“Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II”, by Jennet Conant

 

443 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0684872889

Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II is Jennet Conant’s tale of Alfred Lee Loomis and the development of radar at the private scientific research facility he founded at Tuxedo Park, Orange County, New York. Much of the first half of the book is a biographical sketch of Loomis, chronicling his privileged life and the fortune he made on Wall Street (especially his skill in predicting the Crash of ‘29 and coasting through much of the Great Depression) and his surprising (to his contemporaries) switch to scientific studies.

Conant goes far in placing the research done at Tuxedo Park in context, showing that the breakthroughs achieved at this private laboratory were as important to ending the war as any number of other, more famous discoveries, such as cracking the German Enigma Code, or the development of the atom bomb. Be prepared for a lot of technical lingo, though, an unavoidable issue when one writes about scientific experimentation; but also be prepared for a fleshing out of the characters behind all of these discoveries: Tuxedo Park is replete with stories and anecdotes regarding Loomis and those around him, something that goes a long way towards humanizing these otherwise hazy individuals.

While there are other books on other inventions carried out during World War II, this is the first work that I know of that focuses on Tuxedo Park and the man who privately financed these scientific breakthroughs. And I really wonder why it is I never heard of Alfred Lee Loomis; you can’t know every tale of discovery and risk, but, I mean c’mon, the story of this private businessman/inventor/philanthropist/patriot forking over his own cash to create inventions that would bring the Nazis (and Japanese) to their knees deserves to be more wildly told. With an eye for talent and the means to do so, Loomis transformed himself and his backyard playground into one of the preeminent research facilities in the world; indeed, I would have to say that Tuxedo Park ranks only behind Los Alamos in importance for America and the world in terms of impact.

Tuxedo Park goes a long way towards correcting this criminal oversight, detailing as it does the creation and functioning of what was, I have to keep stressing, a privately funded escapade. While some of these inventors, scientists and physicists may very well be known to others with a more in-depth background in scientific inquiry than I possess, for noobs like me Tuxedo Park was a revelation, and I can only marvel that only the US of A could make national defense a private as well as a public domain.