined the fight. All that summer, the roaming eye of the Rad Lab ASV radar had the German wolf packs on the run. The U-boats, equipped with receivers that had been designed to pick up the old long-wave ASV, were not capable of detecting the microwave pulses from the Allies’ new search radars. By late summer, convoy losses dropped sharply. In Berlin, German admiral Karl Dönitz, who in 1940 had boasted that “the U-boat alone can win this war,” was forced to admit that “the methods of radio-location that the Allies have introduced have conquered the U-boat menace.” As he later wrote, radar threatened to provide the Allies with the key to victory unless Germany could address the disparity in their technological prowess:
For some months past, the enemy has rendered the U-boat ineffective. He has achieved this objective, not through superior tactics or strategy, but through his superiority in the field of science; this finds its expression in the modern battle weapon—detection. By this means he has torn our sole offensive weapon in the war against the Anglo-Saxons from our hands.
Ironically, Loomis was helped in his campaign to sell radar to the military’s top brass by his old nemesis, Ed Bowles, who was now an expert adviser to the secretary of war. Loomis had consistently sought to keep Stimson informed of the advances in the Rad Lab radar and hoped that he might use his influence on the newly formed Joint Committee on New Weapons and Equipment (JCNWE), a panel that had been formed under the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate civilian research for the war effort. Loomis’ efforts were not wasted, for Stimson was so unhappy about the services’ conservative approach to the new technology that after personally checking out a demonstration of the ASV-equipped Dumbo II, which successfully located a distant ship, he fired off irate notes to Generals Marshall and Arnold demanding action: “I’ve seen the new radar equipment. Why haven’t you?” But it was Bowles, eager to establish a role for himself in Washington, who wrote persuasive reports for the JCNWE, courted the various generals, and assiduously worked from within to change their perception of microwave radar. He pointed out the ways in which the new weapons were not being deployed to their full potential, arguing that the Rad Lab ASV could not be treated “simply as a magic gadget” but needed to be part of “an operational framework.” By August 1942, Bowles—who according to Bush had virtually become assistant secretary of war for radar—was winning support for the establishment of a regular ASV-equipped bomber unit at Langley Field to search out and attack German submarines, and for a new offensive strategy—air search—that would do so much to finally win the U-boat war.
WITH the demonstrable success of the ASV in the Atlantic, and new appreciation for the strategic opportunities presented by the advancing technology, there was a mad rush of activity at Loomis’ laboratory. The Allied air forces were revving up for a full-scale bombing offensive against continental Europe, and the physicists went to work on advanced radar aids to bombing. There was a feverish drive to construct twenty of the Rad Lab’s highly accurate three-centimeter sets, code-named H2X, so that they could be shipped to England before the cloudy fall weather set in. The effort to develop radar beacons, echo amplifiers to be used as blind-landing aids, was reorganized and accelerated. By the summer of 1942, the CXBK, an experimental microwave ASV radar, was in operation over the Bay of Biscay, and when the British reviewed pictures of its scope presentations, with their clearly defined coastlines and bays, the towns and cities standing out brightly, an RAF dignitary declared, “Gentlemen, this is a turning point in the war.”
The Rad Lab physicists scrambled to meet all the requests for radar equipment, took on dozens of new projects, and came up with still more innovative gadgets. Most important, they finally overcame the wariness of the military services so that they could work closely together in developing new tactical devices and guarantee that they would be successful in the field. Loomis, who was a strong believer in the necessity of a “follow through” policy, fought to increase the Rad Lab’s role, declaring that it should not only stay in the engineering business, but should be expanded greatly to handle more of it. His microwave committee recommended “a several-fold increase in the number of scientists and engineers engaged in its research and development program.”
Loomis’ drive to increase the size of the lab was stoutly opposed by a number of leading industry representatives, who jealously accused Loomis of creating his own private factory and leveled charges of government encroachment. But with Compton’s backing, and the unanimous support of the microwave committee, Loomis’ proposal carried the day. The Rad Lab was now permitted to create a “model shop” to produce limited numbers of the experimental microwave radar it was designing for the military, and given unprecedented freedom to operate, it became more a partner to the army and navy than a mere adviser to manufacturers. At the outset, Loomis had worked hard to achieve a “meeting of minds” with industry, but after a while, as Bush put it, “The Radiation Laboratory took the ball and ran away.” Some of the fights between the sides became quite entrenched. The big companies were “damn conceited,” in Bush’s view; then again, the physicists were “also conceited.” Much of the time he felt like saying, “A plague on both your houses.”
“Loomis thought that we were fighting the war and not doing pure research, that our job was not only to develop the equipment but to get it into use,” explained DuBridge. “There were people who felt that we put too much effort in the field and there were other people who felt we didn’t put in anywheres near enough. We tried to strike a balance,” he said, but “the idea that we would see our equipment help win the war was basic of the laboratory philosophy from the day we began.”
Still, convincing the military to cooperate with the scientists was not easy. Rabi, who was in charge of advanced development, vividly recalled what happened when one navy contingent came to the lab to describe the various devices they wanted: “I asked, ‘What are they for? What is their purpose?’ This naval officer looked me in the eye and said, ‘We prefer to talk about that in our swivel chairs in Washington.’ ” Rabi did not answer, but he did not do anything, either. Engineering specifications alone would not help foresee combat needs. When they returned again with another problem, he told them, “Now look, you bring back your man who understands radar, you bring your man who understands the navy, who understands aircraft, you bring your man who understands tactics, and then we’ll talk about your needs.” Taking that from one of the “longhairs”—the academics—“was pretty hard for them to swallow,” acknowledged Rabi, “but they did.” From that day on, they started working together as a team:
They were worried about snooper planes following the fleet, and they wanted to shoot them down. We developed a height-finding radar to be used on the ship, a radar to be used in conjunction with airborne radar. This started a relationship with the navy that was very important to us. When we got to know one another, when they learned we were trying to help them and that we respected them, when they discovered we didn’t want any of the glory, we came to be friends with great mutual respect.
The Rad Lab scientists no longer confined themselves to their cubbyholes but often developed their weapons in the field, traveling to the European and Pacific theaters of operation to assess the military’s needs, going back to the lab to fine-tune their design, and then returning to the front to oversee the deployment of their devices.
Because the Rad Lab could not accommodate all the additional projects they had taken on at the request of the army and navy, Loomis arranged for additional funds from the NDRC, and the laboratory began to grow rapidly. He first purchased the Hood Milk Company building on Massachusetts Avenue, just two blocks away, and had the three-story brick structure overhauled as laboratory space, and then he bought the neighboring Whittemore Building. Four floors and a penthouse were piled onto one of the original labs, and field stations cropped up in Orlando, Florida, Spraycliff, Rhode Island, and Deer Island in Boston Harbor. New men were brought in and trained to run these facilities, and an army of young women came—and kept on coming—to meet the lab’s growing administrative needs, working as secretaries, bookkeepers, and technicians, so that they eventually outnumbered the men almost two to one. By the end of the year, the staff would reach almost two thousand people and was still growing, with a budget of $1,150,000 monthly. Loomis’ small secret community of physicists had evolved into a large, energetic, affectionate mob, complete with raucous parties—comings and goings were vigorously feted—romances, and intralab marriages. Any concerns that were raised about the reproductive effects of all the high-frequency energy emanating from the early radar sets were put to rest when three people in the aptly named “propagation group” became parents at the same time.
Under Loomis, the Rad Lab moved from research into development, design, and manufacturing and was reorganized into ten divisions working in parallel and reporting to a steering committee. Dozens of new departments were created to handle the great flood of orders. In the early days, with everyone acutely aware the Germans were pounding American ships, everything was done with an eye to speeding the lab’s progress: the personnel office expanded to organize the tremendous human traffic; the accounting office kept the books and paid the bills; the business office handled the maze of requisitions, purchase orders, and invoices; the purchasing group bought the thousands of mechanical and electrical hardware items—the largest item being a carnival merry-go-round—required by the physicists; the self-service stockroom carried over five thousand electronic parts; the receiving room handled, at its peak, a monthly average of twenty thousand boxes; the mailroom, which by the end employed twenty-five very popular girls, sorted the sacks of internal and outgoing letters and documents; and the shipping room moved the tons of radar equipment that had to be crated and loaded before leaving for the docks and England. After a luncheon meeting with Loomis that fall, Stimson noted in his diary: “His work in Boston seems to be progressing satisfactorily. His inventions are making rather more rapid progress than we can take care of them.”
The Rad Lab had officially entered “the big time,” with a total of fifty projects on its books. The lights burned all night, and the scientists, who lived on coffee, doughnuts, and sandwiches, worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, that first year. “Tea wagons” loaded with equipment constantly rattled down the corridors, and as the yearbook notes, “Things got so busy it was fashionable not to answer your phone.” Security was tightened, identification badges were mandatory, and despite the well-intentioned warnings about secrecy, gossip remained the major form of recreation. Everybody talked all the time—whether it was about the imminent danger of enemy agents or the latest dope on a newly launched project. Despite the constant hum of conversation, there was never any evidence then or since of a single laboratory leak. The Rad Lab was its own world, self-contained, urgent, and alive, and it absorbed everything so that the outside world seemed almost distant. Alvarez, who had been sidelined for several months by surgery and serious side effects from the anesthesia, returned to a laboratory that was very different from the one he had left. “We really were working as industrial scientists now,” he recalled. “Activities and staff had grown exponentially. It took me a while to catch up.”
One of the projects Alvarez was originally assigned to—the automatic tracking fire-control radar—had been completed in his absence, and an operating SCR-584 prototype, the first of its kind, had been mounted on the MIT roof. The second, known as the XT-1, which was mounted on a truck, had been completed a month before Pearl Harbor and sent to Fort Monroe in Virginia for evaluation. Alvarez, who became something of a Rad Lab legend for the three words Suppose we have, often found scrawled in his laboratory notebooks, had another idea. One day back in August, watching the first microwave fire-control radar automatically track an airplane, he suddenly realized that if a radar set could continuously track an enemy plane accurately enough to shoot it down, it should be able to use the same information to guide a friendly pilot to a safe landing in bad weather. With strong support from Loomis, Alvarez had begun developing the concept that would emerge as one of the most valuable contributions of the Rad Lab—an aircraft blind-landing system, or “ground-controlled approach” (GCA). Thanks to the accelerated post–Pearl Harbor development schedule, XT-1 prototypes became available sooner than expected, and early in the spring of 1942, Alvarez and a group of about twenty physicists got down to work testing his idea.
They had to prove first of all that it was possible to “talk” a pilot down—that he could land solely on verbal instructions from the ground. In the Logan National Guard hangar, now completely taken over by Rad Lab projects, they had a blindfolded pilot walk a line on the floor while a controller observed his deviation and instructed him how to correct his path. The results were encouraging, so they designed further tests, rigging a primitive radar set with optical sights. Alvarez also took lessons at the Squantum Naval Air Station several times a week to prepare for the navy instrument pilot’s exam, on the theory that he would better understand the challenge pilots faced in flying on their instruments alone and perhaps eventually learn to land by GCA himself. By late March, Alvarez and his small team drove to Quonset Point Naval Air Station outside Providence and began conducting trials of their makeshift blind-landing system. During several weeks of work with a navy test pilot named Bruce Griffin, Alvarez gained confidence in their “unorthodox” solution to the blind-landing problem:
We improvised communications procedures as we went along, and after many landings under conditions of good visibility Bruce began to fly under the hood [with the hood literally over his head to prevent sneaking a peak] to lower and lower elevations before making a visual approach. His radioman acted as check pilot when he was under the hood. One day Bruce announced that he had flown under the hood all the way to touchdown. We cheered the first complete landing on GCA.
In May, the navy invited them to test their radar system at the Oceania Naval Air Station near Norfolk, Virginia, offering an advanced SNJ trainer, considered by pilots to be one of the best planes ever built. “It was ideal for the aerobatics,” recalled Alvarez, who went along for the exciting ride as “Bruce brushed up on the loops, rolls, split-S turns, and Immelmans [reverse turns] he couldn’t attempt in his ungainly Duck.” Unfortunately, the XT-1, which had worked so beautifully in its one previous test tracking a low-flying aircraft, went completely “spastic.” Every time the plane approached the truck, the antenna would suddenly break away from the line of sight to the plane and point at its reflected image three degrees below the surface of the runway. They tried every trick they knew to keep the radar from locking in on the reflected image, but the equipment was unable to track planes near the ground. The GCA tests were “disastrous,” and Alvarez and his team returned to MIT thoroughly discouraged. He knew the most sensible option was “to give up and move on.” There were many other important radar problems that needed to be solved, and they were wasting manpower and resources. But they had “fallen in love with the GCA talk-down technique,” and it was the only hope they had of solving the problem of landing planes in fog and poor visibility conditions, which regularly grounded bombing and air reconnaissance missions.
The crucial breakthrough came during a dinner with Loomis at his suite at the Ritz-Carlton in early June. Alvarez, who by then was feeling defeated, gave Loomis a frank assessment of the system’s shortcomings, and the two of them then analyzed the Quonset Point and Oceania events in detail. Loomis was obstinately committed to the idea that GCA was feasible and was ready to throw out the conventional ideas of what was possible in the existing art of radar. He was insistent and, as Alvarez later recalled, “did an amazing job of restoring my morale, which had hit a new low.” He also made it perfectly clear that neither of them was leaving until they had hit on some sort of solution. “We both know that GCA is the only way planes will be blind-landed in this war,” Loomis told the thirty-one-year-old physicist, “so we have to find some way to make it work. I don’t want you to go home tonight until we’re both satisfied that you’ve come up with a design that will do the job.” Together, they engineered a radical new form of radar, as Alvarez recounted in his memoirs:
We both contributed ideas. The antenna configurations we devised departed completely from all previous designs. Out of the Ritz-Carlton discussion came a tall, narrow, vertical antenna that scanned by being mechanically rocked and a horizontal antenna that scanned its pattern left and right. The beaver-tail beam from the vertical antenna would be so narrow that when its main lobe pointed at a plane very little energy would spill even one degree away, eliminating the possibility that the system would confuse the plane with its reflections. Alfred suggested switching a single radar transmitter between the two antennas four times a scan cycle. The three principles Alfred and I came up with on that memorable evening have been basic to GCA technology ever since. I was allowed to leave for home just before midnight.
Had it not been for Loomis’ challenge that night, there might not have been a blind-landing system in World War II. “I would have immersed myself in other interesting projects to forget my disappointment and embarrassment,” wrote Alvarez. “Many lives would have been lost unnecessarily.”
Once again, the fact that Loomis had played a key role in the conception of the new GCA design had its advantages. He would often drop by Building 22 to offer encouragement, and after Alvarez and his graduate student Larry Johnston had worked out the kinks in the design, he urged them to build a demonstration model as quickly as possible, promising to use OSRD funds to have ten prototypes built by a small radio company on the West Coast. Loomis, who had honed his competitive skills on Wall Street, felt that farming out the contract to a small firm would yield both faster and better results, and as usual, he was hedging his bets by engaging in a little frontal maneuvering. He had for some time now been concerned about the wide gap between the physicists’ technological innovation and its effective production. Loomis wanted to see GCA succeed and was troubled by the bad case of “NIH” (not invented here) that the industrial engineers had developed after one of the Rad Lab’s previous airborne sets had failed to translate well in manufacturing. The “reengineered” model that they had finally delivered months late was so cumbersome, it never saw any action.
Determined to avoid a repeat of this scenario, Loomis, together with Rowan Gaither, a very able San Francisco attorney who went on to become a close friend and business partner, created the transition office—known informally as the “hurry-up department”—to shepherd the lab’s creations through manufacturing and production and, in many cases, right into the field. The crux of the problem was that microwave radar was still so novel, few manufacturers had adequate facilities and trained personnel to produce the devices. Loomis, who always strove to keep red tape to a minimum and money easy, appointed Gaither as chief overseer and troubleshooter. To keep production problems to a minimum, Gaither would invite industrial engineers at companies of their choosing to come to the Rad Lab and receive training in the intricacies of the physicists’ creations and proper testing of the new equipment. In short, they would be educated in the Rad Lab way—which roughly translated as “our way or the highway.” This basic strategy proved such a success, it became a matter of laboratory policy to thus facilitate the transition from prototype to production model, much to the irritation of several industrialists, who again groused about Loomis’ unfair tactics.
Loomis’ other reason for ordering the ten preproduction models of the embryonic devices, designated the Mark I, was to circumvent objections from the army and navy, as well as the RAF. According to Alvarez, they had all let it be known that their pilots would “never obey landing instructions from someone sitting in comfort on the ground,” and they preferred to wait for something along the lines of the ILS (instrument landing system). Loomis, with characteristic self-confidence, paid no attention and assured Alvarez that as soon as the three services had laid eyes on the Mark I GCA system, they would want working models “yesterday.”
Leaving Loomis to fight the bureaucratic battles, Alvarez applied himself to building the Mark I. The system used two trucks parked halfway down the runway, the larger of the vehicles carrying a gasoline-driven generator directly behind the driver’s seat. Next came the azimuth antenna, pointing downwind at the approaching aircraft, rocking left and right, per their Ritz-Carlton epiphany. Bringing up the rear was the tall elevation antenna, scanning up and down. Above the generator, he mounted the area search antenna, despite objections from the air force experts that it was unnecessary. Had he heeded their advice, the Mark I would have been a “dismal failure.” The GCA truck, parked in front of the antenna truck and facing the landing aircraft, contained the controller’s communication system and the screens displaying the radar signals. They completed their first successful trial run in November 1942. After several more weeks of testing at East Boston Airport, where Alvarez worked on improving his “talk down” technique through trial and error, they were ready. On February 10, 1942, General Harold McClelland, director of Air Force Technical Services, requested a formal demonstration of the Mark I to be staged at Washington National Airport.
Four days later, on Valentine’s Day, a large group of high-ranking army, navy, and RAF officers assembled to view the test. Unfortunately, the long drive had loosened many of the connections, and Alvarez was forced to postpone twenty-four hours. The next day, the high-voltage tubes in the transmitters kept blowing, and he postponed another day. The following day did not go any better, and again he had to ask for their forbearance and invited them to return the next day. That night, he and his crew never went to bed, staying up to check and recheck every connection and vacuum tube. As Alvarez greeted the officers the next morning, he was pleased to see that the same group had gamely shown up once again. But just as he was about to begin, Larry Johnston whispered in his ear that the system was down again—more burned-out tubes. The only nearby source of tubes they knew of was Anacostia Naval Air Station, directly across the Potomoc. While Alvarez stalled for time, his pilot took off and flew across the river, returning in only a matter of minutes. With great relief, Alvarez ushered them onto the field, where the military brass listened in via loudspeaker and watched the planes respond:
We demonstrated that the aircraft were really under my control even though I could only follow them on radar. The high point of the demonstration was the approach of a colonel whom General McClelland had told only to get up into the air, tune his radio to a certain frequency, and do whatever he was told by some voice on the ground. The colonel had never heard of GCA but was an experienced instrument pilot. He first checked me out by changing his altitude and his heading. After each change I told him what he had done. He made several perfect approaches and then landed under the hood.
Just as Loomis had predicted, the three services rushed to order hundreds of GCA sets each. When they heard that ten preproduction units were available, they immediately called a meeting at the Pentagon to determine their equitable distribution in the United States and England. Loomis asked Alvarez to tag along to the meeting, and as he later recalled, although his demonstrations of the Mark I would continue for a week, Loomis’ sales campaign “succeeded that first day”:
Neither of us said a word as the admirals, generals, and air marshals engaged in a horse-trading session that ended up with all ten sets allocated to the services, and none to MIT or to the NDRC. The meeting was about to break up when Loomis said quietly, “Gentlemen, there seems to be some misapprehension concerning the ownership of these radar sets; it is my understanding that they belong to NDRC, and I am here to represent that organization.” His training as a lawyer was immediately apparent, and after he had shown in his gentle manner that he held all the cards, an allocation that was satisfactory to all concerned was quickly worked out.
After Alvarez’s success with GCA, he went on to invent two other closely related microwave early-warning systems: MEW, one of the Rad Lab’s most spectacular inventions; and Eagle, a blind-landing system that had more than its share of trouble getting off the ground but was worth it in the end. Loomis made Alvarez head of his own division, special systems, also known as “Luie’s gadgets,” and championed his ideas even when many others at the lab had their doubts. Alvarez set to work building a gigantic radar mounted on a circular track that would slowly scan hundreds of miles out over the Pacific to give early warning of the approaching enemy. He finally managed to get his monster antenna to work, and a MEW set with a fifteen-foot-long billboard antenna was operational by mid-1942. An improved set was demonstrated to the Army Air Forces board members in the summer of 1943, and as Fortune reported, for the first time they realized what the giant could do:
They saw a novel array of six scopes on a single radar, with an observer at each. He looked not simply at a few course indications of aircraft, but at clear signals, small blips of light, from each bomber in flight as far as 180 miles on the line of sight from every direction. As each sweep came by, the blips could be seen to move, indicating the flight tracks of the planes. Bunched planes near an airport could easily be resolved into units. Each scope gave accurate, up-to-the-minute data on flights of a huge number of planes. Each operator could concentrate on an assigned wedge-shaped slice of his scope and easily vector (give directional orders to) a plane.
The MEW program was immediately speeded up, and an improved, experimental set was rushed to England, where it was set up at Start Point, on the tall Devonshire cliffs overlooking the British Channel. Rad Lab physicists helped the army assemble the radar set in December 1943, and it was then entrusted to the RAF. The MEW system transformed the inaccurate technique of the old British filter center, allowing all planes to be tracked on the plotting screen, and the pilots linked to the operations room by radio phone. The MEW did not see service until 1944, when its performance exceeded all expectations and allowed the American scientists a moment of pride in the remarkable technological service they had rendered to the British in return for the cavity magnetron.
OVER the course of 1942, the Rad Lab physicists also pushed ahead with Loomis’ Loran project. As was the case with most of the Rad Lab’s new devices, the navy and air force had little interest in Loran at first and were unimpressed with their initial tests. They blamed the new method for all the errors they found in position finding, even though most of them originated with the old system they used for comparison. In January, a month after Pearl Harbor, another field test was made using Montauk, Long Island, and Fenwick, Delaware, as transmission stations, and Bermuda substituted as a “ship.” The Bermuda test turned out to be decisive, establishing once and for all the reliability of sky waves. The average of all the readings agreed with the calculated figure within a microsecond, with an average error of only plus or minus 2.8 miles. They decided that the medium of frequency of about 2.9 megahertz worked best and headed back to the Rad Lab to develop new, higher-powered transmitters, along with improved and simplified transmitter timers. At this point, Loomis was finally able to persuade the United States Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy of the importance of Loran; as one of the physicists on the project recalled, “The submarine menace made it easier to persuade the two navies, particularly because the convoy route from Cape Sable to Ireland had some of the worst weather in the world.”
One minor hiccup that occurred in the Loran tests that spring was when the frequency the group chose, 2.2 megahertz, turned out to be the same channel used by a local ship telephone link, and the Rad Lab’s powerful transmitter caused phones to ring off the hook all over the Great Lakes area. The navy was not amused and promptly instructed the Rad Lab to abandon the channel. After learning that the frequency of 1.95 megahertz was available—it had been used by ham radio operators before Pearl Harbor—the Loran group quickly claimed it for their own. On June 13, Loomis and the Loran crew conducted the first full-scale operational trial, using a navy blimp equipped with a Loran receiver indicator which was launched at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The trials were so successful in demonstrating the potential of a highly accurate navigation system that suddenly Loran was in great demand: the navy needed it right away for antisubmarine work; and the air force wanted it to help in the ferrying of aircraft across the Atlantic from Brazil to Africa.
A high-level meeting in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Building in Washington was quickly arranged among representatives of the army, navy, and OSRD to discuss the most effective way to apply Loomis’ new navigation system to the war effort. Only a few Loran sets had been built by the Rad Lab for research purposes, and there were not enough to go around. It would take several months to produce more, so it was necessary to sort out who would have to wait. “The argument became warm,” recalled Bush, who was presiding, “and the officers ignored the chair and went after one another directly. So I tapped the table and said, ‘Gentlemen, you seem to overlook the point as you argue; I “own” these sets.’ The discussion then became more orderly, and an agreement was reached.” It was yet another instance when the military was forced, by the president’s mandate under the OSRD, to cooperate with the scientists. Despite the military’s reluctance, Bush noted, the final agreement they hammered out over the Loran system “moved us a long way toward mutual respect, out of which only can arise genuine concert of effort in a common cause.”
At the navy’s request, the Rad Lab began work on the first Loran network, a chain of four stations that would cover the whole North Atlantic from Greenland to Nova Scotia. Over the summer, the physicists rushed to complete and assemble the equipment for the field stations, while a flying survey party of laboratory and navy personnel selected sites in Newfoundland, Labrador, and Greenland. By September 1942, the two Canadian stations were operational, and the southernmost one was synchronized with the Montauk Point station and with its northern mate at the other end of Nova Scotia. One month later, regular Loran navigational fixes became possible, with the Rad Lab scientists, U.S. Coast Guard, and Royal Canadian Navy supervising the sixteen-hour-daily operation of the service. Bad weather and shipping delays hampered the setup of the northern three stations in Newfoundland, Greenland, and Labrador, and during that critical winter the physicists and engineers braved foul weather and U-boat-infested waters to work on the installations. By spring, the entire seven-station system was operational. The navy’s next priority was the northeast Pacific, where ships needed help navigating the fog-bound Aleutians, and the north-east Atlantic. Eventually, the Loran network covered the whole of Europe east to the Danube and south to the North African coast.
One of the shortcomings of Loomis’ Loran system was its relatively short range over land: 150 to 200 nautical miles for the ground wave, as opposed to 700 to 800 nautical miles over water. Once it was discovered that after sunset sky waves traveled equally well over land and water, a new form of Loran known as SS (“Sky-wave synchronized”) was developed. SS Loran appeared to be particularly well suited to nighttime operations, such as those by RAF Bomber Command, which flew planes over central Europe at night, so the navy requested that the Rad Lab start a full-scale trial of the SS Loran system in the United States. Stations were set up near Duluth, Minnesota, and on Cape Cod to establish an east-west baseline; Key West and Montauk were used for a north-south baseline. By fall, army, navy, and RAF observation planes were flying missions across the east-central United States, navigating entirely by SS Loran. The results were “marvelous and phenomenal,” according to the pilots who flew the B-18s, and the navy immediately diverted some of its badly needed Loran ground station equipment to the European theater to help the RAF bombers.
Loomis reported on Loran’s progress to the secretary of war over a long dinner at Woodley on May 7, 1943. Afterward, the two men sat on the porch, talking late into the night. Stimson noted that his cousin was in “cheerful spirits” and full of news of “the enormous work being done by the laboratory in Boston.” Loomis described some of the new inventions and assured him that “the Germans have not progressed nearly as far in their developments of Radar as we have.” Their intelligence reports indicated that very few German submarines were even equipped with ASV radar yet. But he again warned Stimson, “Everything depends on our pushing ahead as rapidly as we can before they have developed it.”
Riding high on the Rad Lab’s string of successes, Loomis agreed to meet with the Rad Lab’s official historian, Henry Guerlac, who had been appointed by Bush to write a detailed account of the radar project, intended to justify, in the event of a congressional investigation, the huge sums of money spent. Loomis regarded the whole undertaking with suspicion and saw it as a kind of bureaucratic apologia aimed at mollifying the politicians on Capitol Hill and proving some half-baked thesis about government programs that he personally wanted no part of—“as for example, that capitalism was a bad thing.” He made this clear with almost his first remark, Guerlac recalled, when he “brushed aside” his carefully prepared list of questions, being much more interested in interrogating his interrogator: “He is a man of abundant energy, who talks rapidly and confidently, and who dominated the conversation from start to finish so effectively that I never really succeeded in making an interview of it.”
Finally, “while trying to avoid all direct references to himself,” Loomis reluctantly came round to answering a few questions about the developments in microwave radar “in which he took such a leading part.” He was thrilled by the United States’ ability to outdistance Germany in wartime radar capability and said that it was “convincing proof of the magic efficiency of American individualism and laissez-faire.” He believed Bush’s confidence in the ability of civilian scientists to apply their talents to military invention—“leaving them with complete freedom” on technical matters—epitomized the American way. The country’s fast results, he argued, came from “free agency and free[dom] from politics.” That said, he made some excuse and hurried away, leaving the stunned historian with almost nothing to show for his hour’s time with the microwave committee’s illustrious chairman.
When Guerlac later mentioned Loomis’ dismissive manner to John Trump, one of the other Rad Lab physicists, he was assured that it was probably nothing personal and that Loomis was just making sure he did not “gum up the present work at hand (e.g. building radar to win the war) by writing anything that would offend anybody.” Loomis had “one important characteristic,” Trump noted. “His ability to concentrate completely on a chief objective,” even at the cost of neglecting “matters that appear to other people to be of equal importance.”
THROUGHOUT the winter of 1943, the British and American air forces continued carrying out extensive bombing missions over Germany. Now that they had gained control over the Atlantic, and ASV radar together with a strengthened convoy system had broken the back of the German submarine offensive, the Allies could concentrate on the war in Europe. For months now, Allied troops had tried to smash their way into Italy and had been repulsed, and it became obvious that a new plan was needed to unlock the stalemate at the front. Beginning in March, American planes equipped with the H2X blind-bombing radar system began destroying Italian roads and railways that supplied the enemy stronghold at Anzio. Loomis’ Rad Lab had delivered the first H2X systems to the U.S. Army Air Forces that fall, and now they would have the satisfaction of seeing it fly blind-bombing missions over Germany. Rabi, who asked of every invention, “How many Germans will it kill?” and had pushed the microwave radar sets from ten centimeters to three, was responsible for making the advanced systems that much deadlier: now bombardiers flying above thick cloud cover could still see, on their radar screens, detailed images of strategic targets on the ground.
The big push began in the summer of 1943, when the U.S. Seventh Army and British Eighth Army invaded Sicily in one of the bitterest and costliest campaigns of the war. On September 3, Italy surrendered, and the Allied armies drove forward, slowly fighting their way north along the peninsula toward the Gustav line, where the German defense held. To break the locked front, the British planned a diversionary attack to give American amphibious forces a chance to make a surprise landing at the beach at Anzio, close to Rome. On January 22, 1944, when the American divisions waded ashore at Anzio, they brought with them the Rad Lab’s SCR-584 gun-laying radar systems, which the troops buried deep in the sand so that only the antenna was visible. Although they had trained more on textbook than on actual sets, with the radar guiding their artillery, they shot down five German planes the first night, and before the month was over the total had risen to sixty-three. While they achieved the beachhead at Anzio, the operation—in exposing a large force to risk for a relatively small advantage—was not considered an Allied triumph. But the performance of the Rad Lab’s radar in securing the perimeter had been impeccable.
In the early months of 1944, the bombing raids over Germany intensified, preparing the way for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of the European heartland. The ultimate success of the Normandy invasion depended on minimizing the strength of the German opposition. The Ninth Air Force had as their objective the destruction of German fighter strength, and flew radar-guided missions over all of northern France, Belgium, and Holland, identifying and attacking airfields and landing strips. Allied bombers also wreaked havoc with the French transport system, taking out the railways, roads, and bridges the German army would need to build up forces at the battlefield. It was expected that D-Day casualties would be high—very high—and the devastation from the steady strategic bombing was the best hope the seaborne infantry had that they would survive the landing and initial combat. In January, Loomis and Stimson discussed the secret operation, and the secretary of war noted that Alfred was full of warnings about rockets: “He thinks they are going to take the place of artillery and, as he is a pretty shrewd in his outlook, I am giving considerable weight to that now, thinking up the possibility of getting a rocket coverage for Overlord.”
Under the stormy skies of D-Day itself, the Rad Lab’s state-of-the-art radar systems stood watch, guaranteeing the Allied troops fire support during the landing and security from surveillance. On June 6, 1944, the largest amphibious invasion force ever mounted hit the beaches at Normandy. They were accompanied by a total of thirty-nine SCR-584 radar sets, which would help protect the infantry from air attacks as they advanced through Europe. In the darkness of the early morning hours, 450 airplanes equipped with H2X radar systems bombarded the French coastline, cloaking the beach in clouds of smoke and dust as five Allied divisions—two American, two British, and one Canadian—struggled ashore through the surf and dodged enemy fire as they headed for the shelter of the cliffs. It was a precisely timed operation, allowing only five minutes between when the last bomb fell and the first swarm of infantry debarked. While no Allied troops were felled by misdirected bombs, the fear of releasing payloads on their own men compounded a variety of other errors, resulting in hundreds of bombs being dropped onto fields behind German front lines and leaving thousands of American soldiers to be slaughtered at the water’s edge on Omaha beach. The air bombardment was more successful at Utah beach, where radar beacons successfully guided parachute troops and glider-borne infantry to their targeted drop zones. The Rad Lab’s precise navigation system, known as landing craft control (LCC), was also used to control the landing of the invasion force, directing wave after wave of assault troops to prearranged points on the sixty-mile-long beach.
By evening, a beachhead had been established. Despite the horrific losses at Omaha beach—where the American army suffered most of their 4,649 casualties—the Allies had succeeded in landing 120,000 men with artillery and supplies on the French shores. The Atlantic Wall—miles of trenches, reinforced concrete, barbed wire, and mines blocking access to Germany—had finally been breached. From then on, it was only a matter of time before Allied victory was assured.
The MEW system, set up across the Channel, also had a chance to star on D-Day. Beginning in the prelude, as fighter sweeps were sent over France, the MEW radar tracked their progress and spotted the enemy interceptors that soon followed. The pilots were warned, and as a result, the fighters made unprecedented numbers of kills. It also helped guide bombers over specific targets and aided in the air-sea rescue of downed pilots. Another set, mounted on a truck, plowed through windshield-high water onto the Normandy beach and ran much of the Ninth Tactical Air Command’s missions in support of the First Army. When Patton went on the offensive, the British borrowed a MEW set from the lab so the Nineteenth TAC could have it to support the Third Army. Rad Lab scientists had a front row seat on the aerial assault as they worked in the control room, standing by with little or no sleep for days, checking the system, observing the results, and correcting tactics. Alvarez’s MEW system, the greatest of the high-power warning radars, ended up chaperoning more and more tactical aircraft—controlling Thunderbolts flying off the Brest peninsula, dispatching bombers, and arranging rendezvous with friendly tank columns. According to Fortune: “Many a fighter pilot, returning from the Continent exhausted and out of ammunition, knew he owed his life to the radio voice of the seeing radar eye in the Fairlight ops room, which called out to him some such warnings as ‘Bandits on your left, take vector 090.’ The longhairs with their giant folly with short waves had brought him home.”
On June 12, six days after the Normandy invasion, the first buzz bombs came over the English Channel, loudly announcing themselves before suddenly, silently, plunging to earth, followed by a deafening explosion. In the first month of the V-1 attack, thousands of civilians in London and neighboring cities were killed by the flying bombs, which came to be known as Hitler’s “revenge weapon.” RAF fighters, guided by MEW, teamed up to fight the V-1 menace and succeeded in destroying a great many of the flying bombs before they hit their targets. Before long, RAF patrols cruised the skies day and night, waiting to intercept the deadly drones, which the MEW system could spot as far as 130 miles away. But the ballistic missile program was the pride of the Third Reich, and they had a seemingly endless store of these rockets, which were capable of placing a few tons of explosives on London daily.
After a desperate plea from Churchill to Roosevelt, two hundred of the Rad Lab’s SCR-584 gun-laying radar systems were transferred and deployed against the V-1s. What made the SCR-584 so effective in the end was the miniaturized radar proximity fuse—a shell with a radio-controlled detonator—which exploded near a plane or flying bomb for maximum destructive effect. Along with radar, the proximity fuse was one of the most important applications of the cavity magnetron, and it was given top priority by Bush’s NDRC, who assigned the development of the “smallest radar” to the noted Carnegie physicist Merle Tuve. For this revolutionary new device, the flight characteristics of the German V-1, which traveled in a straight line at a constant speed, made for a relatively easy target. Unlike the RAF fighters, which were not always successful in destroying the missiles as they left their launch sites, the SCR-584s, coupled with the proximity fuse, inflicted a heavy toll on the V-1s, destroying 85 percent of the flying bombs that succeeded in crossing the Channel.
On August 12, General Sir Frederick A. Pile, commander of the British antiaircraft command, sent his congratulations to General George Marshall: “The curve is going up at a nice pace, and already we are far away ahead of the fighters. As the troops get more expert with the equipment I have no doubt that very few bombs will reach London.” Marshall forwarded the note to Bush, who passed on his thanks to Loomis.
By September 1944, the SS Loran system was up and in regular service over the Continent, enabling nighttime navigation over land and sea. In the final months of the war, it helped with the bombing operations over Germany. RAF pathfinders equipped with SS Loran flew roughly twenty-two thousand bombing sorties. In the preceding months, the pilots had been relying on the Rad Lab’s radar blind-bombing system, the H2X, but when the results with Loomis’ navigation system were found to be better, the decision was made to conduct all the area bombing operations entirely by SS Loran. Night after night, SS Loran–guided pilots flew strategic bombing missions over the heartland of Germany, raining destruction down on its cities, factories, and railroads. By VJ-Day, the Loran chain extended over one-third of the globe and over most of the contested area, including the Pacific theater, where Loran stations had provided crucial navigational guidance for the Twentieth Air Force’s bombing of Japan. Loran transmitters installed in the Himalayas guided traffic over “the Hump” and safeguarded the vital supply routes into China, Burma, and India. Loran would continue to develop as a vital navigation system in peacetime, offering endless possibilities. The total cost of the Loran project from December 1940 to its close was approximately $1.5 million, while an estimated $100 million was spent on Loran systems, including shipping, assembly, and installation. The research and development of Loran came to no more than 2 percent of the government’s investment in the equipment—not a bad record for Loomis’ laboratory, which under the conditions of war research was “always ready to sacrifice money to buy time.”
IN a sense, the Rad Lab was a catalyst for the burst of creativity and inventive effort that would propel American scientists toward their pioneering achievement in Los Alamos. In the early days of the war, it was Loomis, in his role as scientific agitator, who had been the primary force in organizing the country’s nuclear physicists to work on radar, at a time when the atom splitters had little to do and fission’s useful applications still seemed remote. So by the fall of 1942, when Bush, Conant, and General Leslie Groves took steps to form the highly secret atomic bomb development program, which was then known as the Manhattan Engineering District (later as the Manhattan Project), along with an urgent effort to develop the component elements in sufficient quantity, they had to look no further than Loomis’ Rad Lab for a readily available pool of brilliant minds to draw on. These scientists had been collaborating on war research for over a year and would bring with them that cluster of collegiality, friendship, and trust that would help mitigate the terrible pressure and frictions inherent in the task ahead. Moreover, the Rad Lab had grown sufficiently in size and number so that those who were taken away would scarcely be missed, and their projects could be completed on schedule by others who would follow in their footsteps.
As soon as General Groves appointed Oppenheimer as scientific director of the Manhattan Project, he suggested he recruit his top men from Loomis’ brain trust of physicists. There would be one critical difference: Unlike Loomis’ civilian operation, the Manhattan Project was to be a military lab, which meant inducting the physicists into the army, something many of them were not happy about. Rabi objected vehemently and pointed to their recent experience at the Rad Lab. “We knew the military,” he explained. “We’d been engaged in making military things, had the military around us. We knew it wouldn’t work. In the first place, none of us would come.”
After a number of heated talks, a compromise was struck allowing the early experimental phase of the Manhattan Project to proceed under civilian administration along the lines of the Rad Lab, with the military assuming control after January 1, 1944 (the latter actually never occurred). “The first idea that Conant and Groves had was that the bomb was such a hot secret that they should get the boys out there in the fall of 1943,” recalled Kenneth Bainbridge, who was among the first Rad Lab alumni to leave for the New Mexico laboratory. “On January 1, they would have to decide whether they would go back and keep their mouths closed forever, or they’d stay on for the duration under the military procedure and put on uniforms.”
Once that hurdle was crossed, Oppenheimer was eager to start recruiting his staff and went to Cambridge to begin his raid on the Rad Lab. He knew he would have to coax many of the physicists into leaving Loomis’ laboratory, and this might inevitably cause some turbulence. As he wrote Conant: “In view of . . . the very large number of men of the first rank who are now working on that project, I am inclined not to take too seriously the no’s with which we shall be greeted. . . .” Oppenheimer began by courting Alvarez, a former Berkeley colleague and old friend. “Great salesman that he was,” recalled Alvarez, Oppenheimer had no difficulty convincing him to head west and join the atomic bomb project. “He wanted me back on his team and hinted enough about the challenges of the separation project to persuade me to leave radar.” He also set his sights on Rabi, another old friend. But Rabi refused Oppenheimer’s overtures and insisted on staying at the Rad Lab to finish his work. In the end, he agreed to serve as a consultant and would be one of the few scientists permitted to go back and forth to “the Hill,” as they dubbed the Los Alamos lab.
Loomis was shocked when he first heard Oppenheimer wanted to steal several of his ablest division heads, and he and DuBridge “hit the roof.” He had known Oppenheimer since his first visits to Berkeley, and while he acknowledged his brilliance, he had always found him a bit too arrogant and cocky. But out of loyalty to Bush and Lawrence, Loomis finally relented. Over the next few months, the list of scientists who joined the migration from the MIT Rad Lab to Los Alamos grew to include Norman Ramsey, Bob Bacher, Hans Bethe, and George Kistiakowsky. Oppenheimer needed everyone there by mid-April for a conference on the many problems of physics and technique that loomed large ahead of them. One by one, the physicists slipped quietly out of Cambridge, heading out to the desert by train and traveling under assumed names.
By that spring, the details of the uranium 235 bomb, called the “Thin Man,” had been pretty well worked out, and their main focus was directed toward the development of the plutonium 239 bomb. Oppenheimer asked Kistiakowsky, who had become an explosives expert at the request of the NDRC, to head up the effort, and he appointed Alvarez as his right-hand man. Fifteen months later, just after dawn on July 16, 1945, the first atom bomb test, Trinity, took place at a barren stretch of desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Lawrence, Bush, and Conant had come to the mesa for the demonstration and lay sprawled in shallow trenches twenty miles northwest of the tower-supported bomb. Alvarez was approximately twenty-four thousand feet above ground zero, watching from the cockpit of a B-29 bomber, when the sky suddenly turned bright, and he saw “an intense orange-red glow through the clouds.” He had volunteered to measure the explosive energy of the bombs that were to be dropped on Japan, and this was the only dress rehearsal.
As Kistiakowsky watched the ascending mushroom cloud through his welder’s mask, he felt the same combination of surprise and relief shared by so many of his colleagues at that moment—the bomb had actually worked. The detonators he and Alvarez had designed had fired as planned. It had gone off without a hitch. He looked around for Oppenheimer to collect his money. In the nerve-racking days before the bomb’s debut, they had started a betting pool to help ease the tension, each of them wagering on their estimate of the explosive yield. “Oppie, you owe me ten dollars,” he told Los Alamos’ director, who had entered a cautiously lowball guess. Later, they calculated the nuclear blast was equivalent to eighteen thousand tons of TNT, a yield of 18.6 kilotons, far greater than anyone had expected. Rabi, who had arrived late and had to take the last bet, which was eighteen—the theoretical maximum—wound up winning the pool.
After their initial jubilation at the outcome of the experiment, Rabi recalled the reverberating wave of dread that followed the “opening of the atomic age”:
While this tremendous ball of flame was there before us, and we watched it, and it rolled along, it became in time diffused with the clouds. . . . Then, there was a chill, which was not the morning cold; it was a chill that came to one when one thought, as for instance I did of my wooden house in Cambridge, and my laboratory in New York, and of the millions of people living around there, and this power of nature which we had first understood it to be—well, there it was.
The physicists knew the brutal island war in the Pacific made the use of the bomb inevitable. They had wondered briefly if the bomb project would go forward after Roosevelt’s stunning death from a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 14, 1945. It had struck him down in the midst of posing for his presidential portrait, and he had died a few hours later at three thirty-five P.M. Later that same day, Stimson began briefing Harry Truman, the newly sworn in commander in chief. “Stimson told me,” Truman wrote in his memoirs, “about an immense project that was under way—a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.” With Germany’s collapse a month later, on May 7, it appeared certain the bomb would be used against Japan. The weapon they had raced to develop to save the free world would be used to destroy a ruthless enemy and terminate the war. The success of the Trinity shot all but guaranteed that the new president would continue what his predecessor had begun. After weeks of debate over how the bomb should be used to bring surrender—a technical demonstration coupled with a warning was rejected by Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Compton, and Fermi as unlikely “to bring an end to the war”—the target cities in Japan were selected.
A few days after the test, Alvarez assembled spares of all the measurement system components, fitted out a toolbox to service the equipment, and made out a will. He packed the uniform and official papers that identified him as an air force colonel, so that if their plane was downed over enemy territory, he would be treated as a military officer and not executed as a spy. On July 20, he flew to Wendover, Utah, and boarded one of the Green Hornet Squadron’s transports, which would ferry him to the B-29 base on Tinian island, fifteen hundred miles from Japan. From there he would fly the mission in an escort plane three hundred feet behind Colonel Paul Tibbets’ Enola Gay, which would carry the Thin Man’s smaller and lighter brother, a four-ton atomic bomb known as “Little Boy.”
In the end, the calutron that Lawrence sketched in Loomis’ living room would supply virtually all of the U-235 uranium used in the bomb the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The sixty-inch cyclotron, using a method of gaseous diffusion that was developed at a second wartime plant in Hanford, Washington, would produce the fissionable plutonium 239 for the second bomb, dubbed the “Fat Man” in honor of Churchill, dropped on Nagasaki three days later.
BY the summer of 1944, Loomis had already begun to look ahead to the end of the war. The Rad Lab, whose experimental microwave technology had once been labeled by the army as “something for the next war,” had produced over a hundred distinct radar systems, most of which were in service and helping to speed the day of victory. But for much of the last year, the excitement of developing new radar equipment had been replaced by the laborious administrative task of seeing it produced and mobilized. Loomis spent much of the year chained to a desk in Washington and expediting patent filings so that the radar projects could be moved forward as quickly as possible. It was a tall order, as DuBridge described in a summary report: “By June 1943 nearly 6000 radar sets of Radiation Laboratory design had been delivered to the Army and Navy, 22,000 were on order, and production was climbing past the rate of 2000 sets per month of all types. The total value of Service orders had by that time grown to three quarters of a billion dollars. Production mounted rapidly during the latter half of the year, and equipment with trained personnel were reaching the theaters in large quantities.”
Loomis presided over a laboratory that had ballooned into an organization of nearly four thousand—five hundred of them physicists—with emissaries all over the world implementing its war-winning ideas and devices. It had sprawled over more than fifteen acres of floor space in Cambridge and elsewhere, spent approximately $80 million in federal funds, and in its last year had reached a budget of about $125,000 a day, or close to $4 million a month. It was, in the words of Karl Compton, “the greatest cooperative research establishment in the history of the world.” While many found fault with the administrative eccentricities of the organization—or “dis-organization,” as some critics maintained—it was General Patton, witnessing the Rad Lab’s radar systems in operation in the Rhineland in 1944, who observed, “This is the way that wars not only can, but must be, run from now on.” Loomis had helped to force the development of radar within the army, and in the opinion of many of his peers, his greatest contribution lay in his brilliantly orchestrated effort with Stimson to mobilize the products of science and technology, break down military resistance to the flow of innovative ideas and applications, and continuously press for further experimentation and the acceptance of new weapons systems and tactics. As Lawrence told an interviewer at the time, “If Alfred Loomis had not existed, radar development would have been retarded greatly, at an enormous cost in American lives.”
Lawrence, who had stood at Loomis’ elbow in the early days of the laboratory, could not pay high enough tribute to the banker-turned-scientist who had organized physics for war and exerted his enlightened influence on the kind of war the country was ultimately able to fight: “He had the vision and courage to lead his committee as no other man could have led it. He used his wealth very effectively in the way of entertaining the right people and making things easy to accomplish. His prestige and persuasiveness helped break the patent jams that held up radar development. He exercised his tact and diplomacy to overcome all obstacles. He’s that kind of man.” Lawrence added, “He steers a mathematically straight course and succeeds in having his own way by force of logic and of being right.”
As visionaries of the wartime laboratory, Loomis, Lawrence, and Compton had had the hubris to hire a staff dominated by physicists, and it enabled them to create an environment for research run for, and almost completely by, physicists, with everything subordinated to preserving their freedom and creativity and the production of their revolutionary technological devices. In doing so, Guerlac wrote in his official history of radar, “the Radiation Laboratory came close to realizing a scientist’s dream of a scientific republic, whose only limitation was the supply of scientists.” There were those who believed that the laboratory’s great success story should continue on after the war and that still more marvelous gadgets and techniques might be forthcoming. Loomis was vehemently opposed to the idea and took decisive steps to stop the juggernaut, paying a call on President Roosevelt. Loomis felt the Rad Lab would surely stagnate and falter and argued that “only the pressure of war” could make a government program of that size and magnitude flourish. He had great faith in private enterprise and a deep suspicion of public ones. While acknowledging that his opinion appeared to conflict with recent experience, Loomis maintained there was no cause short of the national defense that could have inspired him to help create a large, centralized, government-controlled laboratory, and the very idea was “anathema” to him. War was a great stimulus to science, but it was not a stunt that could be repeated in peacetime. Bush shared his views, and it was decided that the Rad Lab should be terminated.
With his war job almost over, Loomis was eager to return to private life. He felt worn down. He was exhausted by the constant travel and still suffered from the lingering effects of a serious bout of pneumonia. His marriage, which for years had existed only in appearance, was now at an end. His affair with Manette Hobart, long confined to the Glass House and furtive meetings at hotels, had become an open secret. There was no longer any question of his returning to his old home on Club House Road in Tuxedo Park. Throughout the war years, he had repeatedly packed his sickly wife off to sanitariums for her health, and Loomis, in a rare miscalculation, made the mistake of trying to have her committed permanently. When his oldest son, Lee, returned from war and discovered what his father had done, he rushed to his mother’s defense.
Lee was a big, obstreperous young man, and although he had followed his father’s lead and graduated from Harvard Law School and eyed a Wall Street career, the two had never gotten on. They had always knocked heads, now more than ever. Lee became his mother’s self-appointed protector and guardian. He took control of his mother’s half of the Loomis fortune and shrewdly invested it on her behalf. Both Lee and Henry regarded what their father had done as traitorous and angrily broke off all relations with him. The middle brother, Farney, refused to take sides. While Henry eventually reached an uneasy truce with his father, Lee would have scarcely anything to do with him for the next twenty years. “It was a very bitter divide,” said Lee’s daughter, Sabra Loomis. “They didn’t speak.”
Like most members of the family, she only knows bits and pieces of the story, because no one ever talked about it. During the war years, she lived with her grandmother in Tuxedo Park off and on when her parents were away, and they were very close. By then, Ellen had taken up the use of her maiden name again and signed her letters Ellen Farnsworth Loomis. “I had a dim sense as a child that a wrong had been done to her,” recalled Sabra. “I know at one point she’d been shut up in a hospital, and no one was allowed to write to her or talk to her. There seemed to be a bit of collusion going on in that the doctors had said, ‘No visits from the children, no calls from the husband, no visitors,’ and she thought she had been dumped there and abandoned. Alfred was very powerful and could have what he wanted. I always thought that there must have been something that precipitated it, whether it was that Alfred had already deserted her and she found out, but I don’t know. Only that if she was depressed when she went in, she was much more depressed by the time she got out.”
For someone who had always prided himself on being plainspoken, Loomis had been less than candid with his three sons about the existence of another woman. When he first broached the subject of the divorce with Lee, he denied there was anyone else. After they learned the truth, his deception made it seem that much more terrible. “They were all in a state because Alfred had lied to them,” recalled Paulie Loomis, who was engaged to be married to Henry. “Divorce was a terrible thing in those days, and between that and having Ellen locked up, he halfway destroyed her. Ellen blamed herself, and after that she just started to fall apart. I think Alfred did it just to get her out of the way,” she said, adding, “It’s the only thing I ever held against him.”
In the fall of 1944, Manette and her two young boys moved out west and took up residency in Nevada, as the state regulations governing divorce at the time required. Hobart did not contest the divorce, and in February she signed the papers making it official. Manette remained out west for the rest of that winter while she waited for Loomis to extricate himself from his marriage. He stayed at a neighboring ranch and commuted back and forth to Washington and Cambridge. On April 4, 1945, Alfred and Ellen Loomis’ divorce was final. A few hours later on the same day, he and Manette were married. A justice of the peace in Carson City, Nevada, performed the brief ceremony. No friends stood up for them, but a photograph taken after they exchanged vows shows Loomis, dressed in a banker’s pinstripes, standing stiffly beside his new bride. Manette is smiling shyly up at him and is wearing a prim black suit with a white rabbit-fur collar, cuffs, and matching fur muff, which she had purchased at Bonwit’s expressly for her wedding day. He was fifty-seven; she was thirty-six.
Although Loomis provided very generously for his former wife, giving her more than half of his substantial fortune as well as the house in Tuxedo Park and the penthouse off Fifth Avenue, New York society was appalled. It was hard to know what was more unforgivable—the tandem divorces, the hasty remarriage to a much younger woman, or the suggestion of a long clandestine relationship with his best friend’s wife. Cholly Knickerbocker, the reigning gossip of the day, wrote a scathing account of the affair in his regular column, “The Smart Set”:
It’s amazing how many members of the Rarified Set, whose very convolution in their social circles generally is noted for posterity by the scribblers, still can manage to draw the blinds on their glass houses and keep in the dark the changes that go on within. For example, I’m sure many of my eager readers are serenely unaware that the senior Alfred L. Loomis’ marital rapture of well over a quarter of a century is now a very definite rupture—and what’s more has been conclusively phfft for seven months. . . .
The story went on to note that the first public tip-off that the prominent couple were no longer “pulling together in double harness” was the publication of their separate entries in the most recent edition of The New York Social Register. “What’s more, it blandly noted the fact that Alfred is blissfully enjoying a second Darby and Joan existence with Belgian Manette Seeldrayers Hobart. . . . Evidently Al long had been a close friend to Manette and Garret Hobart—for a little research reveals the fact that when their first [actually, it is their second] son was born in 1937, Manette named the child Alfred Loomis Hobart!”
It would be impossible to overstate the reverberations Loomis’ divorce had in the elite financial and social circles he had once frequented. “Oh, I think it was the most shocking divorce at that time,” recalled Lynn Chase, whose husband, Edward L. Chase, was close to George Roberts, the head of Loomis’ old law firm, Winthrop & Stimson—which, in a move that was regarded as the coup de grâce in the scandalous affair, chose to represent Ellen and not Alfred in the divorce. “People absolutely turned their backs on him and had nothing to do with him for years. It was a combination of the fact that everyone had been so devoted to his wife, and that she was unwell and could not cope on her own. Then he had married somebody that had more or less been in his employ, had worked as some sort of secretary at his laboratory—it was all very, very shocking. He was like a nonperson after that. He just disappeared from society.”
The newlyweds steered clear of New York for several months, honeymooning at Del Monte Lodge, and in Carmel and San Francisco. Ernest and Molly Lawrence hosted a Saturday afternoon cocktail party in their honor and invited Don Cooksey and all the cyclotroneers. They celebrated later that night over dinner at Trader Vic’s, their old haunt, and organized a big picnic lunch at Muir Woods on Sunday. While they all wanted to be happy for Loomis, for whom they had tremendous admiration and affection, the Berkeley scientists, many of whom had met Manette on visits to Tuxedo Park when she was still Mrs. Garret Hobart, were every bit as astonished by the turn of the events as Loomis’ old club crowd. It is clear from the correspondence between Loomis and Lawrence throughout this period that even his closest colleague and friend failed to detect that anything was seriously amiss in his marriage. Lawrence had seen Ellen last in the fall of 1944 and had written thanking them for their hospitality—“it was certainly a real treat visiting you and Ellen again”—and expressing his delight that they were planning on “coming out in the spring.”
One can only imagine his surprise, to put it mildly, upon learning that a new Mrs. Loomis would be accompanying him on that trip. But the war had disrupted all their lives, and the years of all-consuming research, exacerbated by the burden of distance and secrecy, had taken a heavy toll on many marriages. If not exactly approving—Lawrence’s wife, Molly, and Ellen had become quite close—they were not inclined to judge him, either, and welcomed his new wife with open arms. Manette may have discerned a certain reserve on the part of some of the wives and once remarked that she did not get to know Molly very well in those first few years because she was “so wrapped up in her children that she didn’t have time,” though whether that was by necessity or by design is unclear.
In any case, they usually saw Lawrence alone. He and Manette got along famously and quickly formed a very close bond. She encouraged him to take up painting to relax and later made him pose for a large bronze bust she did of his handsome head. “We always used to joke that I was his teacher and he was my pupil,” recalled Manette, who regarded him as far more “human” than most scientists. “We could tease him; he loved that. He loved having a good time. He was full of life. He loved going out with people, and dancing with pretty girls when they went along.” Lawrence continued to visit Loomis in New York whenever he could and frequently accompanied them on jaunts to Jamaica and Balboa. The three of them reveled in one another’s company, and Lawrence and Manette would flirt outrageously with each other, much to Loomis’ evident pride and amusement.
On their return to New York, the couple moved into a large apartment in the Mayfair House, a sort of residential hotel that provided all the amenities, including room service and housekeeping, which Loomis, who had spent the war years in hotels, had come to appreciate. Manette’s domestic skills were also minimal, so it suited them both perfectly. Loomis also purchased a lovely summer home in East Hampton, Long Island, not far from R. W. Wood’s old farmhouse, with plenty of room for Manette’s sons when they were home from boarding school. But nothing prepared them for the inhospitable climate they had returned to. Most of the extended Loomis and Stimson tribe were not on speaking terms with him, and few of his blue-blooded peers wanted anything to do with his foreign wife. They got a decidedly chilly reception at the exclusive Maidstone Club in East Hampton. “I think it cut him very deeply,” said Lynn Chase, who can still remember the way people publicly snubbed Manette. “Here he had all this money and power, and he could not buy the approval of the Maidstone community.”
LOOMIS spent the next few months overseeing the dismantling of his laboratory and winding up millions of dollars in contracts. Things had been shipped in all directions, and many scientists were so anxious to help that they would send something to the Pacific without making any record of it. Thanks to Gaither and his crack team of administrators, every piece of equipment would be accounted for. “Out of the $30 million in outstanding claims for the government, MIT did not have to pay one cent,” Loomis later observed, “because he realized and I realized the government can thank you for doing something in an emergency, but along comes an order that wants to know where these typewriters are. . . .”
For most of the people who had worked there, it was hard to believe that an institution as big and vital as the Rad Lab could simply be shut down, but Loomis did just that. Never one to be sentimental, he scoffed at those who were reluctant to lock the doors and turn off the lights. By the end of summer, the penthouse sheds had been stripped of their antennas and knocked down, and most of the main laboratories had been emptied, with only marks on the linoleum to show where the furniture had been. Building 22, where Alvarez had done some of his finest work, was closed off, and carpenters were already at work turning it back into dormitory space for incoming MIT students. Like most endings, the Rad Lab’s was not nearly as glorious as its beginnings, when it opened for business in the fall of 1940, fourteen months before Pearl Harbor, on the strength of Loomis’ vision and the three dozen physicists who shared it.
In the end, after “five years of furious technology,” the atom bomb stole its thunder. “On the evening of August 5, 1945,” the official yearbook noted, “the Laboratory found itself in the same position as the overwrought butler”:
It had worked in secret. Newsmen had long since despaired of a story. But now it was to be told. An open invitation went to the press and newsreels. “Guided Tours” were set up for the next day. A painstaking “news release” was written. And a little before the 7:30 PM deadline, a messenger in a special car was sent off to the news offices of Boston. At 7:15 the messenger phoned in. She had delivered half of her releases, and could deliver no more. Her car was blocked by people running around in the street and kissing one another. It appeared that at 7:00 PM Japan’s surrender had been announced.
Although the press covered the laboratory later, the thrill was gone, and its glorious achievements got short shrift. Time magazine’s scheduled cover story on radar was bumped to page seventy-eight, and the new cover, celebrating V-J Day, credited the work of the Los Alamos physicists. The men who worked on the atomic bomb were hailed as heroes, and countless books and Hollywood movies would recount their exploits, while the daring and inventive minds who created radar were largely forgotten. The Manhattan Project became world famous. The Tizard Mission faded into obscurity. Only the Rad Lab veterans knew better, knew that if radar had not kept the Germans from defeating England, the war might have been over before America entered the contest. Everyone who had worked at the laboratory understood the decisive role their deadly devices had played in speeding the day of victory, and it was reflected in a remark by DuBridge that became something of an unofficial slogan, their badge of honor: “Radar won the war; the atom bomb ended it.”
In a strange sense, it was exactly the conclusion Loomis would have written himself. For the record, the yearbook tallied their successes: the lab had begun as a gamble, and it had paid off. They had started out behind and finished ahead. They had made history, smashed the U-boat, and shot down German planes and V-1s. Along the way, they had introduced some revolutionary concepts into warfare and significantly advanced knowledge in the field, packing decades of radar development into only a few years. They had also given birth to a new billion-dollar industry, and at least half a dozen companies were either stating or implying in their advertising copy that radar was their own private invention. While proud of everything they had accomplished, Loomis and his physicists were personally “embarrassed by the problem of telling what they had done,” an awkwardness that was reflected in the Rad Lab’s perfunctory official statements in the days and weeks that followed. Of course, it was impossible to overstate their debt to the British, not to mention prior work done by the U.S. Navy and Army Signal Corps, and therefore difficult to know how much to lay claim to, not to mention the perennial problem of sorting out who did what in the white heat of the moment.1
The Rad Lab formally closed on December 31, 1945. Most of the physicists returned to their university jobs and resumed their careers as professors and research scientists. After completing all his administrative duties as head of the OSRD’s radar section in 1947, Loomis returned to his former activities as a philanthropist, withdrawing quietly into private life. Almost from the moment the Rad Lab ceased operating, Loomis began to disappear. He refused requests for interviews and photographs, and proved so elusive that to get his portrait to accompany their glowing account of his adventures in business and science, Fortune magazine had to pursue him by plane all the way to his private twenty-two-thousand-acre retreat on Hilton Head Island. He turned down prestigious job offers and university appointments, including a long-standing offer from Lawrence to come work with him at his Berkeley laboratory. After the war, he was besieged by letters asking for his support for various scientific causes and research projects, along with innumerable invitations to speak before civilian groups—“this Rotary club, that Women’s auxiliary,” as he put it—most of which he ignored. The requests to sign his name to various protests and petitions were promptly tossed in the waste bin.
Except for occasional appearances at various advisory committee meetings, including an Atomic Energy Commission Panel on Radiological Warfare and the Joint Research and Development Board headed by Bush to counsel the army and navy on strategic matters, Loomis was absent from the Washington scene where he had only recently been such a forceful presence. He was, by disposition, an extremely understated man who really did not care for being center stage. A large part of his success as the laboratory’s leader had been his charisma and persuasiveness, a positive thrust that enabled him to win the confidence of so many brilliant scientists and convince them that supporting and furthering their work was his only goal. While he had teamed up with Lawrence as a pioneer of “big science,” organizing massive industrial and government funding for his large-scale projects, and in the process changing forever the expenditures of money and manpower that would be committed to such research efforts, his true allegiance was always with “little science.” He wanted nothing more than to return to the solitary wizardry of men like R. W. Wood, lone experimentalists who, working practically by themselves in a private laboratory, succeeded in making major contributions to the frontiers of knowledge.
Loomis followed his passion for science to Washington, and then into war, but political influence was something that neither interested him nor held any allure. He did not care to join the ranks of physicists-turned-elder statesmen who were trotted out at conventions and government seminars, to be “exhibited as lions at Washington tea parties,” as the distinguished physicist Samuel K. Allison described “the awe and gratitude of the scientifically illiterate lay world.” Independence was a luxury he could afford, and it enabled him to remain detached, and slightly above, the postwar scramble for position and power that consumed so many of his colleagues.
Although he attempted to avoid attention and public recognition wherever possible, he continued to collect laurels. There was another honorary degree—this one from Wesleyan. In February 1948, while out in California visiting Lawrence, Loomis received a letter from the British embassy informing him that he was to receive one of their country’s highest decorations:
It is with great pleasure that I inform you that the King has been pleased to award His Majesty’s Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom in recognition of the valuable services you rendered to the Allied War effort in the various fields of scientific research and development.
That spring, Harry Truman awarded him the Presidential Medal of Merit, the highest civilian award, for his contribution as one of the leading scientific generals of the war. In the ceremony on Governors Island on the morning of June 23, 1948, Loomis was cited for his “exceptional meritorious conduct” and the “performance of outstanding services” to the United States from June 1940 to December 1945:
Dr. Loomis, as Chairman of the Microwave Committee of the National Defense Research Committee, early foresaw the military possibilities of microwave frequencies for radar detection and ranging. His personal qualities and enthusiasm enabled him to enlist the services of many brilliant physicists and engineers in the coordinated development of this new art. . . . A brilliant experimentalist endowed with extraordinary foresight, Dr. Loomis was a central figure in this development program that contributed so significantly to the successful termination of the war.
At the close of the ceremonies, General Courtney H. Hodges told the scientists who were being honored that day, among them pioneers of rockets, antiaircraft weapons, and infrared equipment, that he understood their reluctance toward “the wholesale transference of intellectual effort to destruction.” He assured them, however, that they had a distinguished precedent in the great mathematician Archimedes, who turned his genius to the defense of the Greek city of Syracuse and destroyed the invading Roman armies with his fireballs, mirrors, and ingenious instruments of violence.
The allusion to Olympic glory was wasted on Loomis, who suffered from no guilt or lingering doubts about his part in developing weapons of war. Unlike many of the scientists who worked on the bomb, he did not regret the “atomic age” or question the morality of devising even more fearful devices. In fact, Loomis felt there ought to be more courage in experimentation in nuclear physics than before and always expressed great faith that scientists could see to it that their products were used responsibly and to the benefit of mankind. He believed in exploring new scientific knowledge to its fullest extent, moving forward without fear of where the experiments might lead. Nobody could foresee all the possibilities and how they might be applied not only to war, but also to peacetime and utilitarian purposes, with incredible potential advantage to civilization. He could not imagine that any “true scientist” could feel differently: “If you want to find the truth, you must continue to experiment.” It was the optimistic credo he had believed in thoroughly all his life. He saw no reason to abandon it now because some people trembled at the awesome power of a nuclear explosion.
Loomis was drawn into the debate over the further testing of nuclear weapons as well as other postwar developments, but increasingly from the remove of his East Hampton home. He made himself available for consultation on his personal opinions but did not care to serve as a spokesman for any particular group or ideology. Leaders in government and industry continued to seek out his counsel because of his long record of success and the almost prophetic accuracy of his appraisals of both men and events. He seemed at times to possess a “seerlike vision,” observed Caryl Haskins, who would succeed Bush as president of Carnegie. It was, he wrote, “an insight given only to the greatest of men.”
For the most part, Loomis disparaged politics and thought it a great pity that so many good scientists were squandering their time and energy on policy problems when they could be pursuing fundamental research instead. He continued to be a close adviser to Lawrence on all matters and cautioned him to avoid getting caught up in wasteful political activity. He even asked Gaither, who had returned to his legal practice in San Francisco, to keep an eye on his generous friend and make sure he did not fall victim to pressure groups. Loomis made a rare exception to this rule a year later when Gaither was asked by the air force to organize the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit outfit that would apply the “best scientific abilities and achievements” to ensure the national defense, and pleaded with Loomis to become founding trustee. He was finally persuaded and was tremendously influential in the pioneering phase of the organization and later even brought Lawrence onto the board.
Loomis never reopened his Tuxedo Park laboratory. At one point, he looked into the possibility of donating the lab to the Rockefeller Foundation or similar nonprofit outfit, but the Tuxedo Park Association was adamantly opposed to the continued operation of a research facility within its confines. He tried to get more than one neighbor to take the property off his hands and found he literally could not give it away. By the end of the war, Tuxedo was in a terrible decline. Old-time resorters had deserted it, and with more than half of the sprawling “cottages” vacant and run-down, it had become known as “the Graveyard of the Aristocracy.” As Cleveland Amory observed in 1948, “No other community in this country ever started off on a grander social scale, and therefore no other may be said to have fallen so hard.” Loomis finally sold the Tower House to a developer, who renovated the property into separate rental units and renamed it the Villa Apartments. Almost immediately thereafter, the Tuxedo Park by-laws were changed to prevent the conversion of any other historic mansion into condominium complexes. The Tower House’s Tudor facade with its single tower remains substantially unchanged, however, and the dark, ornate entrance hall still seems haunted by old ghosts. His beloved Glass House was purchased by a park resident and has been preserved as a private home, its stark white design and double glass walls testifying to the bold ideals of a bygone era.
In his memoirs, Alvarez, who called Loomis “the last of the great amateurs,” lamented that his enormous contributions to science and his country would not be remembered, while conceding that it was “an anonymity of which he would have approved but which hardly does him justice.” But Loomis had no interest in assuming an elevated mantle. Taffy Bowen, who had often marveled at the mysterious way Loomis, “as if by magic,” knew exactly how to get a project started or where to obtain the requisite materials, discovered years later the lengths his American friend had often gone to in order “to avoid taking credit for the developments with which he was associated.” So Bowen was not surprised that when it came to his role in the construction of Lawrence’s giant cyclotrons and the development of microwave radar, “he took pains to see that his part in it was covered up.” Looking back, he wrote, “the extraordinary thing is the modesty with which all of this was done.”
“He didn’t take credit for things, that was very characteristic of him,” said Haskins, who counted himself among the “fortunate band” of scientists privileged to call Loomis a friend. “Of course, he was known in closed circles, but not widely known, after the war. History forgot him. Well, in a sense he forgot himself, because he didn’t care about all that. He wasn’t interested in the past. He was interested only in the present and the future.”
1. Loomis’ application for the Loran patent was disputed by two scientists, each of whom claimed to be the first inventor of the fundamental concept. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office twice held in Loomis’ favor. The court of customs and patent appeals later reversed the ruling in one of the cases. A Loran patent was finally issued to Loomis on April 28, 1959.