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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 456-457



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Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science that Changed the Course of World War II. By Jennet Conant. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. Pp. xviii+330. $14.

On 16 January 1939, the S.S. Drottningholm from Copenhagen docked at New York and Niels Bohr delivered to Enrico Fermi the shocking news that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin had discovered what became known as nuclear fission. Bohr was promptly whisked up to the Tuxedo Park mansion-laboratory of Alfred Loomis, the extraordinarily influential Wall Street millionaire physicist. It was by no means his first visit to Tower House, where Loomis took part in experiments on time measurement, spectroscopy, and brain waves. During Bohr's visit, a few days before a theoretical physics conference in Washington at which fission was first publicly discussed, he received a telegram from Lise Meitner, now in exile in Sweden, announcing that she and her nephew, Otto Frisch, had confirmed the splitting of uranium.

At the same Tuxedo Park house on 29 September 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged, Edward "Taffy" Bowen and John Cockcroft first showed the Americans Britain's cavity magnetron, capable of broadcasting a radar signal at 10 centimeters and small enough that a radar set could be carried in the nose of an airplane—a potential equalizer in the struggle for air superiority over Britain. Bowen and Cockcroft were members of Henry Tizard's desperate and momentous mission to the United States to disclose scientific secrets that called for manufacture across the Atlantic, far from the German bombers. The sight of the magnetron, one of only twelve in existence, was enough to cause Loomis, already familiar with U.S. experiments on radar, to propose on the spot the formation of what became the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, the nursery for scores of types of radar put such uses as hunting submarines, navigation, bombing, and direction of artillery fire.

Loomis, the host at Tower House, had made many millions with his partner Landon Thorne on Wall Street as principal mobilizers in the 1920s of capital for the exploding American electric power industry. The money did more than allow him to lose a bundle in an America's Cup competition. It made it possible for him to work at his protégé Ernest Lawrence's "atom smasher" lab in Berkeley, make strategic little gifts to people, maintain a suite at the Wardman Park in Washington and a luxury apartment just off Fifth Avenue in New York, and live for much of World War II in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. Like the house in Tuxedo Park, to which guests were brought by Loomis's chauffeured limousines, the strategically placed homes were ideal for holding endless catalytic meetings with leading scientists whose acquaintance Loomis had cultivated for twenty years. Before the war these meetings brought together many physicists from both sides of the Atlantic. [End Page 456]

Jennet Conant's dramatic book, touching on two of the greatest technical developments of World War II, is a narrative of influence—personal, intellectual, political—in science and technology. It is an attempt to explore the special circumstances that made Loomis into one of the most notable "scientific agitators," someone who could make things happen. It did not hurt that the experimental work he did at Aberdeen Proving Ground during World War I was a lot more interesting to him than the law, where he started out, or Wall Street, where he and his partner had the brains and guts to sell out before the 1929 crash. It also did not hurt that he was well connected with the elite of law and business, or that he was cousin to Henry Stimson, Herbert Hoover's secretary of state and secretary of war for both William Howard Taft and Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Loomis also managed Stimson's money.) Conant's account provides a shining example of what...

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