“He didn’t take credit for things, that was very characteristic of him,” said Haskins, who counted himself among the “fortunate band” of scientists privileged to call Loomis a friend. “Of course, he was known in closed circles, but not widely known, after the war. History forgot him. Well, in a sense he forgot himself, because he didn’t care about all that. He wasn’t interested in the past. He was interested only in the present and the future.”
* * *
1. Loomis’ application for the Loran patent was disputed by two scientists, each of whom claimed to be the first inventor of the fundamental concept. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office twice held in Loomis’ favor. The court of customs and patent appeals later reversed the ruling in one of the cases. A Loran patent was finally issued to Loomis on April 28, 1959.
Epilogue
He’s probably the only man who ever on the one hand took the guys down in Wall Street for a ride and made a lot of money out of them; and on the other hand got elected to the National Academy of Sciences on the basis of his accomplishments in physics.
—Vannevar Bush
Alfred Lee Loomis made it clear he had “no interest” in becoming a science adviser to President Truman when William Golden approached him about the job in the fall of 1950. In the wake of the Korean War, Truman was under pressure to reactivate Bush’s OSRD, and Golden had been engaged to advise the president about organizing the government’s scientific efforts, and with interviewing likely candidates to fill the job. “He was very gentlemanly and cordial, but it was certainly apparent he wasn’t interested in engaging in any new activities,” recalled Golden. “He had received some negative publicity after his divorce, and I think he simply chose to withdraw from the world. It was as if some vital ingredient had drained out of him.” Loomis remained personally involved with the work being done by his former colleagues and generously supported their pet projects at MIT, Berkeley, and Cal Tech, where DuBridge served as president for more than twenty years. After the war, he returned to his early love of astronomy and became actively involved in funding and building observatories, such as Walter Roberts’ High Altitude Observatory in Colorado. He never stopped collecting brilliant men. In the late 1940s, he met an engineer named Avery Fisher, who had a small stereo store on 42nd Street in New York. “They became great friends right away, like two little boys,” recalled Fisher’s wife, Janet. When Loomis learned Fisher was having trouble getting financing for his new high-fidelity speakers, he took him straight up to the office he kept with Thorne and instructed his partner to set him up with “an open line of credit.” It was the beginning of Fisher Electronics and another adventure with a pioneering scientist. Years later, as Fisher prepared to enter the new Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center on opening night, he told his wife, “Alfred should be here.” Loomis enjoyed being surrounded by the “old gang” and, as Alvarez put it, “introducing his scientific friends to the pleasures that are normally known only to the very wealthy.” Each spring, he invited Lawrence, Alvarez, McMillan, and DuBridge, along with their wives, to be his guests at the Del Monte Lodge in Pebble Beach and to play golf at Cypress Point. He also hosted annual winter getaways to Jamaica and footed the bill for all the expenses and first-class airfare. Loomis died of a stroke at eighty-seven at his East Hampton home on August 11, 1975. His last obsession, noted Alvarez, who visited him shortly before his death, “was programming tricks for the Hewlett-Packard model 65 handheld computer that was his constant companion.”
Ernest Lawrence and Loomis continued their close association, and Loomis was a key behind-the-scenes figure in the Berkeley physicist’s postwar campaign to assert himself as the leader of the country’s nuclear establishment. Both were advocates of the hydrogen bomb and subscribed to the straightforward view that “we should build it before the Russians do.” To that end, Lawrence teamed up with Edward Teller, a longtime champion of the H-bomb, to turn the Rad Lab’s Livermore, California, site into a second nuclear weapons laboratory and develop more powerful and efficient accelerators, such as the “bevatron.” This led him into direct conflict with Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos laboratory, who was philosophically opposed to an escalating nuclear arms race with Russia. At the heart of the struggle was Lawrence’s next “big machine”—the material testing accelerator, or MTA—an ill-conceived plan to build a giant accelerator that would turn out vast amounts of plutonium for the country’s nuclear arsenal. Oppenheimer came out against it, and the harder Lawrence pushed, according to the historian Nuel Pharr Davis, the more “the MTA permeated and inflamed all the other issues.”
In 1953, as a result of the heightening political tensions, Oppenheimer was accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee of having Communist sympathies, and his security clearance was revoked. The bitter dispute over Oppenheimer’s loyalty divided the scientific community and strained many of the old Rad Lab friendships. Among those supporting Oppenheimer were Bush, DuBridge, Rabi, Bethe, and Conant. On the other side was Lawrence’s camp, including Loomis, Alvarez, McMillan, and Teller.
Loomis, who was conservative and fiercely patriotic, advised Lawrence against testifying at Oppenheimer’s hearing. Lawrence decided not to and urged Alvarez to do likewise. “[Ernest] didn’t think what was the most popular thing to do,” Loomis said later. “He wanted to concentrate his time on scientific research and not get caught up in arguments about whether you’re a loyal American. . . .” Alvarez testified as a government witness and, while never directly casting doubt on Oppenheimer’s loyalty, criticized his decision to veto the H-bomb. In the end, Oppenheimer was ousted from power and publicly disgraced. Lawrence’s group was seen as greatly contributing to Oppenheimer’s downfall, and many scientists would never forgive them.
Lawrence and Loomis collaborated on various other projects together, and in 1950 Lawrence came up with the idea for a color television tube while staying with Loomis at his Mayfair House apartment in New York. On Loomis’ advice, he and Rowan Gaither formed a company to exploit the various television schemes they developed, and Chromatic Television Laboratories was incorporated and patent applications filed. Lawrence’s tube was competitive with one designed by RCA at the time, but the problems involved in financing the tube and getting it into production proved more of a challenge than they expected, and they eventually sold the rights to Sony. Lawrence continued to suffer from frequent infections and ulcerative colitis, and Loomis, in an effort to keep his friend healthy, tried to take him away on vacations and arranged for him to have a full-time chauffeur. On August 26, 1958, Lawrence underwent surgery in a Palo Alto hospital. He died the following morning without regaining consciousness. He was fifty-seven. Only days earlier, he had joked with Loomis on the phone about their next trip: “I’ll be all right, all I have to do is get down to Balboa.”
Vannevar Bush continued as president of the Carnegie Institute until 1955. A year before he retired, Bush helped mount a vigorous defense of Oppenheimer and denounced the hearings for placing a man on trial for expressing strong opinions: “This board has made a mistake . . . a serious one.” Although he disagreed with his Berkeley colleagues, Bush never allowed it to interfere with their relationship, and he, Lawrence, Loomis, and Alvarez remained lifelong friends. Bush’s star waned after the war, but he served on various boards, and for many years was chairman of the MIT Corporation, where he managed to coax the occasional large check out of Loomis for new gadgets and laboratory equipment. Bush died in June 1974.
Luis Alvarez, whom Loomis called one of his “other sons,” was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1968. He won for his development of the hydrogen bubble chamber into a powerful instrument that made possible valuable new discoveries in the field of high-energy physics. Alvarez died in August 1988.
Karl Compton retired from MIT in 1948 and died six years later in June 1954. His brother, Arthur Compton, returned to academic life after the war and served as chancellor of Washington University in St. Lou
is from 1945 to 1953; he devoted his final years to teaching until his death in March 1962.
James Conant and Oppenheimer fought hard to prevent the building of the hydrogen bomb, and Conant’s feelings for Lawrence and Loomis were never the same after the loyalty hearings. As he said in his testimony, if opposition to the H-bomb made Oppenheimer a security risk, “it would apply to me, because I opposed it—as strongly as anybody else.” He left Harvard after twenty years as university president—as he wrote Kistiakowsky, “long enough to serve a sentence for youthful indiscretion”—to become high commissioner of Germany. He went on to become a leading educator and wrote widely on the need for better public education and testing “to break down social barriers.” Conant died in February 1978 and was cremated and buried in his wife’s family plot in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Bill Richards was also laid to rest. His son, Ted Conant, took custody of Richards’ roman à clef and the confiscated short story about the uranium bomb, which he eventually passed on to his daughter.
Ed McMillan shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry with Glenn Seaborg in 1951 for their discovery of plutonium (with Kennedy and Wahl) as well as his discovery of neptunium with Abelson in 1940. His work led scientists all over the world to create and identify another fifteen transuranic elements. He returned to Berkeley after the war and worked with Lawrence on developing the next generation of cyclotrons. He died in September 1991.
George Kistiakowsky, whose career Loomis had fostered since his days as a Tuxedo Park research fellow with Bill Richards, went on to become one of the most influential scientists in the country. In 1959, he became scientific adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower. He remained extremely close to the Conant/Richards family and used to take the author sailing off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Elaine, had a summer home. Kistiakowsky wrote a memoir of his days at the White House during the intricate test ban negotiations with Russia, and he was working on his autobiography at the time of his death in December 1982. He kept a copy of Richards’ novel, Brain Waves and Death, in a drawer by his bed.
Robert Wood spent fifty years as a professor at Johns Hopkins. Loomis continued to visit his brilliant mentor at his farmhouse in East Hampton until his death in 1955.
Taffy Bowen immigrated to Australia after the war and launched an ambitious radio astronomy program. In 1954, Loomis helped persuade the Carnegie Institution trustees to contribute $250,000 so that Bowen could realize his dream of building a 210-foot radio dish in New South Wales. A year later, Loomis had a hand in convincing the Rockefeller Corporation, where he was also a trustee, to put up another $250,000, with the stipulation that the Australian government provide a matching grant. Bowen’s radio telescope was based on the design of the six-foot SCR-584 gun-laying radar that the British and American physicists had built at the MIT Rad Lab during the war. The construction of the Parkes telescope took six years, but when it was completed, it was the largest device of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. It opened up a whole new branch of astronomical study, tracking celestial objects across the sky with a precision once thought to be unattainable. He died in August 1991.
Garret Hobart III became a recluse after the war and rarely ventured out of Tuxedo Park. “He was a vulnerable person,” said Al Hobart. “After Manette left him, he was virtually a hermit.” He died of cancer at age fifty-five in March 1963. He is survived by his two sons, Garret Hobart IV, a retired lawyer, and Alfred Hobart, who runs the Green Mountain Valley School in Vermont, which trains Olympic athletes.
Manette Seeldrayers Loomis and Alfred enjoyed thirty happy years together. Time never diminished his love for her. His granddaughter Jacqueline Quillen, who lived next door in the house Alfred purchased for her family, recalled that when she stopped by one day to borrow some eggs, he told her: “You can have anything that’s mine, except Manette.” Late in life, Loomis worried about how his young wife would cope after he was gone. He asked a close friend, Ronald Christie, who had been one of his favorite young protégés at Tuxedo Park and was a prominent lung specialist at the McGill University in Canada, “to take care of Manette.” A year after Loomis’ death, Manette and Christie were married. Manette died in October 1991.
Ellen Farnsworth Loomis and Alfred did not speak for almost twenty years, until the suicide of their seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Ellen “Debbie” Loomis, the daughter of Betty and Farney Loomis, who plunged to her death from a patio of their old penthouse apartment on January 21, 1965. Alfred rushed to his former wife’s aid as soon as he heard the news. The teenager had been under psychiatric care for depression. A note was found pinned to her coat. The funeral helped heal the rift that had kept the family apart for so many years. Ellen died at age eighty-six in December 1975. Her ashes are buried in the small graveyard behind St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Tuxedo Park.
(Alfred) Lee Loomis Jr. became a successful venture capitalist and was involved with domestic oil and gas drilling operations. He distinguished himself as an aggressive and highly competitive sportsman and was almost universally unpopular. He captured the gold medal in the 1948 Olympics in Britain sailing a six-meter yacht, and in 1977 he managed the Independence-Courageous yachting syndicate, which successfully defended the America’s Cup. In 1946, Lee and Henry Loomis bought St. Vincent’s Island off the coast of South Carolina, where they built a home for their mother. They eventually donated St. Vincent’s to the Nature Conservancy. In 1963, Lee acquired Bull Island, where their family maintained a plantation and wildlife preserve until it was sold in 2000. He died in September 1994. He is survived by his four children: Nancy and Sabra, his wife’s daughters by a previous marriage whom he adopted; Candace Stimson Loomis; and Alfred (“Chip”) Lee Loomis III, an accomplished sailor and past commodore of the New York Yacht Club.
Farney Loomis became a respected biochemist and for many years was a professor at Brandeis University. With his father’s backing, he opened his own Loomis Laboratories in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he conducted biological research on taming hydra. For several years, he and Alfred sponsored small scientific conferences to which they invited leading biologists, as in the old days at Tuxedo Park. When he was sixty years old, the depression that had plagued both his mother and his daughter caught up with him. He died of an overdose of sleeping pills in November 1973. He is survived by Joan and William Farnsworth Jr., his children by his first wife, Violet Amory; and an adopted daughter, Jacqueline, and Bart, his children with his second wife, Betty Loomis Evans. He later married Frances Whitman, adopted her three children, and had a son, Jefferson Loomis.
Henry Loomis went to work at the Berkeley Rad Lab immediately after the war, then shifted to MIT, where he worked as an assistant to the university’s new president, James Killian, who was a friend of his father’s. During World War II, when Stimson and Groves were trying to decide which Japanese cities to bomb, a chance visit by Henry, who had studied Japanese history at Harvard and had raved about the glorious art treasures in Kyoto, helped persuade Stimson to spare the ancient city. Henry pursued a career in public service on the advice of Stimson: “Uncle Harry used to tell us that we’d been kind of lucky in life and that we owed the country a duty.” He served as chief of research and intelligence for the United States Information Agency and ran the Voice of America from 1958 to 1965. He later became president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He is divorced from his first wife, Paulie Loomis. They had four children, Tim, Mary Paul (“Pixie”), Lucy, and Gordon. He is currently married to his second wife, Jacqueline, and lives in Jacksonville, Florida.
Henry Stimson’s last cabinet meeting was on September 21, 1945, his seventy-eighth birthday. The day he left Washington to retire to his Highhold estate in Long Island, he had lunch with Bush, and they drove out to National Airport together in his black limousine. “Every general officer in Washington was there, drawn up in lines from the car to the plane,” recalled Bush. “General Marshall joined him and they walked down between those lines to t
he plane together. Never was a secretary more respected and revered.” He received a nineteen-gun salute, and then the band played “Happy Birthday.” His heart finally gave out in October 1950.
Landon K. Thorne continued in business with Loomis until 1955. After they finally liquidated the firm, each walked away with approximately $15 million. During World War II, Thorne was active in the Red Cross and several times was asked by Stimson, who was his wife’s cousin, to carry important correspondence between the United States and Britain. Near the end of the war, during a dinner at their New York apartment, Stimson informed the party that the following day the United States was going to do something that would change the course of history. The next day, August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Landon Thorne died in 1964 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. Julia Atterbury Loomis Thorne died in 1973 and is buried beside her husband. She donated half of their 230-acre Bay Shore estate, Thorneham, to the Nature Conservancy. Landon Thorne Jr., who spent his career at Bankers Trust, died in 1980. Ed Thorne, a retired businessman, who lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, died in October 2002.
Honey Horn Plantation on Hilton Head Island, a total of twenty thousand prime acres of pine forest on the southern end, was sold by Loomis and Thorne in 1950 to a group of lumber associates from Hinesville, Georgia, called the Hilton Head Company. The property, which they had bought for $6 an acre, sold for $560 an acre—roughly $11.2 million, which Loomis later complained was too cheap. Two of the timbermen, General Joseph B. Fraser and Frederick C. Hack Sr., went on to develop the island as a vacation resort. The Hack family occupied Honey Horn until 1998, when the house and remaining sixty-eight-acre tract was purchased by the town of Hilton Head, which plans to restore the historic site and turn it into a museum.
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