Book Review
Jan. 2nd, 2016 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretTuxedo Park by Jennet Conant.
It's a biography of Alfred Lee Loomis, centimillionaire financier who established a private physics laboratory in his Tuxedo Park, NY mansion in the 1930s and conducted a number of important scientific experiments there, in collaboration with some of the greatest physicists and chemists and biologists of his day, who he sponsored in style. Loomis eventually became during the War the head of the MIT Radiation Lab, where radar technology was developed that would alter the course of the War. He was selected for this role in part because he had been doing early radar research at Tuxedo Park before the war and in part because Loomis's unique position in the physics community made him perfectly placed as a recruiter and administrator of a massive scientific project like the Rad Lab.
Conant is the granddaughter of James Conant, the Harvard president and chemist who was one of the chief administrators overseeing the Rad Lab, not to mention the Manhattan Project, and her social connections to the key players in this book are what makes it work. Conant was able to get stories out of people who never tell stories to outsiders, the enormously wealthy and influential people who knew Loomis best. That makes this book a really special window into the world of early 20th century high powered American science.
I liked that the story focused on the Rad Lab story, since as the author notes, the Manhattan Project has tended historically to overshadow it in retellings of the science of the war. The Rad Lab story has many of the same players, as people like Luis Alvarez and I.I. Rabi were recruited from the Rad Lab to the Manhattan Project and both projects were overseen by Vannevar Bush and James Conant and Karl Compton and the NDRC. So this story felt like it added some missing pieces to my understanding of the (to me) very familiar narrative of the development of the atom bomb.
It's a biography of Alfred Lee Loomis, centimillionaire financier who established a private physics laboratory in his Tuxedo Park, NY mansion in the 1930s and conducted a number of important scientific experiments there, in collaboration with some of the greatest physicists and chemists and biologists of his day, who he sponsored in style. Loomis eventually became during the War the head of the MIT Radiation Lab, where radar technology was developed that would alter the course of the War. He was selected for this role in part because he had been doing early radar research at Tuxedo Park before the war and in part because Loomis's unique position in the physics community made him perfectly placed as a recruiter and administrator of a massive scientific project like the Rad Lab.
Conant is the granddaughter of James Conant, the Harvard president and chemist who was one of the chief administrators overseeing the Rad Lab, not to mention the Manhattan Project, and her social connections to the key players in this book are what makes it work. Conant was able to get stories out of people who never tell stories to outsiders, the enormously wealthy and influential people who knew Loomis best. That makes this book a really special window into the world of early 20th century high powered American science.
I liked that the story focused on the Rad Lab story, since as the author notes, the Manhattan Project has tended historically to overshadow it in retellings of the science of the war. The Rad Lab story has many of the same players, as people like Luis Alvarez and I.I. Rabi were recruited from the Rad Lab to the Manhattan Project and both projects were overseen by Vannevar Bush and James Conant and Karl Compton and the NDRC. So this story felt like it added some missing pieces to my understanding of the (to me) very familiar narrative of the development of the atom bomb.