Tuxedo Park

by Jennet Conant

  Dear Richards:

  I tried to reach you at your home over the telephone, but you seemed to be away, and so I am sending this letter in the hope that it might be forwarded to you. You can best see the present state of affairs concerning our problem from a letter which I wrote to Mr. Strauss on July 3rd, a copy of which I am enclosing for your information and the information of your friends. Not until three days ago did I reach the conclusion that a large scale experiment ought to be started immediately and would have a good chance of success if we used about $35,000 worth of material, about half this sum representing uranium and the rest other ingredients. . . . I am rather anxious to push this experiment as fast as possible. . . . I would, of course, like to know whether there is a chance of getting outside funds if this is necessary to speed up the experiment, and if you have any opinion on the subject, please let me know.

  If you think a discussion of the matter would be of interest I shall of course be very pleased to take part in it. . . . Please let me know in any case where I can get hold of you over the telephone and your postal address.

  During the summer of 1939, Szilard and Fermi worked out the basis for the first successful chain reaction in a series of letters. Encouraged by their correspondence, but frustrated by his continued failure to enlist any financial support for his experiments, Szilard turned to his old mentor, Albert Einstein, for help. Einstein was sixty years old and famous, someone with enough stature to lend credibility to his cause. After meeting with Szilard and reviewing his calculations, Einstein was quickly persuaded that the government should be warned that an atomic bomb was a possibility and that the Nazis could not be allowed to build such an unimaginably powerful weapon. On August 2, Szilard drafted the final version of the letter Einstein had agreed to send to the president. Szilard called a part-time stenographer at Columbia named Janet Coatesworth and, speaking over the telephone in his thick Hungarian accent, dictated the letter to “F. D. Roosevelt, president of the United States,” advising him that “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” could now be constructed. By the time Szilard read her the signature, “Yours very truly, Albert Einstein,” he was fully aware that the young woman thought he was out of his mind. That incident, no doubt exaggerated in Szilard’s gleeful retelling, bears close resemblance to a passage in Richards’ story in which a young secretary comes to see Perkins and confides her concerns about Zmenov. “I’m afraid he’s getting himself into the most dreadful trouble,” she tells him. “You know how impetuous he is. He’s a genius, and when other people don’t see that, he gets impatient.”

  Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt would result in the convening of a government advisory committee to study the problem. Roosevelt appointed Lyman J. Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards, the government’s bureaucratic physics laboratory, as chairman. On October 21, 1939, Szilard went to Washington and reported to the first meeting of the Briggs Advisory Committee on Uranium. He explained how his chain reaction theory worked and put in his usual plea for funds to conduct a large-scale experiment—the same test he had been writing to Richards about for months. To Szilard’s astonishment, the committee agreed to give him $6,000 for his uranium research.

  Even then, Szilard did not cease his efforts at fund-raising and kept up his letters and calls to promising prospects. Twelve days after the meeting in Washington, he sent a brief note to Richards and included an eight-page memorandum for his “personal information only,” summing up his report to the Briggs committee. The memo laid out exactly how much uranium and graphite he and Fermi would need for their experiments, how much it would probably cost, and which companies could supply the materials—a blueprint for building a bomb. “It seems advisable we should talk about these things in greater detail before you take up the matter with a third person. . . .”

  Szilard was never able to pin down the elusive Loomis, who a few months later would decide to back Fermi’s chain reaction research. Four years later, Szilard wrote to Loomis directly, requesting an appointment to see him, and recalled his previous attempts to contact him: “I regretted very much not having been able to meet you in March and again in July of 1939 and am inclined sometimes to think that much subsequent trouble would have been avoided if a contact with you had been established at that time.”

  There are no records indicating whether Conant had any knowledge of Szilard’s regular correspondence with Richards or his attempts to use him as a conduit to Loomis. But by the spring of 1940, when Conant found Richards’ story, any public mention of atomic energy’s military potential would have made the Harvard president uneasy. War had overtaken Europe, and there was already speculation about how long England would be able to fend off a German invasion. Although America was still resolutely isolationist, Conant and other leading scientific advisers to the president had been working to keep the government informed of any new developments of importance to national defense. The Briggs committee had been formed in response to the growing concern about how far along the Germans were in their atomic research. Many noted physicists, including Niels Bohr and Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, two Hungarians now teaching in the United States, were urging their European colleagues—notably the French nuclear scientist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the Viennese physicist Erwin Shrödinger, and the British physicist Paul Dirac—to exercise caution and were pushing for a publication ban on uranium fission. At the same time, Vannevar Bush, a tough-minded Yankee engineer who had recently resigned the vice presidency of MIT to head the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., was agitating for “an accelerated defense effort.” Alarmed that the United States military was technologically unprepared for war, Bush was exploring ways to mobilize the country’s scientists for war.

  Conant was aware that Loomis was in the thick of these talks. With close ties in the worlds of finance, government, and science, Loomis had virtually unprecedented access to the men who would ultimately decide the country’s future. Not only was he a tycoon with his own advanced laboratory at his disposal, he had the financial resources to underwrite any research project he found promising, even writing a personal check for $5,000 to help jump-start Harvard’s nuclear physics research. He was an avid supporter of leading physicist Ernest O. Lawrence and his ambitious cyclotron project—which produced radioactive isotopes that might prove to be therapeutic or possibly provide clues to the exploitation of atomic energy—and was using his wide influence among corporate chiefs and Washington officials to help Lawrence secure more than $1 million in grant money from the Rockefeller Foundation. He was also a first cousin of Henry Stimson, who was a member of two Republican administrations and rumored to be President Roosevelt’s choice as secretary of war. Because he had Stimson’s confidence, Loomis was uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role as the country prepared for a war the Germans had already demonstrated would be, in Bush’s words, “a highly technical struggle.”

  Of course, Loomis did not need anyone’s permission to undertake his own investigation of the new machinery of war. He was enthusiastic about American know-how and was not inclined to sit idly by until the military, which he viewed as slow and hidebound by tradition, finally determined it was time to take action—particularly if just catching up with the Germans proved to be a monumental task. Long before the government moved to enlist scientists to develop advanced weapons, Loomis had assessed the situation and concluded it was critical that the country be as informed as possible about which technologies would matter in the future war. He scrapped all his experiments and turned the Tower House into his personal civilian research project, then began recruiting the brightest minds he could find to help him take measure of the enemy’s capabilities and start working on new gadgets and devices for defense purposes.

  How much Richards actually saw and heard at the Tower House, and how much he gleaned from Szilard or simply guessed at, is impossible to know. What had passed for science fiction and wild speculation only a short time ago was now no longer beyond imagining. His roman à clef pr
ovides a rare glimpse inside Loomis’ empyrean of pure science just before they would all be cast out into a corrupt and violent world. In the final scene in his short story, Zmenov intentionally kills himself by detonating a small explosive “to prove forever that his theory is true.” Richards realized the race to build the bomb was on and that the coming war would change everything. He understood that the leisurely, cloistered world of gentlemen scientists he had known at the Tower House was at an end, and the irony that his death coincided with the passing of an era did not escape him.

  Years later, Kistiakowsky’s widow, Elaine, would compare Richards’ stories to passages in her husband’s unfinished memoir, which he had been dictating into a tape recorder up to the time of his death in December 1982. She was amazed to learn how many details Richards had drawn directly from the period the two scientists had been involved with the Tower House—from its grand beginnings in 1926 to the day it was hastily shuttered in 1940. During the decade and a half Tower House flourished, Loomis played host to a remarkable group of young scientists at a moment when new discoveries were transforming all their fields and a spirit of intellectual excitement and experimentation fueled their research. It was hard to believe that in only a few years, that bright circle would not only build the radar system that would alter the course of the war, but would go on to create a weapon that would change the world forever. “It sounds like fiction,” said Elaine. “It’s incredible to me now, looking back, that it really happened.”

  Chapter 2

  BRED IN THE BONE

  Ward carried himself with composure, but his politeness was merely a habit; he was preoccupied.

  —WR, from Brain Waves and Death

  “ANYONE meeting Mr. Loomis casually might find it hard to distinguish him from the great mass of men of distinction who are reared in the best families, processed by the best schools, groomed by the best tailors, and put in the vice-presidential windows of the best firms,” observed Fortune magazine in 1946 in a flattering profile that was written with Loomis’ tertiary approval but included no direct quotes or photographs of the elusive financier. “The difficulty, however, would not last long. Mr. Loomis, to be sure, has the easy and sometimes suspect charm of carefully tended manners, but in his case it is quickly evident that the manners are not the man.”

  Few Wall Street tycoons of his generation could match Loomis’ extraordinary intellect and sheer versatility. He achieved an immense fortune in business, earned worldwide recognition for his scientific endeavors, and won the highest accolades for his service in wartime. Yet he contrived to do it all as unobtrusively as possible, choosing to remain in the background, a mysterious and remote figure. It was not that he was unduly modest so much as his wealth allowed him to do as he pleased rather than what was expected. And he had learned that anonymity served his interests.

  Loomis exiled himself from the glittering world of New York society because he wanted to devote all his time to science. He set himself up royally in a castle on high hill in Tuxedo Park and financed his own audacious investigations of the stars, the heart, the brain—the secrets of the world. He built his private laboratory not as a shrine to himself, but because he desired nothing more than to be actively involved in the daily research and progress. He provided both the brains and backing for all kinds of inventions, medical advances, and scientific studies. And when duty called, he came down from his mountaintop and helped reinvent modern warfare.

  “He was unique—he was primarily an unconventional person, of course, but then he was much more talented than most,” said Caryl Haskins, a leading scientist who in the 1930s was inspired by Loomis, who became a close friend, to establish his own research facility, the Haskins Laboratories. “He was not motivated by money or fame. He never needed the approval of other people, he just did not need it. Well, he was that sure of himself. He was motivated purely by the facts of the case, purely by the adventure.”

  At the peak of his success, Loomis shunned publicity. He was secretive about his past, and colleagues knew better than to ask personal questions. “He was not so much a man of mystery as he was a very private person,” recalled William Golden, a Wall Street banker who is credited with inventing an antiaircraft machine gun during World War II and later served as a science adviser to President Truman. It was in the latter capacity that he often sought out Loomis’ advice. “There was a certain awesomeness about him that made him—I’m not sure what the right word is—somewhat inapproachable, I suppose. He was aloof, as if detached from a society he had once been very intensely involved in. I always got the feeling this partly had to do with his divorce, which bitterly divided his friends and family.”

  Loomis erected a wall between his two worlds, completely insulating his scientific Valhalla from his business life. Although he socialized with close friends from both walks of life, he never introduced a single Wall Street associate to any of his Tuxedo Park experimenters, or vice versa. “It was characteristic of Alfred that he lived in the present,” said the physicist Luis Alvarez. “On the very few occasions when he shared one of the many closed chapters of his life with me, I was enchanted by what he had to say about the captains of industry and the defenders of the America’s Cup, who were many years ago his most intimate friends. He apparently felt it would sound as though he were bragging if he alluded to the great power he once wielded in the financial world when in the company of a university professor.”

  Once, during a casual conversation early in their friendship in 1940, Alvarez happened to ask Loomis what he thought of Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate. Without hesitating, Loomis answered, “I guess I’ll have to say I approve of him, because I appointed him head of Commonwealth and Southern.” At the time, Loomis was the major stockholder of the power utility and was probably being nothing less than scrupulously honest in his blunt reply. But it is typical of Loomis that he regretted the slip, feeling somehow that he had let the arrogance of money leach into what he believed was a more innocent, purer part of his life. “He was immediately and obviously embarrassed by what he had said,” recalled Alvarez, “and it would be another twenty years before he made another reference to his financial career in my presence.”

  THE aura of eccentricity Loomis acquired after he built his own laboratory, and abruptly quit the business world in favor of tinkering in his basement, has obscured how impressive and wholly respectable he was at the start of his career. Handsome, with a strong build that made him appear taller than his medium height and a massive brow framing sharply appraising brown eyes, Loomis was the very model of the bright young corporate lawyer when he entered the profession in 1912. These were comfortable times, ideal conditions for a young man to propel himself forward, and he gave every sign of having the “nicely predictable future” common to men of his background and education.

  Loomis was a product of the prosperous American middle class, and though not from real wealth, he enjoyed all the same privileges, club memberships, and limitless expectations. He possessed a quiet self-confidence that was almost palpable. It was unmistakable, in the immaculate way he dressed, his calm demeanor, and the carefully modulated voice that friends and family say they never heard him raise. He took control of every conversation the same way he took control of every room he entered—he simply assumed it. Such was the force of his intelligence that most people yielded to its power. He could be ruthlessly to the point, yet his eyes would still twinkle with good humor. His daughter-in-law recalls an enigmatic charm that both men and women found compelling: “He wasn’t easy,” said Betty Loomis Evans, noting that beyond the standard pleasantries, he possessed no small talk whatsoever. “He was very aristocratic in a way. He was so elegant, and so good-looking, and for all his brilliance, he had a lot of warmth. He was just the best man you had ever met.”

  From the beginning, Loomis distinguished himself from the herd of promising young men on Wall Street by virtue of what one lawyer friend called his “Pratt & Whitney” mind, a high-powered
intellect that could cut through a maze of difficulty with dazzling speed. He had a knack for making the complex appear simple, quickly visualizing a solution to a problem and laying it out before people’s amazed eyes. He was relentlessly pragmatic. By force of habit, he would reduce every difficulty or decision to the remorseless logic of a mathematical equation—coolly assessing the risk factors, the odds of success or failure. “You did not want to shoot pool with him,” said his friend John Foster, a former director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, “because he was literally playing all the angles.”

  His gift was an inventive ingenuity, an almost childlike ability to look at something as if for the first time and take it apart and re-create it along the lines of his own imagination. More often than not, he also had the attention span of a child. Curious, eager for the next astounding and unanticipated result, he would no sooner notch a contribution in one endeavor than he would take off in an entirely new direction. He attacked new problems with a single-minded zeal, rattling off “ninety ideas per minute,” according to one associate. He loved puzzles and never tired of trying to work out explanations for life’s riddles—the smallest increments of time, prime numbers, black holes—with anyone who could follow his lightning-quick reasoning. He excelled at games of all kinds. By age nine, he was a chess prodigy and regularly amazed his peers at St. Matthew’s Military Academy in Tarrytown, New York. By thirteen, he could play “mental chess” without aid of a board or pieces and could play blindfolded, carrying on two games simultaneously. He impressed his classmates at Phillips Academy, Andover, when, on a school outing to a New York City chamber of horrors known as the Eden Musee, he challenged a costumed character named the Masked Marvel to a game of chess and played him to a draw.