Loomis was a sophomore at Yale when his father died quite suddenly, after a five-day bout of pneumonia. He was only forty-eight years old, but he had long ago ceased to be the major influence in his son’s life. It is a reflection of the bitter state of affairs that family members would often say of his father that “at least he had the good grace to die before the divorce.” While Loomis had given little thought to a career up to that time, except that he would probably engage in some kind of scientific work, he laid aside those dreams and set out on a career in the law, fully aware that the responsibility to support and protect his family now fell to him. He enrolled in Harvard Law School and threw himself into his coursework and became an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated cum laude in 1912 among the top ten in his class. Contemplating his future after Harvard, Loomis, as was his habit, checked in with Henry Stimson. “My dear Cousin Harry,” he wrote, confirming his intention to pay him a visit in Washington over the Thanksgiving holiday: “My plans for the coming year are very uncertain, and before making any decisions I want to have a talk with you, if possible.”
After passing the bar examination, Loomis started as a law clerk in Henry Stimson’s firm of Winthrop & Stimson, obtained entirely “on his merits,” as George Roberts, a senior partner in the firm and also a product of Yale and Harvard Law School, would always insist. Henry Stimson was not there to welcome him personally, as he was still in Washington, serving a two-year stint as secretary of war in the Taft administration. But the entire firm had about it the feeling of extended family and was staffed by young lawyers whose fathers were either related or friends, and who overwhelmingly shared the Yale/Harvard imprimatur and, as Stimson put it, “the fellowship of club members.”
The chambers at 32 Liberty Street (then 32 Nassau Street) occupied a suite of spacious offices on the fourteenth floor of the Liberty Mutual Building, with sweeping views of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge. The firm maintained the comfortable, ordered atmosphere of eighteenth-century London chambers, with the clerical staff gathered in a large central room, which opened onto the high-ceilinged library, where law clerks researched cases within earshot of the partners’ private offices. It was still in the days when clerks got their training in the general practice of law by working closely with partners on many different kinds of cases, and Loomis was assigned to corporate and financial work and soon showed a flair for security issues, mortgages, and reorganizations. He quickly earned a reputation as one of the more outstanding young lawyers on Wall Street and in only three years was made a member of the firm.
Winthrop & Stimson was a distinguished firm and held it as a point of honor, as Stimson once explained it, that they “stood outside the Wall Street group” and did not “adopt the methods of the others.” The result was that they also did not get as much business as the others. In the years leading up to World War I, the senior partners at Winthrop & Stimson were making a respectable $20,000 a year, while lawyers in a neighboring firm were earning five and ten times that amount. Stimson, who returned to the practice of law in 1913, and his partner, Bronson Winthrop, were of the old school and believed the day began at nine-thirty and ended at five-thirty—except when a case was in court—and discouraged work on Saturdays or discussing cases after dinner. This meant that the firm regularly turned away clients who were seeking the kind of high-powered counsel they could call upon night and day, whose law clerks could be relied upon to slave into the early morning hours. Stimson was so determined to discourage certain kinds of clients that after hearing out a group of men from the West Coast who had a scheme to evade the antitrust laws, he turned them away with the statement “I can just hear the gates of the jail clanking shut behind you.” That Stimson was able to build up a very lucrative practice despite his “New England conscience” proved just how able an attorney he was.
So it was in such an impeccable, if somewhat poky, firm that Loomis began his career, with plenty of leisure time on weekends to devote to a wife and family. At twenty-four, he married Ellen Holman Farnsworth, two years his junior, a delicate beauty from a distinguished Boston Brahmin family and the sister of a Harvard classmate, Henry Weston Farnsworth. The young Miss Farnsworth was reputed to be “the prettiest girl in Boston” and a great catch. She was typical of her day and social class: intelligent, educated—she could read French, Latin, and Greek—and utterly impractical. Tutored at home, she had been immersed in music, poetry, and opera since childhood and had a heightened commitment to the life of the mind. Nervous and high-strung, she was given to terrible headaches that would leave her prostrate for days. She believed in “dressing for dinner” and never descended in anything but the most feminine concoctions cascading with lace. They made a stunning couple, though she struck some observers as extremely old-fashioned and an odd choice for her energetic, forward-looking husband. But Ellen was devoted to fulfilling his every want, respected his desire for large amounts of solitude, and diligently schooled herself in his arcane scientific interests. They were married on June 22, 1912, at her family’s country home in Dedham, Massachusetts, and honeymooned in England, staying in a castle fully staffed with servants that was loaned to them by a family friend. “Alfred is very happy,” Loomis’ mother reported in a hastily scrawled note to Stimson.
The couple first made their home in Sterlington, where his mother already owned a home, and eventually moved to Tuxedo Park. For the next few years, Loomis focused on his career and family and blended in with so-called young marrieds who had settled in Tuxedo. They played tennis and golf, attended genteel soirees, and were praised in the social columns. The couple had two sons in quick succession, Alfred Lee Loomis Jr., known as Lee, and William Farnsworth (Farney) Loomis. “Although their names will not appear in the Social Register for some time, there are several important newcomers in the fashionable set,” society columnist Cholly Knickerbocker announced in the New York American.
But after only three years, the marriage was blighted by tragedy. At the end of September 1915, Alfred and Ellen were rocked by the news that her brother, who had impetuously enlisted in the Foreign Legion at the beginning of the year, had been killed in the bloody battle for the Fortin de Navarin in Champagne. Farnsworth was every bit as bookish and idealistic as his sister and, after graduating from Harvard, had notched some experience in the Balkans as a reporter for Collier’s and the Providence Journal and published a book chronicling his adventures, The Log of a Would-be War Correspondent. He had sailed for the Continent again the previous fall and after only a few months got caught up in the military fever that was sweeping London and Paris; in January he joined the Foreign Legion. Henry Farnsworth was the first of the young American volunteers killed in World War I.
Loomis was unprepared for the depth of his wife’s sadness. She had been extraordinarily close to her brother and had passionately supported his noble impulse to enlist. When he had gone abroad in 1912, Ellen had beseeched her husband to ask Henry Stimson, who was in the middle of a two-year term as secretary of war under President William Taft, to arrange a letter of introduction for him from the State Department to the United States diplomatic officers. She had eagerly awaited his vivid dispatches describing the life of the legionnaires. For months after his death, she was inconsolable. She wept for hours at a time and withdrew into her own world, writing long, grief-stricken letters to her mother every day. “She spent a lot of her early married days in mourning for him,” recalled Betty Loomis Evans. Years later, Ellen was still moved to tears by a passing reference to Farnsworth. “She was devastated by his death. She and her brother were so full of glorified ideas about knights in shining armor. They both had this romantic idea of war. I don’t think either of them was too connected to reality.”
WHEN the United States declared war against Germany in April 1917, the twenty-nine-year-old Loomis promptly enrolled in officers training camp and was sent to Plattsburgh, where his mathematical skills quickly became apparent. Artillery work came easily to him, and he amazed his fel
low officers with his knowledge of modern field artillery, an obsession dating back to his college days. Loomis had spent the months before the war boning up on his old hobby. Along with a handful of other young lawyers, he had organized the “Canoneer’s Post” to study the latest ordnance equipment being mobilized by the European powers, and he had persuaded West Point instructors to act as their tutors. As a result of his expertise, he was commissioned a captain on July 16 and transferred to the army proving ground in Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
Stimson naturally oversaw Loomis’ wartime postings as closely as he had his civilian career. For Stimson, the war was a moral duty, and although fifty years old and almost blind in one eye owing to an old injury, he insisted on active duty and was eventually appointed a lieutenant colonel in the field artillery. But he believed Loomis’ talents would be best served behind the lines and urged him to apply for a job at the new Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland under General William Crozier, one of “the most able and progressive officers in the army.” Stimson forwarded Loomis’ application to Crozier, along with a formal letter of recommendation and a personal note outlining his abilities. In a letter to Loomis that spring, Stimson counseled his young cousin not to worry that the Aberdeen assignment would “necessarily deprive you of the opportunity for field service.” He added:
I find no one who differs with our view that your most promising avenue for usefulness lies along this line. I have great confidence in your inventiveness and thorough grasp of the principles of mechanics. It is quite possible that, with the aid of these qualities, you might, by a single solution of any one of the many mechanical problems which are confronting us in this war, accomplish more than could be accomplished by five hundred line officers in the artillery.
On January 1, 1918, after four months at Sandy Hook, Loomis was sent to Aberdeen. His “inventiveness,” along with a constant stream of ingenious ideas for new armaments and new solutions to old tactical problems, had earned him one of the most important jobs: chief of the development and experimental department. At Aberdeen, he joined some of the most distinguished physicists and astronomers in the country, who had been mobilized to help adapt the army to the needs of modern warfare. One of Loomis’ responsibilities was to test ideas for new weapons submitted to the Army Ordnance Board. Among the luminaries whose novel recommendations Loomis had to take into account and duly try out were those of Thomas Edison, who was by this time a genuine folk hero, his life story and list of major inventions—the stock ticker, the incandescent electric light bulb, the phonograph, the moving picture, the alkaline storage battery, and a host of others—known to nearly every schoolchild. Although he was already seventy years old and crustier than ever, he was still hard at work in his laboratory in Orange, New Jersey, and throughout World War I contributed technical advice and suggestions.
Loomis followed up on one recommendation and recalled that the “perilous experiment” not only blew up Edison’s scheme, it almost annihilated a number of Aberdeen personnel as well. As the story was later recounted in Fortune magazine, “Edison’s idea was to work up a terrific spin on a large TNT-filled drum, and then suddenly drop it from a height. The theory was that the drum—trailing wires attached to a detonator—would bounce along of its own momentum until it reached the enemy lines, when it could be exploded. Put to the test, the drum dug a hole in the ground where it fell, bounced out, traveled about 200 feet, dug another hole, and then let go.”
The hazardous duty must have been noted, because shortly afterward Loomis was promoted to the rank of major and put in charge of experimental research on exterior ballistics. “He was the military officer in charge of the small R and D division,” recalled Paul Klopsteg, an electrical engineer, “when I came there to take on research and development, principally on methods for measuring projectile velocities. So he and I worked together rather closely during those days, and then after we moved to Aberdeen and continued there.” At the time, there was no simple way to measure the velocity of shells fired from guns, making it difficult to predict with any great accuracy the time it would take for a shell to arrive at a given point. The existing method, called the Boulenge chronograph, was extremely complicated, difficult to operate, and only fairly accurate. It measured the time it took for a shell to pass through two wire screens, the recording mechanism activated by the projectile as it passed through the screens and broke the electric circuits. It also had a cumbersome custom-made design that was impossible to mass-produce, making it impractical for the modern military.
Loomis was convinced the device could be improved. Working with Klopsteg, he developed an ingenious new method for measuring the velocity of shells. One of the problems with the old “break circuit” chronographs was that the wire could stretch until it reached the breaking point, maintaining the circuit for varying lengths of time depending on the angle of the shell at impact and creating irregularities of some magnitude. Loomis and Klopsteg devised an electric recording instrument that, for the first time, depended on closing rather than opening the circuits, thereby eliminating the chief source of error. It consisted of an aluminum disk spooled with ticker tape, which a small motor kept revolving at a constant speed. Instead of breaking a circuit on contact, the shell created an electrical impulse when it hit each screen, causing a spark to burn a small hole in the tape. Shell velocity could easily be calculated by measuring the distance between the spark holes.
The revolutionary new device, known as the “Loomis chronograph” and later formally called the “Aberdeen chronograph,” was simpler to use and far more reliable. It was also admirably adapted to field use because of its portability and immediately supplanted its predecessor. “In its present form, it is the result of the enthusiastic initiative of Major A. L. Loomis,” trumpeted an article in Army Ordnance, “and the ability of Dr. Paul E. Klopsteg to cope with the various physical and electrical problems in the development of such an instrument.” Hundreds of Aberdeen chronographs were made during the war, and as the result of electronic improvements added in World War II, Loomis’ and Klopsteg’s remarkably efficient invention became standard U.S. Army and Navy equipment.
Loomis was promoted to lieutenant colonel and up to the close of the war worked on a variety of ideas that would later materialize as military advances—from a recoilless cannon to a low-slung French 75 hung on a tripod mount for concealment purposes that was dubbed the “snake in the grass.” But the Aberdeen chronograph was his first invention—his first scientific triumph. He took enormous pride in his accomplishment: his name was listed first on the patent filed by the United States Army. Not long afterward, “Alfred L. Loomis of Tuxedo Park” applied and received a second patent of his own, “for an improvement in chronographs” design to enhance the construction, and thus the accuracy, of the rotating drum within the recording device. “Even though he was just a young lawyer,” said Luis Alvarez, “with his mathematical background, and his wonderful intellectual talents, it turned out that he really did a good job and invented a number of things that were used for twenty-five years in measuring external ballistics.”
Loomis remembered his time at Aberdeen fondly and loved to tell amusing stories about his experiences with the antiquated ways of the United States Army. When he was first assigned to work with an outfit of cannoneers, he recalled being puzzled by one of the company’s soldiers, who always walked fifty paces or so in back of them and would stand stock-still for hours at a time with one arm slightly raised. When Loomis finally asked what on earth the man was doing back there all by himself, he was astonished to learn that he was filling a role that dated back to when cannons were still pulled by horses. One soldier always led the horse and held the reins, and even though the horses were long gone, the post had never been abolished. Loomis formed a lasting impression of the military bureaucracy as fundamentally averse to change, and that prejudice would never leave him and would influence much of what he did in the next war.
He also became an enthusiastic champion of the n
ew armored tanks, and at every opportunity lectured Stimson that they were the future of modern warfare, “not horses and guns.” He became such an expert on tank construction, he built a scaled-down model in his garage at Tuxedo Park in order to see if he could make further improvements in the design. On one memorable occasion when Colonel Stimson came to visit, Loomis rolled into Tuxedo’s small Victorian rail station in his light armored tank to meet the train, kicking up dust and causing quite a scene. When they had both climbed on board and were noisily clanking home, Loomis turned to Stimson and said with satisfaction, “Now this is the way to protect the nation.”
WHILE at Aberdeen, Loomis struck up a friendship with Robert W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University, widely considered to be the most brilliant American experimental physicist of his day. Loomis had met Wood before, owing to the slight acquaintance of their families, both of which had summered in eastern Long Island. The two men hit it off, bound by the instant kinship two scientists can discover when they share a playful intellect and a passion for the same discipline. Wood was from a wealthy New England clan, like Loomis the precocious son of a doctor, and from childhood he too had had an absorbing interest in all sorts of scientific phenomena. He had twice flunked out of the Roxbury Latin School before being admitted to Harvard, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. He took a leisurely approach to graduate work at Johns Hopkins, until he was distracted by what was going on in the physics laboratory next door. He had little patience with the formalities of academe and never bothered to complete his Ph.D., which no doubt only further endeared him to Loomis.
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