American Experience

(windshield wipers beating)

NARRATOR

On the afternoon of January 16, 1939, 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 bomb? 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, artillery, 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 1912, 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, 40 miles outside Manhattan. On the surface, there was little that distinguished Loomis from any number of his well-bred peers. But behind the polished faade 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. 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 soires, 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 1917, he got a reprieve when the United States went to war 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 War is quite an extraordinary accomplishment for someone who is in fact a lawyer. (gun fires)

NARRATOR

When the war ended in 1918, 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 soires, 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 1919, 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 1924, 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 anand Robert Wood bubbledelf 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 war. 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 2,000 to 50,000 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 kill 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 40-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. 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 killing 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 "New York Times" 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. 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 1929, he and Thorne had become, as "Fortune" 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 24, 1929, 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 $30 to $40 million more, during the Depression.

NARRATOR

In the spring of 1933, 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 protg. In the late 1930s, 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. 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 war. Most of all, they want no more participation in foreign wars.

NARRATOR

As Europe teetered on the brink of war, 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. You had very respected American figures talking about the corrupt munitions industry and British plutocrats trying to get Americans involved in the coming war. This time America should keep out, and I know I will. 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 war, and that America will become involved. (people cheering)

QUILLEN

By 1938, 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 1939, when Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi came to Tower House and raised the specter of a Nazi super-bomb, 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 war. 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 kill a sheep from a hundred yards, with the idea that that would lead to a death ray that could zap enemy pilots in the cockpit. 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 1939 is quite extraordinary.

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 a hundred 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 1940, 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. 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 1940, 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 war with Nazi 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 war, one that would put Loomis himself at center stage.

From shortly after 6

00 until half past ten, the German air force carried out one of the most devastating raids of the war. 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 war. (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 war. What they didn't have was the capacity or the resources to develop them further. So in the summer of 1940, 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 War.

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 19, 1940, 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 war.

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, explosives, 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 1930s is because he has immense wealth. But if his personal fortune was $50 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 30 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 1940, 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 6. 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 gun that could track and shoot 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 war 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. (gunfire and explosions)

ZIMMERMAN

When you see pictures of Second World War, 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 9,000 shells to bring down a single aircraft. (explosion)

NARRATOR

Loomis's automatic anti-aircraft gun 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 guns 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 guns and unimpeded by cloud cover or darkness. (plane engine droning) Witnesses marveled as the guns swiveled in unison and fired at an invisible target in the night sky. Moments later, an explosion miles overhead offered proof that the guns had found their target. (explosion) (firing)

CONANT

This became a hugely important weapon, because the Nazis would soon unveil the V-1.

ZIMMERMAN

The V-1 is a form of cruise missile. 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.

This was an incredible innovation right there

able to fly without pilots, to bomb enemy targets. Well, against that came the incredible innovation of the Allies, able to track them and shoot them down. (firing) (explosion) (plane engine droning)

CONANT

It was a battle between two robots. And this automatic aircraft gun 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 1944. (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 guns 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 1945, 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 4, 1945, Alfred and Ellen Loomis were divorced. A few hours later, he and Manette were married.

CONANT

When his oldest son, Lee, returned from war 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, "Time" magazine readied a cover story

about one of the great untold stories of the war

radar. The authors marveled at the scale of the operation. The Rad Lab had grown into an organization of nearly 4,000 people spread over 15 acres of floor space, with a budget close to $4 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

"Time" magazine's focus was the profound effect of radar on the war.

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 20 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 bomb project and far more important in the war. The saying at the Rad Lab was, "The atomic bomb only ended the war. 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 1945, 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 war 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 11, 1975, at the age of 87, 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. "American

Experience

The Secret of Tu