Tuxedo Park

by Jennet Conant

  Lawrence had managed to beguile Weaver with his eloquent justifications for why more than $2 million should be spent on his new cyclotron, but the others on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation were stunned by his extravagant demands. Lawrence’s project had been growing progressively over the months, and as the physicist Robert Cornog observed at the time, if built to scale, it would certainly qualify as “the eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh wonder of the world.” The trustees concluded that Lawrence had let the California sunshine go to his head. He was asking too much. It was too risky. They lost their nerve, and as Weaver admitted during a conference with Loomis, the outlook looked grim that they would part with as much as half a million dollars.

  Over the next two months, Loomis worked furiously to restore their flagging confidence. Compton did his part, sending a glowing letter of recommendation: “I not only consider Professor Lawrence’s cyclotron project as ‘one of the most interesting, the most potentially important, and the most promising projects in the whole present field of natural science,’ but I should definitely place it in the number one position by a large margin among the various scientific projects of which I have knowledge at the present time. . . . No one could possibly question the selection of the University of California and Ernest Lawrence as the institution and the scientist to whom the project should be entrusted.” On a more personal note, he added:

  It happens I spent all of last week with Mr. Alfred Loomis on his South Carolina island discussing various problems involved in the construction of this proposed big cyclotron. We were interested first in trying to understand as thoroughly as possible the nature of the problems which would be involved in building a big machine, and second, in assuring ourselves that there were no inherent impossibilities in going to a cyclotron of so large a size. The net result of this study was our conclusion that there seems to be no insurmountable difficulties. . . . It is evident from this letter that I am not writing as a “disinterested party.” However, my interest is entirely impersonal and has nothing to do with my own institution, and exists only because of my enthusiasm for the whole cyclotron project and my faith in Ernest Lawrence himself.

  In early 1940, Loomis returned to California. A few weeks later, on February 29, the Nobel citation and medal were awarded to Lawrence at a ceremony on the Berkeley campus, with the Swedish consul making the presentation in place of the king. The university’s president heaped praise on Lawrence and proudly declared that he had “discovered a blasting technique far more potent than anything Alfred Nobel ever dreamed of.” The large party that followed at Di Biasi’s restaurant in San Francisco was packed with all “the boys” from the Rad Lab and featured a cake shaped like the sixty-inch cyclotron, with “8 Billion Volts or Bust” written in colored icing. Lawrence received congratulatory telegrams from all over the world. Lee DuBridge, head of the Physics Department of the University of Rochester, sent a limerick that was posted on the blackboard of the lab:

  A handsome young man with blue eyes

  Built an atom-machine of great size,

  When asked why he did it,

  He blushed and admitted,

  “I was wise to the size of the prize.”

  One of the most prescient notes came from Loomis’ friend and mentor. Wood, by way of an old pioneer recognizing a new one, wrote Lawrence: “As you are laying the foundations for the cataclysmic explosion of uranium (if anyone accomplishes the chain reaction) I’m sure old Nobel would approve.”

  Apart from wanting to be in the thick of the action, Loomis remained in Berkeley primarily to pump up support for the cyclotron project in the last few weeks before the Rockefeller board convened. On Thursday, March 28, he met with Vannevar Bush. The following day, Loomis had organized a meeting on the second floor of the Rad Lab to discuss the project in detail with Lawrence, followed by an informal get-together that weekend at the Del Monte Lodge at Pebble Beach. He had invited a number of influential intermediaries who would be in a position to swing the Rockefeller vote in their favor. Karl Compton was coming out, as was his younger brother, Arthur Compton, a respected physicist, along with Harvard president Jim Conant. Cooksey captured the group in a photo in Lawrence’s lab. “Alfred set up a show on Pebble Beach, where he had hired a whole darned hotel and gathered all sorts of people who had control of the money,” recalled Bush. “He put on the show to back up Ernest’s next venture, quite successfully, it goes without saying.”

  “They were all out there more or less as my guests,” recalled Loomis. “I had a big party down in Del Monte. We did a great deal of work for radar, where we could get together uninterrupted.” Loomis took advantage of his captive audience for a last pitch “about the necessity of the money for this big machine.” He was also gambling that his prize winner’s charisma would work its usual spell on all those assembled: “You can’t get a group together for a long weekend without Ernest’s affect on them.” By Sunday, “there was no opposition.”

  On the following Wednesday, April 3, Weaver phoned Lawrence that the trustees had awarded him $1.15 million, an astounding sum under the circumstances. This did not include the matching pledge from the university of $85,000 a year for ten years. Or the additional $50,000 Loomis helped angle from the Markle Foundation, which was to be one of several large donations he would secure for Lawrence to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars. According to Alvarez, it was the Tuxedo millionaire who made certain the pot of gold was at the end of the Rockefeller rainbow: “Loomis had been instrumental in securing the virtually unanimous support of the ‘scientific establishment’ for the proposal, thus relieving the Rockefeller Foundation of any necessity for acting as a judge between factions competing for the largest funds ever given to any physics project.”

  No sooner had the Rockefeller money been banked than Loomis whisked Lawrence off to Wall Street, where he spent two weeks making sure his boy got the best deals possible in purchasing the large quantities of iron and copper he required to build his great cyclotron. Loomis introduced Lawrence and Cooksey to his friend Philip Reed, the head of General Electric, who agreed to make the 184-inch cyclotron’s power supply at cost. He then tried to induce Westinghouse to make them a better offer, to no avail. Loomis used his influence with Luis S. Cates, president of Phelps Dodge, to extract a promise that the increasingly scarce copper would be available, and he leaned on E. T. Stannard of the Kennecott Copper Company. He also took them to see Sloan Colt, head of Bankers Trust. “I knew most of these people very intimately, and it wasn’t done on any official basis,” he said later. “It was done on a more man-to-man basis,” which was the way he and Lawrence did most things.

  In Tuxedo Park, Loomis hosted a grand dinner for Lawrence and invited many prominent friends in the financial community who might be in a position to help him. The party was a great success, but while the after-dinner drinks were being served, one banker turned to Loomis and inquired under his breath, “Didn’t the scientist come?” Telling the story later, Loomis explained that the charismatic physicist was so much like everyone else, so like the other successful businessmen in the room, that no one realized the Nobel laureate was at the table. Lawrence was hardly the owlish, white-haired professor they had expected. Always a great hit with women, Lawrence paid a great deal of flattering attention to the wives that night, particularly the pretty ones. “He loved to dance with them and in a very masculine way flirt with them,” recalled Loomis. “He even at times made mild passes at them.”

  All in all, Loomis managed to get all the materials and equipment Lawrence needed for bargain rates despite the wartime shortages. He made sure every one of his friends all made good on their words and delivered the orders as promised. That it would turn out afterward that he was either a shareholder or had a controlling interest in several of these companies came as no surprise to those who knew him well. Loomis, of course, never mentioned it. On his return home, Lawrence regaled Alvarez with stories about his adventures on Wall Street with Loomis. Not one to be dazzle
d, Lawrence was nonetheless astounded at the ease with which the millionaire commandeered the city’s resources:

  After spending some time with the Guggenheims, during which a favorable price for copper was negotiated, Loomis said, “Well, now we have to go after the iron. I think Ed Stettinius is the right man.” [Stettinius was then chairman of U.S. Steel and later secretary of state.] Lawrence was impressed when a call was put through and Loomis said, “Hello, Ed, this is Alfred, I have somebody with me I think you’d like to meet. When can we come over?”

  On another occasion, they went to see Seward Prosser, who was chairman of the board of the Bankers Trust Company and a trustee of the Markle Foundation. They were sitting in his office talking about Lawrence’s research when Prosser turned abruptly to Loomis and asked, “Alfred, won’t you come back and be on our board of directors? We greatly miss your counsel and advice.”

  Loomis smiled and, shaking his head, replied, “Seward, thank you very much, but I am certainly not coming back to your board of directors. I am now doing a much more interesting and important job.”

  As they left the Bankers Trust Building, Loomis told Lawrence that seeing his former colleagues again in this way, at that moment, was an extraordinary experience: “Here I am back in Wall Street getting the help of my old friends on a project that is dramatically constructive and forward looking, while [they] are here trying to hold together a tottering [financial] structure.”

  Loomis’ masterminding of the Rockefeller grant for Lawrence’s cyclotron did not go unnoticed. The way he overcame obstacles and brokered alliances, never taking no for an answer, made it clear just how effective a behind-the-scenes force he had become. Writing to Lawrence to congratulate him on the Rockefeller vote, Conant put in a plug for Harvard’s cyclotron and gingerly broached the subject of recruiting the multitalented Loomis, who after all was an alumnus and seemed to have both energy and resources to spare: “I am still exploring the possibility of stealing back from you, if I can persuade him to come to us, our mutual friend who is a volunteer now in your outfit. It seems to me there is a possibility of using him, at least as a consultant, on both shores on the continent.”

  Lawrence sent Conant an obliging response: “I know that Alfred Loomis is very anxious to help you in any way he can. I need not say to you that not only is he a man of great ability, but also of fine character who is anxious to be useful in any way he can. Needless to say, we are glad to share our blessings, and fortunately for us it is possible for him to be very active in behalf of the work here and at the same time be very helpful in Cambridge.” Loomis would indeed go to bat for the crimson team, lobbying the head of the Markle Foundation about making a grant to Harvard’s cyclotron project and contributing his own “generous gift,” which, as Conant wrote in gratitude, “will just make the difference between seeing the cyclotron work through next year.” Conant sent off a note to Lawrence thanking him for “arousing Mr. Loomis’ interest,” adding, “I am sure you have helped us more than you realize.”

  That spring, at a luncheon honoring Lawrence at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, attended by the scientific elite on the West Coast, Winthrop Aldrich, a member of the Rockefeller Foundation board, made a speech praising all that Lawrence had accomplished. In doing so, he said: “You may believe that the war in Europe is the most important thing that is going on for the human race at the present time, but actually it may prove that the events which are about to take place on the University of California campus may be of much more far-reaching significance to humanity.” To the physicists in the audience, Cooksey wrote Loomis afterward, “it sounded like a reasonably fair introduction.”

  While he would always try to minimize his contribution, years later Loomis acknowledged that he was probably more conscious of the need to make haste and may have played an important role in persuading everyone involved that the cyclotron could not be built on the usual painstaking scientific timetable—that “science requires it, and requires it as fast as possible.” Loomis, far more than Lawrence, was acutely aware of the imminence of America’s involvement in the war. He had been working simultaneously on the cyclotron and the radar projects and had traveled to London several times to educate himself on Britain’s radar technology, which was considerably more advanced. He had learned from his British colleagues just how depleted their industry resources were and how desperately they needed the United States’ support.

  “It was the early part of 1940,” Loomis recalled. “Stimson was actually saying the war was coming very soon, and I’d been so close to him, and he felt so strongly about it.” He had worked so quickly to get the money and supplies for the cyclotron because he knew that with the country spending so much money to rearm itself, and the situation in Europe deteriorating, a “business and raw material bottleneck” would soon cause delays. “I was a great help in speeding up the situation,” Loomis would concede years later. “And those were the months in which weeks counted.”

  Chapter 8

  ECHOES OF WAR

  Locusts hummed metallically in the distance, and the horizon wavered under a cloudless sky. Externally, the Laboratory was an idyll of summer peace.

  —WR, from Brain Waves and Death

  BY early 1940, Loomis was so caught up in his work with Lawrence that he had decided to purchase a home in California and accept a position as a research scientist at the Rad Lab. The experience of working at the Berkeley lab was intoxicating for Loomis. The sixty-inch cyclotron, after numerous delays, was finally up and running, and it was a marvelous sight. With its big, powerful magnet, it promised to be productive of exciting discoveries in nuclear physics, and Loomis could not resist the chance to be a part of it all.

  He had also decided that his next big project would be to back the new research being done by Enrico Fermi, the brilliant young professor of physics at Columbia who had won the Nobel in 1938—a year before Lawrence—for his discovery of new radioactive elements and his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons. Fermi happened to be in Berkeley from January 30 to February 20 as a visiting lecturer, and Loomis, who had known the Italian refugee physicist for several years, was quite taken with him. Fermi was enormously talented, with a lively and highly systematic mind, and he was open and generous like Lawrence. By his own account, he had taken up “the uranium split business with which half the world seems to be occupied . . . as soon as the cyclotron gave a beam.”

  Loomis was determined to help advance Fermi’s work and arrange funding for him to build a nuclear chain reactor. Fermi’s proposal was still on the drawing boards, but Loomis, who was always quick to seize on the next new thing, offered to help underwrite the cost of any experiments that might determine how fission could be exploited for atomic energy. If the explosive power of fission could be realized, it would give mankind command of an almost limitless supply of energy. With characteristic confidence and enthusiasm, Loomis plunged ahead into nuclear physics. A scientific race had begun, one with incalculably high stakes, and he was prepared to devote all his efforts and resources to developing the new field as fast as possible.

  For Loomis, the discovery of fission by German physicists in the beginning of 1939, in light of the events in Europe, was both exhilarating and profoundly disturbing. The discovery was of great importance to science, yet such an enormous release of energy, if harnessed and controlled, would be a terrible weapon in the hands of Hitler. He had first heard the momentous news from Niels Bohr, upon the Danish physicist’s arrival in the United States on January 16, 1939. Fermi had been at the pier to meet the SS Drottningholm to welcome Bohr, whom he and Loomis had recently visited in Copenhagen, and had promptly driven him to Tuxedo Park, where they both stayed for several days before going on to Washington for the Fifth Conference on Theoretical Physics. Bohr had barely set foot on American soil before announcing that the fission of uranium had been demonstrated by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin.

  While he was in Tuxedo Park, Bohr had r
eceived a cable from the radiochemist Lise Meitner, a close associate of Hahn’s, that she and her nephew Otto Frisch had confirmed the fission process in their own experiments in Sweden and that they had good reason to believe that when the uranium isotope 235 was bombarded with neutrons, it split into two lighter elements with a loss in mass and an enormous release of energy. “He got a cablegram from Meitner, and they thought it was 235 that was doing the splitting and that energy was coming out of it,” recalled Loomis. “And then a week later he delivered the lecture before the National Academy, and practically before the sun was set it was confirmed in three labs in America.”

  The news that the experiments had been verified in American laboratories generated so much excitement that Bohr and Loomis had been able to talk of little else. Hans Christian Sonne, a Danish banker living in Tuxedo Park who had gone to boarding school with Bohr’s brother and was a friend of the family, recalled that one evening after drinks at his house, Bohr and Loomis sat around discussing what the new development might mean for physics. “My father was a businessman, so he did not understand the scientific details,” said his son, Christian Sonne, a real estate executive in Tuxedo Park, “except that it might make it possible to produce enough power to make a mighty big bomb.”