Tuxedo Park

by Jennet Conant

  Loomis, operating in a manner that Compton described as “typical of him,” spent the next few months quickly mastering the new subject and “worked with his little permanent staff at Tuxedo on the fundamentals of microwave until he felt capable of inviting collaboration.” Late that summer, Bowles and a group of MIT physicists arrived at the Tower House and began an in-depth study of the propagation of radio waves. The main feature would be a study of ultrahigh-frequency propagation, to be conducted by J. A. Stratton and Donald Kerr, veterans of MIT’s blind-landing research program, “to determine the practical range that we can expect to obtain with 50 cm waves, which we now have facilities to generate.” As they progressed, they would apply their techniques to shorter and shorter wavelengths.

  Bowles was not at all keen on the idea of working for the retired Wall Street banker, with his perfectly pressed white suits and “ideal living and laboratory quarters.” The “Tuxedo Park situation,” as he called it, was more “complex” than he had first reckoned, and he privately suspected the financier had invited them only because it put a small company of MIT scientists, himself included, at Loomis’ disposal, “pretty much to follow his bidding.” Much to his dismay, “Loomis himself was a gadgeteer and pretty much called the shots.” But Bowles was too ambitious to rock the boat and tried his best to humor his new boss. “It was simply that I knew he was a close friend of Karl Compton’s, and, no doubt, this summer’s activities had his benediction. What I got out of it was some knowledge of Loomis, his technical interests, and his manner of operation, [of] which I was later to learn much more.”

  Loomis, on the other hand, could not have been happier. Pleased to be of service, and thrilled by the challenge of perfecting this critical new technology, he dropped all of his other experiments to concentrate on the microwave project. In the process, he drastically rewrote the charter of the Tower House. Once a bastion of pure science, Loomis’ laboratory, tucked away in the lush hills of Tuxedo Park, was on its way to becoming a private research center devoted to the development of secret war-related technology—the radar systems used to detect airplanes.

  Chapter 7

  THE BIG MACHINE

  Remember how Aston says, in his book, something about “when man has unleashed the energy of the nucleus, the result will be published to the universe as a new star”?

  —WR, from “The Uranium Bomb”

  ERNEST LAWRENCE first ventured out to Tuxedo Park for an extended weekend in 1936. “Just to meet and talk about things,” Loomis recalled, and “to see the lab.” Loomis had not invited him personally, so the gregarious Berkeley physicist must have tagged along as somebody’s guest. It may have been for one of the annual meetings he held at Tower House, when dozens of scientists came from all over the country. There was nothing unusual about his wanting to see the place, “because almost every famous scientist had been out there as a routine thing.”

  Of course, Loomis knew Lawrence by reputation. He had earned international acclaim at the age of thirty for his invention of the cyclotron, the most powerful machine for smashing atoms ever built, and was reportedly making formidable use of the device. Known for his brilliant inventive mind and a boyish enthusiasm that was almost contagious, he was widely regarded as one of the most promising young physicists around. Still, nothing prepared Loomis for the jovial and easygoing fellow who ambled up the drive and introduced himself. After meeting Lawrence, Manette declared the tall, blond, blue-eyed Swede, who happened to be a top-notch tennis player, to be one of the most charming men she had ever met: “He was completely opposite of what you expect a scientist to be—he was just a handsome big fellow, full of loving and full of fun, and very easy to be with. You were friendly in five minutes.”

  At thirty-five, Lawrence had a winning manner, determination, and zeal that had already made him something of a legend in nuclear physics, which was the new fad sweeping the physical sciences. A native of South Dakota and a graduate of its state university, he had followed his mentor, Merle Tuve, a fellow South Dakotan who was also of Scandinavian descent, to the University of Minnesota to work on his master’s degree. As a National Research Fellow at Yale, Lawrence had published a series of papers on “ionizing potentials”—demonstrating that an electron will ionize an atom—that had quickly brought him attention as a exceptional experimental talent. In 1928, Berkeley, which was in the midst of an ambitious drive to expand its Physics Department, managed to lure him out west (and away from Yale!) with the promise of fast promotion and ample funds for equipment. The following year, he conceived of the basic idea of building the cyclotron after reading a paper by an obscure German scientist on the behavior of ions in a magnetic field.

  In 1931, Lawrence and his co-workers succeeded in building the first cyclotron, using a tank six inches across and a small electromagnet whose poles faced each other vertically across the gap. In the gap was placed a shallow cylindrical tank, pumped out to a high vacuum so that the particles inside could move freely without interference from air molecules. Lawrence fed deuterons (heavy hydrogen nuclei) as atomic projectiles in at the center and kicked them around at high speeds using a radio frequency oscillator. He then graduated to a bigger setup, using a huge eighty-five-ton magnet and a vacuum tank eight inches across, which allowed him to accelerate the deuterons at very high speeds and direct them against any target. His work developing powerful beams of particles had already earned high praise from none other than Bohr himself, “the dean of quantum theorists,” who would make two trips from Copenhagen to California in the 1930s to check up on the young Berkeley physicist.

  Right from the start, Loomis was “very impressed” with Lawrence, whose work in the field of high-energy physics held special interest for him. After all, the rapid pace of development of high-energy physics at Berkeley was due largely to the parallel development and expansion of an industry Loomis had been involved in since its infancy—hydroelectric power. Southern California Edison was the world’s largest producer of hydroelectric power, and throughout the booming twenties the utility had given millions of dollars for physics research programs at Berkeley and Cal Tech to find ways to improve the technique of high-voltage transmission. Loomis was something of an expert on the need to transmit power economically, having worked that equation on Wall Street for the better part of a decade, and over the years he had kept a close eye on the advances in high-voltage technology.

  Physicists had wrestled for years with the problem of achieving high voltages for their scientific investigations. After a scientific conference in 1928, Loomis had talked with Sir Ernest Rutherford, the revered director of Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, about the difficulty of producing and controlling big voltages on the order of what nature packed in a bolt of lightning. Lord Rutherford had done the pioneering studies of radioactivity and, with others, had found three kinds—alpha, beta (streams of electrically charged particles), and gamma (as in X rays)—which had led to his formulation of the nuclear model of the atom. The gruff, burly British Nobel laureate was convinced that the creation of machines operating at the highest possible voltage was “a matter of pressing importance” and had taken the lead in promoting the development of million-volt accelerators. “Rutherford was an old man, and very abrupt in conversation,” Loomis recalled. “I [had] just met him and we were talking, and he suddenly burst out and said, ‘You damned American millionaires. Why can’t you give me a million volts, and I will split the atom.’ ” Loomis, who shared the great man’s frustration, could only reply warmly, “Well, we don’t know how to make a million volts that can be useful to you. We know how to make sparks jump, but we don’t know how it’s going to be useful.”

  Loomis’ interest in high voltages prompted him to try his own cyclotron experiments. At one point, he and his colleagues at Tower House “broke down a quarter of a million machine,” which struggled to produce 250,000 electron volts, just “to see what we could do.” He had no trouble laying his hands on one, as he was a member of the M
IT Corporation and was quite involved with the high-voltage machine the school had developed. According to Vannevar Bush, who was then vice president of MIT, Loomis, who was “a rather red-hot individual,” once burst into his office and told him he had heard that their cyclotron, which had been installed in a Boston hospital, was always broken down and could not be fixed, and that “it was a terrible thing MIT couldn’t build a good machine.” Bush, who suspected the mischievous rumors had been spread by the General Electric Company, which manufactured high-voltage devices and was none too happy that MIT was invading their turf, had had to march Loomis down to the hospital himself to prove to him that their machine “operated nearly perfectly.” So when Loomis later heard that Lawrence had succeeded in building a big cyclotron and “had gotten a million usable volts out of a little seven-inch disc,” he understood immediately “just what [Lawrence] was working for and why he was working for it.” It wasn’t new to him, because at the very same time, he had been working “on a parallel track.”

  It was with that background that Loomis and Lawrence first talked in Tuxedo Park and, according to Loomis, immediately “hit it off.” He admired the younger physicist’s daring and inspired resourcefulness. Loomis asked his advice about an experiment he was working on, and Lawrence spent the day with him at Tower House and followed up with an invitation to visit his laboratory at Berkeley. After that, whenever Lawrence came east, he stayed with Loomis at his New York penthouse or came to Tuxedo for the weekend. During the mid-1930s, Lawrence was making special experiments on the thirty-inch to get test data and planning his next cyclotron. His ideas on just how to build the device were always shifting, according to Loomis, and every time he came to visit he would announce, “This is a better way than we talked about last month.” Lawrence’s enthusiasm was catching, and before long, Loomis was caught up in his plans to build another massive cyclotron. Both men were bonded by their innate optimism, a quintessentially American belief in technology that had as its rallying cry the macho credo of cyclotroneering—the bigger the machine the better. They shared an absolute faith in scientific progress. And for them, the pace of change could not be fast enough.

  What gave urgency to their work was the pressing importance of the science itself, the novelty of nuclear transformation. Although the situation in Europe appeared more precarious every day, neither Lawrence nor Loomis had begun to think about the cyclotron in terms of its potential as a formidable atomic weapon. They were committed to pure research—pure curiosity. “We were obligated to science to exploit it, and every time we’d make it bigger, we’d find new facts,” recalled Loomis. “Obviously, if the seven-inch worked and the thirty-inch worked, the next step, the quicker, the better, would be to go up higher.”

  The two men became best of friends in a single bound. It was a meeting of minds that Loomis once said was as simple and completely symbiotic as picking up a conversation that had no beginning, middle, or end: “Ever since we first knew each other, there was a continuity as definite as if we’d lived in the same building all the time. There were gaps in time that weren’t any bigger than if I should go upstairs, change my suit, and come down. We would go right on where we had left off. And his dream of bigger and better was there from the very day he built that thing [the cyclotron].”

  As Alvarez wrote, the relationship that quickly developed between Loomis and Lawrence had “all the earmarks of a perfect marriage”:

  They were completely compatible in every sense of the word, and their backgrounds and talents complemented each almost exactly. . . . Lawrence had developed a new way of doing what came to be called “big science,” and that development stemmed from his ebullient nature plus his scientific insight and his charisma; he was more the natural leader than any man I’ve met. These characteristics attracted Loomis to him, and Loomis in turn introduced Lawrence to worlds he had never known before, and found equally fascinating. Anyone who was in their company . . . would have thought that they were lifelong intimate friends with all manner of shared experiences going back to childhood.

  Lawrence’s star was then already on the rise, but it was not yet universal, and his allegiance with the wealthy and influential Loomis speeded him on his way. Each stimulated and built up the other, so that everyone who was drawn into their nexus felt a charge of excitement—the thrilling sense that anything was possible. What they wanted was to build a tremendous cyclotron. That it would also cost a tremendous amount never once gave them pause, and their boundless confidence not only sustained them, it spurred them on to win the richest prize in physics—the breathtaking $1.15 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

  In the 1930s, raising large sums for scientific research was a daunting task, and Lawrence had to devote an inordinate amount of his time to scrounging money and materials. Nearly all scientific research was privately supported, and during the Depression, there was limited public sympathy toward underwriting the expense of scientific knowledge. The technological advances that for so long fueled the industrial machine had manifestly failed, and the country felt not only betrayed by science, but deeply ambivalent about its impact on their lives. Mechanized factories were blamed for throwing tens of thousands of assembly-line workers out of their jobs, and politicians railed against the “grave maladjustments” the rapid pace of technological progress was wreaking on society.

  As a result, research funds were scarce, and the competition was stiff. Lawrence’s readiness to share his cyclotron technique with other laboratories had come back to haunt him in the form of many imitators: there were eleven cyclotrons in various stages of operation in America and roughly the same number in Europe and Japan, and many of these projects were directed or staffed by research fellows whom he had trained at Berkeley. Most of Lawrence’s grants had come from universities and hospitals interested in developing cyclotrons for biomedical purposes. He had discovered that cyclotrons produced “penetrating radiations” that had shown promise in the treatment of certain types of leukemia, and if, as experiments seemed to show, neutron bombardments had a greater effect on tumors than X rays did, then Lawrence believed they had a new weapon to fight cancer. Lawrence’s brother, John, a doctor, had collaborated in studies using direct radiation from the cyclotron for cancer treatment. It was with that pitch that Berkeley president Robert Sproul had appealed to William Crocker, a retired banker and major benefactor of the medical school, who was finally persuaded to fork over another $75,000 so that Lawrence could run his own program on campus, known as the Crocker Radiation Laboratory, or Rad Lab for short.

  Berkeley had worked desperately to keep Lawrence, who was being courted by Harvard’s president, Jim Conant. To steal Lawrence away, Harvard had promised to pay him a salary of more than $10,000, to create positions for Berkeley’s other star physicists, Robert Oppenheimer and Edwin McMillan, and to provide ample funds for a laboratory that would be, in Conant’s words, “second to none,” including a very big cyclotron, cloud chamber (an expansion chamber that makes the path of a charged particle visible for further study), and other auxiliary equipment. Conant had even approached Loomis about becoming a trustee in hopes that currying favor with the wealthy patron would help their cause. Instead, the overtures from such a prestigious Ivy League suitor prodded Berkeley to dig deep into its pockets to provide Lawrence with “his heart’s desire”—a new, greatly expanded laboratory and an even larger cyclotron. “I shall always be grateful to you for the honor of your confidence,” Lawrence wrote to Conant, declining his offer. “It opened up possibilities for work here that a month ago I thought were quite out of the question.”

  In October 1937, Lawrence’s biomedical research won the Comstock Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, regarded as the highest scientific honor in the country. The “Cyclotron Man” made the cover of Time magazine and was hailed in the headline for his godlike powers: “He creates and destroys.” Inevitably, his extraordinary success, combined with his extreme youth, bred jealousy and led to nasty gossip that Law
rence was just using cancer to unlock foundation coffers. Loomis, who had always looked for practical applications for all of his research, dismissed the criticism as ridiculous. “[Ernest] was a great optimist that somehow or other this would work for medicine. It was obvious from the very beginning, when he was building [radioactive] isotopes, that it opened up matters for making medical measurements as well as chemical and physical measurements.”

  Even before the sixty-inch design—dubbed the “Crocker Cracker”—was completed, Lawrence was thinking of one “ten times greater,” a truly huge cyclotron for nuclear physics or, as Isidor Isaac Rabi of Columbia called it, “the beam to end all beams.” For Lawrence, money, not technology, was the chief obstacle. In a radio broadcast, he announced he was considering constructing a cyclotron “to weigh 2,000 tons and to produce 100 million-volt particles. . . . It would require more than half a million dollars.” With the active encouragement of Loomis and other big-thinking admirers, it would increase steadily in size and cost over the next year. “He was building a cyclotron as big as money would permit him,” said Loomis, adding that “we got up to 210 inches” before it was finally cut back to 184 inches. “The idea would go up and up. He did very courageous things. Most people would not want to make such a big calculation, but he was so confident.”