Secret of Tuxedo Park, The (1988)

[bunniefuu]

♪

[tires riding through snow]

[windshield wipers flipping]

♪

♪

NARRATOR: On the afternoon of January , ,

two of the most famous scientists in the world

visited a remote mansion outside New York City.

♪

Hidden inside was a world-class laboratory,

the consuming passion of a secretive millionaire.

MICHAEL HILTZIK: Within the scientific community,

there were tales of this mysterious hilltop laboratory,

fabulously equipped,

owned and operated by this millionaire

who moved in the background, like a shadow.

And you couldn't just get in.

But if you were a top-flight talent,

the invitation would come from Alfred Loomis.

NARRATOR: Physicists Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi

brought staggering news.

That afternoon,

Alfred Loomis became one of the first people to learn

that scientists had split the atom

in a process that transformed mass into energy,

potentially huge amounts of energy.

Nobody knew the answer to the critical question:

could this be used to build an unimaginably powerful b*mb?

Under any circumstances,

the prospect would have been unsettling.

Under these circumstances, it was terrifying:

nuclear fission had been discovered in Hitler's Germany.

[people cheering and shouting]

♪

For years, Loomis had been hearing rumors of the work

going on in German labs--

jet engines, tanks, a*tillery,

synthetic fuels, ballistic missiles,

and now, nuclear fission.

With every discovery,

Hitler was growing more dangerous.

♪

Bohr and Fermi left Tuxedo Park the next morning.

Alone in his mansion, Loomis decided to pursue

what must have seemed a forlorn hope:

he would dedicate himself

to overcoming Germany's scientific advantage.

It was an implausible notion,

but it would change Loomis's life

and, against all odds, alter the course of history.

ROBERT BUDERI: I remember first learning about Loomis

and just being blown away.

I'm, like, "What?

This thing happened and nobody knows about it?"

♪

♪

NARRATOR: Alfred Loomis didn't start out reclusive, a millionaire,

or even a scientist.

In fact, he had tried hard to live an unremarkable life.

After graduating from Harvard in ,

he took a job as a corporate lawyer on Wall Street,

made a good marriage, started a family,

and settled in the village of Tuxedo Park,

miles outside Manhattan.

♪

On the surface, there was little that distinguished Loomis

from any number of his well-bred peers.

But behind the polished façade

was a raw, unformed ambition and a most unusual mind.

Alfred's rigid propriety was in fact a penance,

the legacy of his father's transgressions.

Everyone knew that his father was unfaithful,

everyone knew that he drank too much.

His parents' marriage was miserable,

and so Alfred had this sort of rootless, parentless existence.

And he felt the shame of his father's behavior

hanging over him.

NARRATOR: Growing up in an emotional void,

Alfred found solace in scientific exploration.

He was captivated by life's mysteries--

the smallest increments of time, prime numbers, black holes.

The pursuit of the unknown offered an escape,

but only for a time.

The family's troubles culminated

when Alfred's father died suddenly,

leaving the young man responsible

for his mother and sister.

CONANT: The family had name and stature, but they didn't have money.

Alfred wanted to make sure

his sister and his mother would be okay,

so he had to enter a profession, earn money,

and make up for, in wealth and respectability,

what his father had not bequeathed them.

[hooves tapping]

NARRATOR: Alfred's marriage was the perfect expression

of his rectitude.

♪

JACQUELINE L. QUILLEN: Oh, my Lord, my grandmother, Ellen Farnsworth Loomis,

was beautiful.

I mean, she was called "the most beautiful girl in Boston."

♪

JACQUELINE LOOMIS: They were very, very active.

I don't think they had a quiet moment.

It was the one time that I think they were both incredibly happy,

and had a lovely marriage.

[water rippling]

NARRATOR: Alfred and Ellen played tennis and golf,

attended soirées,

and were praised in the social columns.

[motor buzzing]

Despite Alfred's determination to fit in,

there were things that set him apart.

♪

QUILLEN: I have seen Alfred

take on my father, a very good chess player,

and two other scientists, good chess players.

He was playing all three of them simultaneously.

He was looking away from it,

possibly on the telephone in another room,

and the moves were called out to him.

Alfred would nod his head

and then reply what his move was.

Alfred never lost.

NARRATOR: There were other signs

that there was more to Alfred Loomis

than met the eye.

In his off hours, he applied for patents

on various small devices he had invented,

ranging from a slide rule for calculating securities

to a reliable fire extinguisher.

♪

For five years,

Loomis bridled his restless mind at Tuxedo Park.

Then, in , he got a reprieve

when the United States went to w*r with Germany.

♪

He trained as an officer

and with the help of an influential cousin,

was posted to the Army's research center

near Aberdeen, Maryland.

CONANT: For Alfred Loomis,

this is like Heaven.

Being able to invent things, having a real impact,

this is a whole intoxicating new world to him.

[firing]

DAVID ZIMMERMAN: He comes up with a device to measure muzzle velocities

much more accurately than any other existing device.

Accurate muzzle velocity

means more accuracy hitting your targets.

And the fact that Loomis actually improves

the accuracy of the major weapon of the First World w*r

is quite an extraordinary accomplishment

for someone who is in fact a lawyer.

[g*n fires]

♪

NARRATOR: When the w*r ended in ,

Alfred returned to his old law firm.

He needed the income--

he had a wife and three sons to support now,

as well as his mother and sister.

But at Aberdeen,

he had glimpsed a different, irresistible, future.

His ambition had crystallized.

[pouring and hissing]

♪

QUILLEN: The world was exploding with new science.

It's as if the whole world of science

went from black-and-white to Technicolor,

and Alfred wanted to be part of it.

NARRATOR: For Loomis,

the prospect of a lifetime's worth

of soirées, socializing, and corporate law

had become unbearable.

If he was going to avoid that fate,

Loomis would have to make enough money

to get out from under his obligations.

[crowd clamoring]

In ,

he left his predictable future behind

and stepped onto the giant roller coaster

that was investment banking in the Roaring Twenties.

[traders yelling]

CONANT: Alfred's brother-in-law, Landon K. Thorne

was one of the hottest young bond salesmen on Wall Street.

And Landon came to him and said,

"Look, you and I should team up

and finance the electrification of rural America."

They took Wall Street by storm,

and started making money hand over fist.

[tickertape machine clicking, traders shouting]

[engine running]

NARRATOR: Even as Loomis was conquering Wall Street,

he kept in touch

with the scientists he had met at Aberdeen.

[engine revs]

Among them was a physicist

who spent his summers at a farm on Long Island.

One afternoon in the summer of ,

Loomis drove over to see him.

CONANT: Robert W. Wood was quite an eccentric, flamboyant physicist,

one of the foremost experimental physicists in America.

Alfred dropped by, and he found that in his barn,

Robert Wood had sort of this big informal laboratory set up.

This was much more fun than the gossip at the yacht club,

and so Loomis parked himself on a stool

and Robert Wood bubbled with enthusiasm

and told him all about the research he was doing.

NARRATOR: Loomis was entranced.

He asked Wood

if there was any research they could do together,

perhaps something that needed funding.

Wood talked about an experiment

he had seen in France during the w*r.

Scientists there had invented a device

for locating enemy submarines

that used an oscillator to send out a beam

of high-frequency sound waves.

Wood had noted that when fish swam into the beam,

they turned belly up and died.

When he put a hand in, he felt a sharp burning sensation.

Wood suggested that they could start by asking why.

♪

Loomis wasn't one for half-measures.

He bought a massive General Electric oscillator,

even more powerful than the one Wood had seen in France.

[banging rapidly]

They installed it in Loomis's garage in Tuxedo Park,

and stepped up the output from , to , volts.

Then they stuffed cotton in their ears, put on earmuffs,

and switched it on.

[electricity hissing]

ZIMMERMAN: They keep on increasing the power

that they're getting out of it,

something General Electric never intended,

creating greater and greater sound waves,

which they then used

to k*ll small animals, deform cells, etc.

[slide clicking]

It may seem rather cruel,

but in fact they're trying to understand

how these waves interact with organisms.

And ultimately what it does lead to

is a safe way to look at things like a fetus.

Wood and Loomis actually invented this new device,

which becomes the basis for ultrasound technology.

CONANT: Loomis's ambitions get greater and greater,

and he decides to model himself

after these genteel British scientists,

like Lord Rayleigh,

who have mansions and their own private laboratories

and do cutting-edge work.

So he starts hunting around Tuxedo Park,

and he finds this enormous old mansion.

It's been derelict for about ten years.

It's very private, it's all up on its own,

and he decides that this would be

the perfect laboratory for a gentleman scientist.

♪

NARRATOR: In the years that the mansion named Tower House stood vacant,

its weather-beaten battlements and broken windows

had given rise to all sorts of sinister tales.

Now the place took on a new air of mystery,

as trucks arrived with load after load

of exotic machinery.

[engines running]

Behind those stone walls,

Loomis was converting Tower House

into a state-of-the-art laboratory.

The elegant bedrooms and lounges,

grand salon and ballroom,

were fitted out to house the scientists

that Loomis began inviting to Tuxedo Park.

[train whistle blowing, bell ringing]

For many of them,

coming from cash-strapped universities

in the middle of the Great Depression,

it was like traveling to another world.

♪

CONANT: You get off at the train station

and Alfred Loomis's Rolls comes up and picks you up,

and drives you through these enormous stone gates.

And you start climbing up these winding, narrow roads,

passing -bedroom mansions

with stable houses and guest houses.

♪

And you arrive at the Tower House,

and the butler welcomes you.

I can't imagine what Loomis's neighbors thought,

because many of these people who arrived,

first of all, they were foreigners.

♪

Many of them spoke with foreign accents.

They're also Jews,

and Jews are simply not allowed to live in Tuxedo Park.

♪

CONANT: There is all kinds of gossip and all kinds of whispering

about what's going on up there.

The newspapers have covered

some of the more sensational of Alfred's experiments.

♪

There are rumors that he is k*lling fish, dissecting frogs,

and there is something the newspapers have dubbed

"The Whispers of Death."

♪

NARRATOR: Rumors of a secretive wealthy eccentric

conducting strange experiments in a remote Gothic mansion

were too good for the press to resist.

♪

Alfred abhorred publicity.

He ran from it.

I remember, when I was married,

there was a picture of me in the <span tts:fontStyle="italic">New York Times</span>

with my husband.

And about a week later,

when we got back from our honeymoon,

he had kept the picture,

and he pointed to it and he said,

"That will be one of two times

your face will appear in the newspaper."

And the second time being my death.

And that was that.

♪

NARRATOR: Loomis hated any breach in his wall of privacy,

to the point that he resented his own servants.

In order to escape them,

he built an ultra-modern residence

adjacent to the laboratory

whose chief virtue was a servantless existence.

♪

[lab equipment rattling]

Loomis created a sanctuary of his own design,

a hideaway in which everything was subsumed

in scientific exploration.

More and more, even his wife found herself on the outside.

♪

CONANT: Ellen was very supportive of her husband.

She tried to keep up.

She tried to have a sort of lively interest

in his inquiries.

She tried to be housekeeper, helpmate, and doer of odd jobs,

to have some role in this new scientific hobby

that seemed to consume all of her husband's passion and time.

♪

QUILLEN: Little by little, she felt the distance.

And I think she just didn't know how to stop it from growing.

And then began the migraine headaches,

and there was no bringing her back

to her joyful, prettiest girl in Boston that he married.

♪

NARRATOR: The Loomis boys-- Lee, Farney, and Henry--

were sent away to boarding school at the age of seven,

as Alfred had been.

When they came home for holidays and vacations,

they loved working with their father in the lab,

but he took little interest in their lives.

Their efforts to please usually went unnoticed,

as when Farney came home from boarding school

confident that he was finally good enough

to play chess with his father.

MARY PAUL LOOMIS: His father said,

"Okay, well, you set up the board," you know,

"on the porch."

Alfred never came out onto the porch,

never left his chair in the living room,

and beat him in some very small number of moves.

And so Uncle Farney was just devastated.

It never occurred to Alfred

that he could have been a little gentler.

My dad described his father

as not having any of the emotional pieces,

none of the sentimentality

that you would associate with fatherhood.

[cars running, horns beeping]

NARRATOR: Loomis was living a double life, spending his days on Wall Street

and his evenings and weekends in the lab.

By the beginning of ,

he and Thorne had become, as <span tts:fontStyle="italic">Fortune</span>magazine put it,

"banker and spokesman

for America's booming electrical industry."

But even as their business was growing by leaps and bounds,

Loomis was starting to feel

that there was something very wrong

with the stock market.

[ship horn blows]

MARY PAUL LOOMIS: When my father was a little boy,

the family went to England on this big cruise ship.

Dad shared with me that one day on the trip,

Alfred was just doing a bunch of calculations,

and then was suddenly standing up,

saying that he was going to send a cable to his partner,

his brother-in-law, Landon Thorne,

to tell him to sell everything and buy gold.

JACQUELINE LOOMIS: Landon did not hesitate.

He sold everything they had.

Which was remarkable,

you know, after working and working and working

to build up their resources,

to turn around and sell them immediately.

♪

NARRATOR: Over the next months, as stocks soared,

Loomis and Thorne quietly pulled their money out of the market.

Then came Black Thursday.

[traders yelling]

On October , , stock prices plummeted,

and stunned investors saw their entire net worth

wiped out overnight.

♪

Loomis and Thorne came through without a scratch.

CONANT: They were sitting on a mountain of cash when the market broke.

It meant that he had money to invest.

And Alfred Loomis made a second fortune,

apparently $ to $ million more,

during the Depression.

♪

NARRATOR: In the spring of ,

Loomis abruptly walked away from Wall Street.

♪

At last, he could devote himself to science.

The upshot was a stream of discoveries.

ZIMMERMAN: He discovered-- I hate to think how he figured it out--

that by subjecting a person

to these strong, high-frequency sound waves,

it created a fever.

There were conditions where you needed to induce a fever.

Now, previous to this,

they had to actually give the subject malaria.

And if you can imagine how horrific that would have been:

"Well, to cure you we have to give you malaria."

Now they could actually induce the fever

using these high-frequency sound waves.

♪

CONANT: Loomis buys the most precise clocks ever made,

the most expensive state-of-the-art crystals

for his experiments.

He becomes a leading authority in precise measurements of time.

ZIMMERMAN: And then there's this work, the study of brain waves.

Most doctors didn't believe brain waves existed,

and Loomis decided,

well, their equipment wasn't good enough.

And it's through Loomis's work

that the basic stages of sleep are, for the first time,

measured and systematically described.

NARRATOR: For the sleep experiments,

Loomis frequently enlisted his son Henry,

who had a knack for falling asleep

despite the web of wires and sensors

that were applied to his head and body.

Once, when the sensors indicated

that the boy was in a deep sleep,

Alfred whispered that Henry's beloved sailboat

had caught fire.

JACQUELINE LOOMIS: Henry flew out of the cot.

The wires went flying everywhere

and he tried to scramble up the side of the wall,

thinking he was going to put out a fire.

So they discovered

that even when you're in deep, deep sleep,

we're still conscious of activity around us.

[laughs]

Henry loved it.

♪

MICHAEL HILTZIK: There was so much that went on at Tower House.

This was serious research that was being done

by the best physicists,

the best engineers, the best scientists of the time.

♪

Six or eight or ten papers came out of Tower House every year.

They were respected, they were important.

♪

CONANT: It's beyond a scientific playground.

I mean, this is a scientific idyll.

There is nothing like it anywhere in the world.

In fact, Einstein refers to Loomis's compound

as a "palace of science,"

and it truly is.

♪

♪

QUILLEN: Alfred's life was this passion for science.

He simply wasn't at home.

And Ellen just floated into the back.

♪

In her letters, Ellen said,

"Oh, I wish I knew more about what Alfred's doing.

He seems so happy in the laboratory."

Well, Manette did know what he was doing in the laboratory.

♪

NARRATOR: One of the few women who was welcome

inside the male world of Tower House

was Manette Hobart,

the young wife of Loomis's longtime protégé.

In the late s,

Manette's husband left Tuxedo Park

for an extended research program.

While he was gone, why, Manette was there on site,

and the two of them, I guess, were somewhat thrown together.

♪

How did Alfred fall in love with her?

Because she was interesting.

And she didn't have the headaches.

She was the new woman, the modern woman.

My God, she was interested in science.

And she was very drawn to Alfred.

NARRATOR: As Alfred's personal life took on

another hidden dimension,

political turmoil began casting a shadow

over his palace of science.

[people cheering and yelling]

SENATOR GERALD NYE: Americans want no more w*r.

Most of all, they want no more participation in foreign wars.

NARRATOR: As Europe teetered on the brink of w*r,

America seethed with anger.

CONANT: The country was overwhelmingly isolationist.

And not only that,

but the feeling was very, very bitter.

I haven't the slightest idea of European affairs.

Let Europe fight her own battles.

CONANT: You had very respected American figures

talking about the corrupt munitions industry

and British plutocrats

trying to get Americans involved in the coming w*r.

This time America should keep out, and I know I will.

CONANT: Loomis, on the other hand, is really out of step

with the mainstream sentiment of the country.

And that's because he is talking

to all of these European scientists

who are coming,

and they are watching with absolute dismay and horror

what is happening in Germany.

He has no doubt that there will be a w*r,

and that America will become involved.

[people cheering]

QUILLEN: By , no Jew in Germany

was allowed to hold an academic position.

Alfred said to me that was a real warning bell for him.

And Alfred began offering to pay,

not only to bring them over, to house them,

but found them jobs.

He did that for a number of scientists.

Because, my gosh, there was real danger in the air.

♪

NARRATOR: By the beginning of ,

when Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi came to Tower House

and raised the specter of a n*zi super-b*mb,

Loomis knew he had to do something.

He shared his misgivings with kindred spirits

like Karl Compton, the head of M.I.T.,

and Vannevar Bush at the Carnegie Institution.

It was Compton who came up with the suggestion.

CONANT: Karl Compton says

radar is going to be one of the most important weapons

in the coming w*r.

And they have a group at M.I.T.

that have been working on this radar,

but it involves very expensive equipment.

It involves planes.

It needs financing,

and they don't have the money for it at M.I.T.

NARRATOR: That spring, with Europe still at peace,

Loomis dropped all of his other experiments

and began studying radar with characteristic intensity.

♪

It was a new technology, with roots in several countries,

including a far-fetched attempt by the British

to defend against air attack.

BUDERI: The British had a reward for anyone

who could k*ll a sheep from a hundred yards,

with the idea that that would lead to a death ray

that could zap enemy pilots in the c*ck.

And they reached out to a Scottish scientist,

Robert Watson-Watt, and said, "Look into this."

It didn't take him long to rule out a death ray,

but he came back with this idea

of what he called radio detection,

as opposed to radio destruction.

♪

With radar, you're sending out a wave of energy.

Imagine if you dropped a pebble in a pond.

That ripple it would start spreading out,

and when it would hit something, a portion of that energy

would come back to where you started.

NARRATOR: Loomis immediately focused

on the next generation of the technology:

microwave radar.

If he could build a device

that used high-frequency radio waves, called microwaves,

it would be more more compact, precise, and versatile

than any radar system in the world.

ZIMMERMAN: There's a huge advantage with shorter wavelengths,

and the fact that he's doing this

as early as

is quite extraordinary.

♪

NARRATOR: There was one huge hurdle:

In any radar system,

the echo from a distant target is incredibly faint.

Going back to our pond analogy,

if the ripple expanded as it went out miles,

just think how weak and how diffuse that would be.

And then the signal coming back to you

is even weaker and more diffuse.

♪

NARRATOR: In order to produce discernible echoes from distant targets,

a radar system needed to transmit

very strong radio waves.

Engineers had mastered long-wave radar transmitters,

but nobody knew how to build a microwave device.

It became Loomis's Holy Grail.

In the summer of ,

he brought in a team of scientists

to solve his transmitter problem.

Radar devices at the time were very large and bulky.

They try and disguise the one they've got

by putting it in a diaper truck,

which they paint in the Tuxedo Park colors.

And they're running this truck all over the golf course

while Loomis's youngest son, Henry,

pilots the plane for them to track.

NARRATOR: Loomis was working frantically,

but making little progress on the transmitter.

With every passing day, the need became more urgent.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The Nazis are marching ahead

at the fastest speed a country army has moved

in all history.

NARRATOR: When the German army invaded France in May of ,

it started to look as if America

might soon be facing Hitler on its own.

As French forces collapsed, President Franklin Roosevelt

created a small but powerful organization

to develop the sophisticated new weapons

that would be needed in a w*r with n*zi Germany.

Loomis led the Microwave Radar Section.

Loomis's work was now a national concern,

but it was going nowhere.

All of his money, knowledge, and connections

couldn't solve the transmitter problem.

His microwave radar program was all but dead,

along with his notions of countering the Nazis.

Loomis couldn't know it,

but even as he prepared

to report his failure to Washington,

British prime minister Winston Churchill

was setting in motion a plan to turn the tide of w*r,

one that would put Loomis himself

at center stage.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: From shortly after : until half past ten,

the German air force carried out

one of the most devastating raids of the w*r.

Their main target was the city of London.

[water spraying]

CONANT: The British have their backs to the wall.

They were going to need America's assistance.

So Churchill decided to make

what really was one of the greatest gambles of the w*r.

[people talking softly]

HILTZIK: The British had all of these

great inventions and discoveries

that they had developed in the years leading up to the w*r.

What they didn't have

was the capacity or the resources

to develop them further.

So in the summer of , the British simply said,

"Let's just give them everything

and hopefully the Americans will reciprocate."

It's one of the most extraordinary events

of the Second World w*r.

♪

NARRATOR: For Alfred Loomis, the drama began

with an urgent summons to Washington.

A delegation of Britain's leading military scientists,

led by Sir Henry Tizard,

had arrived for a series of top-secret meetings

with their American counterparts.

♪

The night before the meetings were to begin,

September , ,

Loomis invited members of the Tizard mission

to his palatial suite at the Wardman Park Hotel.

It soon became clear

that some of the Americans in the room

still wanted nothing to do with Britain's w*r.

CONANT: The American admirals were very standoffish

and distrustful of this scientific exchange

with England.

They did not want to reveal the Navy's secrets.

Loomis, by contrast, was absolutely unabashed

in his desire to help the British cause.

And he really won the British over.

They decided to put their cards on the table that night.

♪

NARRATOR: Churchill had instructed his emissaries

to deliver his country's most precious military secrets

to the Americans--

jet engines, anti-submarine devices,

proximity fuses, expl*sives, and more.

But the biggest news came last.

They reveal to Loomis the existence

of this new type of radio tube called the cavity magnetron.

♪

BUDERI: The cavity magnetron

was that extremely powerful microwave transmitter

that Loomis was looking for.

It was a thousand times better

than anything the Americans knew of.

ZIMMERMAN: Suddenly, microwave radar is possible.

It's such a quantum leap forward in the technology,

Loomis cannot believe that such a device exists.

♪

NARRATOR: "The atmosphere was electric,"

one of the British scientists recalled.

"They found it hard to believe

"that what lay on the table in front of us

might prove to be the salvation of the Allied cause."

♪

The magnetron made microwave radar possible,

but it was up to Alfred Loomis to make it a reality.

BUDERI: You still needed to do a world of innovation.

So then it became a decision,

was it going to be handed off to industry

or was a new type of lab going to be set up?

And there was a fight.

NARRATOR: Several companies were eager to get their hands

on what promised to be

a phenomenally lucrative program.

Loomis avoided their advances.

Instead, he proposed a new type of research operation,

combining elements of industry, academia, and the military.

He helped negotiate an agreement to house it

at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

one of the few places that a large top-secret enterprise

might go unnoticed.

♪

They named it "The Radiation Laboratory,"

but everyone called it the Rad Lab.

♪

The Rad Lab was an important innovation

in the organization of scientific research.

You bring together hundreds of scientists,

the best physicists, the best engineers,

and you put them all to work together

in an interdisciplinary fashion.

This was really the birth of big science.

ZIMMERMAN: One of the reasons Loomis is so successful in the s

is because he has immense wealth.

But if his personal fortune was $ million,

that pales in comparison to the billions of dollars

the government was going to spend on the radar program.

♪

NARRATOR: The Rad Lab was going to need thousands of components--

antennas, receivers, power supplies, and the like--

and fast.

Loomis summoned agents from five

of the biggest manufacturing companies in America

to his New York apartment,

and had them bid for the production contracts

then and there.

CONANT: The representatives said

that they thought

they could possibly get their bids in under a month.

And Loomis looked at them and said, "No.

"I want your bids in at the end of the week.

I want the components at the end of days."

He just let no obstacle stand in his way.

♪

NARRATOR: Loomis had to recruit

the best scientists in the country

for a program that did not yet exist.

For that, he turned to another Tower House regular,

nuclear pioneer Ernest Lawrence.

♪

Recently, Loomis had helped Lawrence

raise over a million dollars to build a particle accelerator.

Now it was time for Lawrence to return the favor.

From Loomis's apartment,

the most famous physicist in America

started making calls.

BUDERI: The typical recruiting process might be,

"I want you to come to M.I.T.

to work on this important project."

And the scientist would say, "What kind of project?"

"An important project."

And they would drop everything and head to M.I.T.

It was really amazing.

In this first few weeks,

they attracted six future Nobel laureates

to this lab.

♪

NARRATOR: In November , Loomis's staff packed up their equipment,

shuttered the Tower House lab forever,

and headed to M.I.T.

The Rad Lab consisted of a few dozen people.

Their experimental facility was an unheated tarpaper structure

on the roof of Building .

♪

Loomis sketched a demanding schedule

on a blackboard in the lab.

They would focus on two microwave radar projects.

The first, an airborne system, would be precise and powerful,

yet small enough to fit into the nose of an aircraft.

The other came straight out of science fiction:

an automated anti-aircraft g*n

that could track and sh**t down planes on its own.

♪

The challenges were immense and time was short.

The Rad Lab was underway.

♪

[waves lapping, breeze blowing]

In the days and weeks

after the attack on Pearl Harbor,

Americans were shocked to discover

the sorry state of their country's military.

[waves lapping]

[plane engine running in distance]

There was one remarkable exception

to the general shambles:

America was going to w*r with a radar program

as advanced as any in the world.

BUDERI: The Rad Lab was still relatively small,

and this group felt a tremendous amount of pride

in the fact that they had helped their nation

be more prepared

than ever would have been imaginable without them.

And the stature of the lab was elevated instantly.

♪

NARRATOR: Suddenly, military leaders

became intensely interested in the Rad Lab.

Pearl Harbor had provided a dramatic illustration

of the importance of air power

and the inadequacy of existing defenses.

[g*nf*re and explosions]

ZIMMERMAN: When you see pictures

of Second World w*r, say, attacks

on American aircraft carriers,

the entire sky is filled with anti-aircraft bursts.

They're basically putting up a curtain of steel

which hopefully the aircraft will run into.

[plane engines droning]

One calculation has put it as high

as , shells to bring down a single aircraft.

[expl*si*n]

NARRATOR: Loomis's automatic anti-aircraft g*n

had the potential

to fundamentally change that equation.

But it involved some huge technical hurdles,

chief among them the need for a radar device

that could lock onto a single aircraft in a crowded sky

and track it automatically.

ZIMMERMAN: One of Loomis's really important ideas

is the idea of conical scanning.

With conical scanning,

you're not trying to hit the aircraft directly

with your radar pulse.

Instead, you're creating a rapid series of pulses,

with the aircraft in the center of your cone.

When the aircraft is in the middle of the cone,

you get a nice, steady signal.

But as the aircraft moves,

the spot where the pulse is maximum

shows the direction that the aircraft is moving.

You can then have a system which moves the radar antenna

to track the aircraft

NARRATOR: The device was ready for testing

just four months after Pearl Harbor.

It heralded the dawn of a new type of warfare.

There was little human input.

Instead, a battery of four g*ns

was aimed and fired by a radar-controlled computer,

operated remotely from inside a darkened trailer.

[machinery buzzing]

[whirring]

[firing]

The assembly was

a thousand times more accurate than manual g*ns

and unimpeded by cloud cover or darkness.

[plane engine droning]

Witnesses marveled as the g*ns swiveled in unison

and fired at an invisible target in the night sky.

Moments later, an expl*si*n miles overhead offered proof

that the g*ns had found their target.

[expl*si*n]

[firing]

CONANT: This became

a hugely important weapon,

because the Nazis would soon unveil the V-.

ZIMMERMAN: The V- is a form of cruise m*ssile.

They're unmanned, they're shot from ramps on the French coast,

and they're sent to land on British cities and explode,

doing immense damage.

BUDERI: This was an incredible innovation right there:

able to fly without pilots, to b*mb enemy targets.

Well, against that came the incredible innovation

of the Allies,

able to track them and sh**t them down.

[firing]

[expl*si*n]

[plane engine droning]

CONANT: It was a battle between two robots.

And this automatic aircraft g*n

really neutralized what the Germans had thought

would be one of their greatest new weapons.

NARRATOR: Microwave radar revolutionized warfare.

Installed on ships, submarines, bombers, and fighter planes,

radar conferred a crucial advantage:

an ability to see the enemy before being seen.

But that was just the beginning.

The breadth of Rad Lab innovation was on full display

when the Allies invaded Normandy in June of .

[explosions]

Airplanes equipped with radar sets

bombarded the French coastline;

radar beacons guided parachute troops and glider-borne infantry

to their drop zones;

a radar system in England

tracked the progress of Allied fighters

and spotted the enemy interceptors

that followed.

A Rad Lab navigation system directed the invasion force,

while radar-controlled g*ns

protected the infantry from air attack.

♪

Alfred Loomis's ambition was finally being realized:

Allied scientists were overcoming

Germany's technological edge.

And the Rad Lab was at the center of it.

♪

♪

NARRATOR: By the spring of ,

Loomis's admirable public life stood in sharp contrast

to his personal one.

Alfred's affair with Manette

had become almost an open secret.

♪

For years, Loomis had been sending Ellen off

to sanitariums, allegedly for her health.

Now he tried to have her committed permanently.

♪

"No one was allowed to write or talk to her,"

a daughter-in-law recalled.

"No visits from the children, no calls from the husband.

She thought she had been dumped there and abandoned."

[rain pounding]

CONANT: Loomis used his influence to have the doctor sign the papers.

You know, he locked her away.

It was a terribly frightening, nightmarish experience for her.

And she never fully recovered.

♪

NARRATOR: On April , , Alfred and Ellen Loomis were divorced.

A few hours later, he and Manette were married.

CONANT: When his oldest son, Lee, returned from w*r

and discovered that his father had had his mother locked away,

he went and rescued his mother.

And she really lived the rest of her life

pretty much as a recluse, cared for by nurses.

JACQUELINE LOOMIS: Henry, my husband, was devastated,

and said he would never forgive his father

for the fact of it happening so quickly.

NARRATOR: As Allied victory drew near,

<span tts:fontStyle="italic">Time</span>magazine readied a cover story

about one of the great untold stories of the w*r: radar.

The authors marveled at the scale of the operation.

The Rad Lab had grown into an organization

of nearly , people

spread over acres of floor space,

with a budget close to $ million a month.

HILTZIK: The Rad Lab pointed the way

toward the creation of the military-industrial complex.

[pinging]

It was not only the transfer of big science

into a government project,

but it was a government project on an industrial scale.

[people talking softly]

ZIMMERMAN: The Rad Lab really hallmarks a new type of science.

Individual scientists, even one as wealthy as Loomis,

simply can't compete.

Loomis marks the end of the gentleman scientist

with his private research laboratory.

♪

NARRATOR: <span tts:fontStyle="italic"> Time</span>magazine's focus

was the profound effect of radar on the w*r.

ZIMMERMAN: Without radar, it's hard to foresee

that the Allies could have been successful.

Radar was important in virtually every military theater,

every type of military operation.

NARRATION: After toiling for years in secrecy,

the radar men looked forward to their moment in the sun.

But as the deadline for the August issue approached,

another story knocked radar off the front page forever.

BUDERI: In quick succession, we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

And that completely stole the thunder from the Rad Lab.

And yet, the Rad Lab was actually bigger

than the b*mb project

and far more important in the w*r.

The saying at the Rad Lab was,

"The atomic b*mb only ended the w*r.

Radar won it."

And I think that's true,

and Alfred Loomis was a key part of that.

♪

NARRATOR: The Rad Lab at M.I.T. closed its doors at the end of ,

and was soon all but forgotten.

Loomis never went back to Tuxedo Park.

He sold Tower House.

The contents of the fabled laboratory

were left for the trash.

♪

CONANT: From the moment the w*r ended,

Loomis really started to withdraw from public life.

He did collect the Medal of Merit from Truman,

but he turned down very large government jobs,

he turned down university appointments.

NARRATOR: Alfred and Manette

found tranquil lives on Long Island,

where, to some extent, they forgot about the world,

and the world forgot about them.

When Alfred Loomis died on August , ,

at the age of ,

his passing attracted little notice.

He wouldn't have wanted it otherwise.

"He never needed the approval of other people,"

a colleague recalled.

"He was motivated purely by the facts of the case,

purely the adventure."

CONANT: Loomis foresaw a need

for new methods, new technology, and new science

at a crucial time.

By force of logic and enthusiasm and energy,

he just made things happen.

BUDERI: Can you imagine doing something more important in your life?

I mean, really taking a front-row seat

at saving the world.