Alfred Lee Loomis

After amassing a fortune on Wall Street, Alfred Lee Loomis, devoted himself to science, starting a laboratory that helped develop radar technology, an advance cited as a key to the Allied victory in World War II. His associates included Albert Einstein, who described Loomis’s lab as a “palace of science.” Loomis was a quintessential WASP -- Yale undergraduate, Harvard Law, a Wall Street fortune and a house in the gated exurb of Tuxedo Park, N.Y Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Niels Bohr, Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi and George Kistiakowsky, and innumerable others went there to work and confer at Loomis' lavish research center -- one of the best-equipped and most interesting private American laboratories -- established by Loomis in the 1920s and maintained into the 1940s. During the 1920s and '30s, Loomis built, with the brilliant Johns Hopkins physicist Robert W. Wood, an immense spectrograph in which they studied formaldehyde; he investigated high-frequency sound waves, quartz crystal clocks and chronographs; he constructed an electroencephalograph "of a novel and highly efficient design"; all in all, his research "had important medical and therapeutic applications and had won the respect of scholars from Johns Hopkins, Princeton and Harvard," even though he was an amateur whose formal scientific training was, by academic standards, almost nonexistent. By the late 1930s, Loomis, who had been paying close attention to the Nazi war machine. The story of how radar made its passage from the drawing board into the cockpits of Allied fighter planes is incredibly dramatic. It helped that his cousin and intimate friend, Henry Stimson, was Roosevelt's secretary of war. As both a husband and a father he was distant, and did not awaken the emotional side of himself until 1938, when he fell "hopelessly in love" with Manette Hobart, the wife of a close friend, who at 29 was two decades his junior. Born in New York, NY on 4 November 1887 to Henry Patterson Loomis and Julia Sarah Josephine Stimson. Alfred Lee Loomis married Ellen Holman Farnsworth and had 3 children. He passed away on 11 Aug 1975 in East Hampton, Middlesex, Connecticut, USA.