Origins of RAND - Tuxedo Park - Alfred Lee Loomis
Origins of RAND - Radar development at Tuxedo Park - Alfred Lee Loomis -
multimillionare and the ultimate insider - after the war and retiring he never
gave an interview (the unknown Howard Hughes)
(Tuxedo Park ) Radar won the War - (Manhattan Project) Atomic Bomb ended the war
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/id/131054
Tuxedo Park
Ms. Conant talked about her book, Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the
Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II, published by
Simon and Schuster. The book is the story of Alfred Lee Loomis, a
wealthy businessman who was also a scientist. He helped establish a
top-secret laboratory at M.I.T. where advanced radar systems were
developed that helped the Allies defeat Germany in World War II.
http://www.amazon.com/Tuxedo-Park-Street-Science-Changed/dp/0684872870
http://www.rand.org/about/history/
The Origins of RAND
World War II had revealed the importance of technology research and development
for success on the battlefield and the wide range of scientists and academics
outside the military who made such development possible. Furthermore, as the war
drew to a close, it became apparent that complete and permanent peace might not
be assured. There were discussions among people in the War Department, the
Office of Scientific Research and Development, and industry who saw a need for a
private organization to connect military planning with research and development
decisions.
In a report to the Secretary of War, Commanding General of the Army Air Force H.
H. "Hap" Arnold wrote:
"During this war the Army, Army Air Forces, and the Navy have made
unprecedented use of scientific and industrial resources. The conclusion is
inescapable that we have not yet established the balance necessary to insure the
continuance of teamwork among the military, other government agencies, industry,
and the universities. Scientific planning must be years in advance of the actual
research and development work."
In addition to General Arnold, key players involved in the formation of Project
RAND were:
Edward Bowles of M.I.T., a consultant to the Secretary of War;
General Lauris Norstad, then Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Plans;
Major General Curtis LeMay;
Donald Douglas, President of Douglas Aircraft Company;
Arthur Raymond, Chief Engineer at Douglas;
Franklin Collbohm, Raymond's assistant.
(During the war, both Raymond and Collbohm had been brought to the Pentagon by
Bowles to work on a special project that analyzed ways to improve the
effectiveness of the B-29.)
...
In May 1946, the first RAND report appeared, Preliminary Design of an
Experimental World-Circling Spaceship,[1] concerned with the potential
design, performance, and possible use of man-made satellites. A year later,
Project RAND moved from the Douglas plant at Santa Monica Airport to offices in
downtown Santa Monica. Also in 1947, a symposium was held in New York as part of
Project RAND's Evaluation Section as a first step in enlisting social
scientists for the staff.
By early 1948, Project RAND had grown to 200 staff members with expertise in a
wide range of fields including:
mathematicians engineers aerodynamicists physicists
chemists economists psychologists
....
On May 14, 1948, RAND was incorporated as a nonprofit corporation under the
laws of the State of California. The Articles of Incorporation set forth
RAND's purpose in language that was both remarkably brief and breathtakingly
broad:
To further and promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for
the public welfare and security of the United States of America.
The three signatories — Franklin Collbohm, H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., and
L.J. Henderson, Jr., RAND associate director — together with eight other
prominent individuals selected from academe and industry, constituted RAND's
original Board of Trustees.
The other eight members were: Charles Dollard, president, Carnegie Corporation
of New York; Lee A. Dubridge, president, California Institute of Technology;
John A. Hutcheson, director, research laboratories, Westinghouse Electric
Corporation; Alfred L. Loomis, scientist; Philip M. Morse, physicist,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Frederick F. Stephan, professor of social
statistics and director, Office of Survey Research and Statistics, Princeton
University; George D. Stoddard, president, University of Illinois; and Clyde
Williams, director, Battelle Memorial Institute.
Informal discussions with representatives of the Ford Foundation led to an
agreement at the end of July 1948 for an interest-free loan from the Foundation
and its guarantee of a private bank loan to RAND. A total of $1 million was
secured for operating the new corporation. Four years later, an expansion of the
Foundation's loan enabled the establishment of a RAND-Sponsored Research
Program, which furnished staff with the means to conduct small non-military
research projects. This marked the beginning of the diversification of RAND's
agenda and was the first of many grants to RAND by the Ford Foundation to
support important new research initiatives.
On November 1, 1948, the Project RAND contract was formally transferred from
the Douglas Aircraft Company to the RAND Corporation.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=574&page=308
BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS With that brief introduction to the remarkable career of
Alfred L. Loomis, we will now examine the man himself, to find, as one might
expect, that he was indeed as extraorcli- nary as his unique accomplishments
would suggest.
He was born in New York City on November 4, 1887.
His father was Dr. Henry Patterson Loomis, a well-known physician and professor
of clinical medicine at New York and Cornell medical colleges.
His grandfather, for whom he was named, was the great nineteenth century
tuberculosis specialist whose work was commemorated in the naming of the Loomis
Laboratory at Cornell Meclical College, and the Loomis Sanatorium at
Liberty, New York. His maternal uncle was also a physician, as well as the
father of Alfred Loomis' favorite cousin, Henry L. Stimson, who was Secretary
of State uncle Herbert Hoover, and Secretary of War throughout World War
II.
From Alfred Loomis' eclucational background, one would correctly judge that he
came from a prosperous, but not exceedingly wealthy family. He attended St.
Matthew's Military Academy in Tarrytown, New York from the age of nine until he
entered Andover [S&B Prep school] at thirteen.
His early interests were chess and magic; in both fields, he attained near
professional status. He was a child prodigy in chess, and could play two
simultaneous blindfold games. He was an expert card and coin manipulator,
and he also possessed a collection of magic apparatus of the kind used by stage
magicians.
On one of the family summer trips to Europe, young Alfred spent most of his
money on a large box filled to the brim with folded paper flowers, each of which
would spring into shape when released from a confined hiding place. His
unhappiest moment came when a customs inspector, noting the protective manner in
which the box was being held, insisted that it be opened over the strong
protests of its owner. It took a whole afternoon to retrieve all the flowers.
http://nndb.net/people/223/000170710/
Alfred Lee Loomis
Born: 4-Nov-1887 Birthplace: New York City
Died: 1-Aug-1975
Alfred Lee Loomis was a wealthy investment banker whose philosophy was to
remain as liquid as possible, and as a result he made it through the 1929 stock
market crash largely unscathed [Inside information].
When not playing the financial markets, his hobby was science -- he invented an
artillery chronograph to measure muzzle velocity of fired shells, and patented
an early electroencephalograph. He conducted experiments and research into such
topics as sound waves, spectrometry, and the very exact measurement of time,
doing all of his work at a lavish laboratory on the grounds of his estate in
Tuxedo Park, New York.
His cousin was Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and from his scientific work
and underwriting he counted Vannevar Bush, Robert W. Wood, and John D.
Rockefeller, Jr. among his friends. On the basis of this and an advanced (for
its time) microwave radar set Loomis had designed and installed in a motor
vehicle, he was asked to head the National Defense Research Committee's
microwave radar project.
His funding, connections, and not insignificant scientific work were
instrumental in the development of more advanced radar that gave Allied forces a
military advantage during World War II. He was also involved in development
of the centrifuge microscope, and attended preliminary meetings of the
Manhattan Project.
While already married, Loomis had a long affair with his best friend's wife,
Manette Hobart, and they married the same day that his divorce from his first
wife was finalized. His son, Alfred Loomis Jr., won a gold medal in the yachting
competition in the 1948 Olympics. Another son, Henry Loomis, was appointed by
Richard M. Nixon to head the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the 1970s.
His grandfather, Alfred Lebbeus Loomis, was a physician of moderate renown, and
Alfred Lee Loomis was a great-uncle of Julie Stimson Thorne, the first wife of
US Senator John Kerry.
Father: Henry Patterson Loomis (professor of medicine, b. 1859, d. 1907)
Mother: Julia Stimson Loomis (b. 1861, m. 1887)
Wife: Elizabeth Ellen Farnsworth Loomis ("Betty", d. 1975)
Son: Alfred Lee Loomis, Jr. (venture capitalist, d. 1994)
Son: Henry Loomis (President of Corporation for Public Broadcasting, b. circa
1919)
Son: William Farnsworth Loomis ("Farney", biochemist, b. 1914, d.
1973)
Wife: Manette Seeldrayers Hobart Loomis Christie (d. 1991)
High School: Phillips Academy Andover (1905)
University: BA, Yale University (1909)
Law School: LLD, Harvard Law School (1912)
American Astronomical Society
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Chemical Society
American Philosophical Society
American Physical Society
IEEE
National Academy of Sciences
RAND Corporation Consultant
Royal Astronomical Society
National Defense Research Committee
Manhattan Project
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Alfred_Lee_Loomis
Alfred Lee Loomis (November 4, 1887 – August 11, 1975) was an American
attorney, investment banker, physicist , philanthropist and patron of
scientific research. He established the Loomis Laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New
York , and his role in the development of radar is considered instrumental
in the Allied victory in World War II . He invented the Aberdeen Chronograph for
measuring muzzle velocities, proposed the LORAN navigational system,
contributed significantly (perhaps critically, according to Luis Alvarez ) to
the development of a ground-controlled approach technology for aircraft,
and participated in preliminary meetings of the Manhattan Project .
Loomis also made contributions to biological instrumentation—working with
Edmund Newton Harvey, he co-invented the microscope centrifuge, and pioneered
techniques for electroencephalography .
In 1937 he discovered the sleep K-complex [REM] brainwave.
...
In 1917 Alfred Loomis and Landon K. Thorne, the wealthy husband of
Loomis's sister Julia, purchased of Hilton Head Island, which they established
as a private preserve for riding, boating, fishing and hunting.
...
They became very wealthy by financing electric companies as these began
to establish the electrical infrastructure of rural America, and Loomis sat
on the boards of several banks and electric utilities. Loomis and Thorne
pioneered the concept of the holding company, consolidating many of the
electric companies that operated on the East Coast of the United States . Loomis
further increased his fortune via insider trading practices that are now
illegal.
In anticipation of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, he had converted most of
his investments into cash after the market had risen so dramatically that he
and his partner decided it was unsustainable. Once the stock market crash had
bankrupted the majority of speculators, while Wall Street floundered, he
became even wealthier as a result of purchasing stocks cheaply after they had
plummeted in value and few people had the cash to reinvest.
Loomis, always a very private person who avoided publicity, retreated
from public life entirely after closing the Rad Lab and finishing his
related obligations in 1947. He retired to East Hampton with Manette, and never
granted another interview
Henry Loomis - Alfred Lee Loomis's son - origins of Mitre - chip off the
block:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/07/AR2008110703752.html
Henry Loomis, 89; Physicist Led VOA and Public Broadcasting
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Henry Loomis, who died Nov. 2 in Jacksonville, Fla., at age 89, was director of
the Voice of America during the Eisenhower administration, president of the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting during the Nixon administration and a
physicist who served as board chairman of the MIT-affiliated defense
contractor, Mitre.
Mr. Loomis, who died of complications from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Pick's
disease, also was the brilliant son of one of the most extraordinary, if now
obscure, Americans of the 20th century.
Mr. Loomis's father, Alfred Lee Loomis, was a fabulously wealthy Wall Street
tycoon who survived the Depression years in high style and then, at the height
of his influence, quit Wall Street and devoted himself to science.
In Tuxedo Park, N.Y., the tony village 40 miles northwest of Manhattan where the
Loomis family lived, he created a magnificent private laboratory in a massive
stone castle and hosted the great scientific minds of his day.
As World War II approached, he personally bankrolled pioneering research into
radar detection systems and nuclear physics. At his Tuxedo Park mansion, he
conferred with the leading scientists of his time, including Albert Einstein,
Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr.
Alfred Loomis gave each of his three sons $1 million with which to experiment
as teenagers. He also bequeathed his scientific brilliance.
In 1940, realizing that World War II was imminent, Henry Loomis dropped out
of Harvard University during his senior year and enlisted in the Navy.
(Harvard awarded him his undergraduate degree in physics in 1946, giving him
credit for his Navy radar teaching.)
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he became an instructor at the Navy's
Oahu radar training school, teaching senior officers how to use an
air-to-surface-vessel radar system that had been developed at his father's
laboratory.
Toward the end of the war, when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Lt.
Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic
bomb, were trying to decide which Japanese cities to bomb, a chance visit by Mr.
Loomis helped persuade the two men to spare the ancient city of Kyoto. Mr.
Loomis had studied Japanese history at Harvard and was passionate about the
ancient city's art treasures.
"I said 'No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want
that,' " he told the Florida Times-Union in 2002.
Stimson, a former secretary of state and war, was a Loomis family cousin and
something of a surrogate father to Mr. Loomis. He "used to tell us that
we'd been kind of lucky in life and that we owed the country a duty," Mr.
Loomis told his father's biographer.
Henry Loomis was born April 19, 1919, in Tuxedo Park, where he played an
active role in many of his father's scientific experiments.
In the Florida Times-Union interview, he recalled being 17 and sleeping
peacefully in a dark, soundproof room, with electrodes attached to his head,
while his father hovered over a nearby microphone.
The elder Loomis knew that his son's great love was the boat Land's End, which
Henry and his brother owned. Through the microphone, Alfred Loomis whispered,
"Land's End is on fire!"
Young Henry bolted out of bed, wires flying from his head. Still half asleep, he
attempted to climb the wall, as if it were the boat's companionway ladder. From
the experiment, his father deduced that emotional disturbance altered
human brain waves.
Mr. Loomis graduated first in his naval training class and, in addition to
teaching radar, served as a radar officer with carriers, air squadrons and
battleships. He received the Bronze Star.
After the war, he did graduate work in physics at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he was an assistant to radiation laboratory
director Ernest Lawrence.
He served on the board of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology-affiliated Mitre Corp. for 13 years and worked with the Central
Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department before being named Voice of
America director in 1958.
Mr. Loomis realized that English was becoming an international language and was
eager for it to be more accessible to VOA's international audience. He pushed
for the development of Special English, for listeners learning the language. The
news was delivered at a slower pace of nine lines a minute, spoken accurately,
and with a vocabulary limited to 1,500 words.
Mr. Loomis quit as VOA director in 1965 after a falling-out with President
Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam War. Johnson demanded that VOA keep quiet
about American planes flying over Laos. Believing that VOA had an obligation
to report the news, Mr. Loomis resigned in protest.
From 1972 to 1978, he was president of the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting. A Middleburg resident during his days in government, he moved
to Jacksonville in 1987.
His marriage to Paulie Loomis ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of 34 years, Jacqueline Chalmers Loomis of
Jacksonville; four children from his first marriage, Henry Stimson Loomis of
Denver, Mary Paul Loomis of Hyde Park, Vt., Lucy Loomis of Aiken, S.C., and
Gordon Loomis of Waxahachie, Tex.; and four stepsons, Charles Williams IV of
Orlando, John Williams and David Williams, both of Jacksonville, and Robert
Williams of Cary, N.C.; 17 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Cloak and
Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence - By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
Henry Loomis - Eisenhower Administration - Working for the CIA - Came up
with Biological and chemical warfare plan for the US
http://www.rand.org/about/history/
In May 1946, the first RAND report appeared, Preliminary
Design of
an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship
http://www.rand.org/pubs/special_memoranda/SM11827/
More than eleven years before the orbiting of Sputnik, history’s first
artificial space satellite,
Project RAND — then active within Douglas
Aircraft Company’s Engineering Division — released its first report:
Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship (SM-11827), May
2, 1946. Interest in the feasibility of space satellites had surfaced somewhat
earlier in a
Navy proposal for an interservice space program (March 1946).
Major General Curtis E. LeMay, then Deputy Chief of the Air Staff for
Research and Development,
considered space operations to be an extension of
air operations...
Alfred Loomis as "Dr. Grant"? Interesting - first satallite
scenario in 1947?
http://www.airlockalpha.com/node/7596
'Eureka' - Founder's Day
...
James Callis as Dr. Trevor Grant
Jack risked life and limb to shift the
satellite alignment
... if Dr. Grant is restored back to 1947 remains to be seen.
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/docs/shapin_LRBTuxedoPark.pdf
Talking with Alfred - Steven Shapin
...
He was, Jennet Conant writes, ‘a corporate capitalist of the first order’.
In 1928, Stimson warned his cousin about the
massive speculative bubble that was developing in the stock market, and
particularly in the electric utilities, but he was preaching to the choir.
Loomis had already come to the same conclusion, and in the first few months
of 1929 he liquidated all his stocks, prudently turning them into Treasury bonds
and cash – just before the Great Crash of 24 October. That was the fortune
he lived on for the rest of his life, and it was quite big enough to allow him
to retire at the height of the Depression, aged just 46.
...
In the early 1930s, as the unemployed were selling apples for a nickel in Wall
Street, Loomis financed and skippered a no-expense-spared, state-of-the-art
America’s Cup yacht, which, nevertheless, finished dead last in the final
Newport trials.
...
He wanted to be, if not a physicist himself, then at least well thought of by
physical scientists and of use to their researches. Impressed by Lord
Rayleigh’s country-house laboratory at Terling Place in Essex,
Loomis established a superbly equipped laboratory in an annexe to his
house in Tuxedo Park, and there began to entertain a succession of
eminent, often émigré, often Jewish scientists whose appearance shocked the
neighbours: ‘strange outlanders with flowing hair and baggy trousers’.
Over the years, the roll-call of physicists who either visited or worked in
the Loomis Laboratory included Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg,
Robert Wood, E.O. Lawrence, George Kistiakowsky, Leo Szilárd, the Compton
brothers (Arthur and Karl) and Albert Einstein.
...
Loomis was an excellent keeper of secrets. Later on, his top-security
clearances, as well as his abilities and contacts, made him one of the inner
circle both in the Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb, and
especially in the MIT Radiation Laboratory, which constructed the militarily
vital distant-object locating systems, radar and LORAN.
...
It was Loomis who got the ‘Rad Lab’ located at MIT, facing down the
opposition of Bell Labs and other industrial firms who feared non-profit
academic competition in what they saw as essentially an engineering and
production problem. He was, after all, a member of the MIT governing board
and a close friend of the university’s president, Karl Compton.
When the Tizard mission arrived from Britain bearing the cavity magnetron
that was at the heart of radar’s secret, Loomis popped into Stimson’s
Washington office to make sure the secretary of war properly appreciated the
huge significance of the device, and Stimson in turn contacted the army
chief of staff, General George Marshall, so that he could be briefed by
his cousin. That’s the kind of access that shaved weeks off the development
of radar when even small delays cost lives.
Loomis browbeat industry representatives from Bell, RCA and Sperry to
deliver contract work on a timescale they initially could not even conceive.
...
When scientists were scraping about for funds to finance early work on
fission or microwave detection systems, Loomis emerged as the most effective
fixer. Spurred on by Stimson, he was instrumental in getting the Rockefeller
Foundation to provide over $1 million for Lawrence’s 184-inch cyclotron at
Berkeley, and then he took Lawrence by the hand around an array of Wall
Street and engineering firms to knock down the price of steel, copper and
other matériel. (It later emerged that Loomis had a controlling interest in
several of these firms.)
He was so well networked in contemporary high-tech business circles that he
could walk into the General Electric labs and get whatever equipment he
and his associates needed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush
A 1940 meeting at Berkeley with (from left to right) Ernest O. Lawrence, Arthur
H. Compton, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Karl T. Compton, and Alfred
L. Loomis
Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974; pronounced /væˈniːvɑr/
van-NEE-var) was an American engineer and science administrator known for his
work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic
bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, and the idea of the memex,
an adjustable microfilm-viewer which is somewhat analogous to the structure of
the World Wide Web. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and
Development, Bush coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading
American scientists in the application of science to warfare.[1]
Bush was a well-known policymaker and public intellectual during World War II
and the ensuing Cold War [2], and was in effect the first presidential science
advisor. Bush was a proponent of democratic technocracy and of the centrality of
technological innovation and entrepreneurship for both economic and geopolitical
security.
http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html
In 1937, Bush became the president of the Carnegie Institution. The
institution spent $1.5 million annually on research. The presidency of the
institution came with a lot of prestige. The president influenced the direction
of research in the U.S. and informally advised the government on scientific
matters,
On June 12, 1940, Bush met with President Roosevelt and detailed his plan
for mobilizing military research. He proposed a new organization he called the National
Defense Research Committee (NDRC).
In mid-1941, The Office of Scientific Research and Development was set up. (OSRD)
Many useful innovations resulted from OSRD research and development
including improvements in radar, the proximity fuse, anti-submarine
tactics, and various secret devices for the OSS (the precursor of the CIA).
Bush was also very closely involved in the Manhattan Project which developed the
first atomic bomb. Of course most of OSRD's work was top secret during
the war, but Bush as its leader became something of a celebrity. Colliers
magazine hailed him as the "man who may win or lose the war"
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/groves_med.htm
GROVES AND THE MED (1942)
...
Vannevar Bush had carefully managed the transition to Army control, there
was not yet a mechanism to arbitrate disagreements between the S-1 Committee and
the military. The resulting lack of coordination complicated attempts to
gain a higher priority for scarce materials and boded ill for the future of the
entire bomb project.
http://www.reformation.org/super-bomb-letter.html
Inspecting the Hanford Washington plutonium production plant at the time of the
Manhattan Project.
From left to right: James B. Conant, Vannevar Bush, General Leslie Groves and
Col. Franklin Matthias
gone from the doe site:
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/images/BushConantGrovesMatthias.jpg
Bush Conant Groves Matthias
In September, Bush and the Army agreed that an officer other than Marshall
should be given the assignment of overseeing the entire atomic project,
which by now was referred to as the Manhattan Project. On September
17, the Army appointed Colonel Leslie R. Groves (right) to head the
effort.
