Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff Works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer here at how Stuff Works in not Love All Things Tech. In today's episodes, another listener request, listener Chris asked that I do a profile on an important person in tech history, someone who's often overlooked by a lot of people. His name is not terribly recognizable outside of a certain group of scientists and people who are fans of science. That would be Alfred Lee Loomis. Loomis would become incredibly important to the development of technology and science in the early twentieth century in America, and yet his name is not familiar to many, even those who do pursue science as a career. So Chris, here we go first. One of the many resources I used while researching this episode was a biography that was written by Louis W. Alvarez. He wrote this shortly after Louis's death. Loomis passed away in nineteen Alvarez likened Alfred Lee Loomis to wealthy individuals who used their financial independence to support themselves as they pursued intellectual interests. So in the days before organized science, when you had folks like Sir Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin who were really pursuing these these intellectual challenges, they were trying to push back ignorance and really learn how the universe works. A lot of them were independently wealthy. That's why they were able to do this. They didn't have to work for a living because they already had money, so they could actually pursued that. Not that they weren't working, but they were pursuing science which didn't have a salary attached to it. These were people who they could rely on their fortune to give them the time and energy to devote to pursuing knowledge. There was no need to demonstrate that this pursuit of knowledge would ultimately produce something of financial value. That's a big problem in funding sciences in general, especially if you're looking for government funding. A lot of government agencies want to know what the end result of your work is supposed to be. In other words, how can they apply whatever it is you are looking into. And it may be that you're doing exploratory research where you don't know what applications, if any, there might be to your work, but the work itself is still important so that we can actually have a deeper understanding of how our universe works. When you are telling that to someone who writes the checks, they say, well, yeah, but I need to have a reason why I'm going to give you money, as opposed to a reason that's bigger than just I wonder why this works the way it does. I need a better reason than that. I need a reason like I wonder why this works the way it does. And once I know I'm going to be able to build you a killer robot that can lay waste to your enemies, then I'm totally gonna fund your research. Well, if you're independently wealthy, you can research whatever the heck you want and you don't have to worry about producing results that are going to make anyone any money. You might still do that down the line, but that's not the reason why you're actually looking into things so alwardly. Loomis kind of falls into that category. That's how science progressed for centuries, by the way, before we get to organize science. Once you did get to the part of organized science, you begin to actually have universities forming these formalized scientific departments. Then you had the ability to earn a living as a professor and still pursue science on the side, so you could do experimental research as well as teaching. Right, you would teach in order to fund your scientific research pursuits. Uh. So you have two different eras the independent wealthy or maybe you found a patron who would uh support your scientific research. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was someone who would get patrons and the patronage would afford him the ability to think like the smarty pants person he was. Or you got to the point where you were a teacher and that's how you afforded it. Alfred Lee Lomis came from a family where he didn't have to worry about this too much. Uh. He was born on November fourth, seven and was born into a prestigious and well connected family. His grandfather, also named Alfred, had been a pioneer in treating tuberculosis. The Loomis Laboratory at Cornell Medical College and the Loomis Sanatorium in Liberty, New York were both named for Grandpa Loomis. Alfred's father was Dr Henry Patterson Loomis, and he was also a medical doctor and a professor of Clinical medicine at Cornell and New York Medical Colleges. In addition, Loomis's uncle on his mother's side was also a physician, and his cousin, Henry L. Stimpson, would serve as the Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover and as the Secretary of War during World War Two. So uh Loomis learned early on to leverage the relationships he made throughout his life for the benefit of many people, not just himself. Loomis's family was doing really well when he was a kid. They weren't ridiculously wealthy, but they were certainly a family of substantial means. From the ages of nine to thirteen, young Alfred Lee Loomis attended the St. Matthew's Military Academy in New York, but at thirteen he transferred to Phillips Academy and Over in Massachusetts, and that's a boarding school that's designed to prepare students for university. Loomis became an eager student of many fields. His two big loves as a child were chess and stage magic. Now, according to Louis Alvarez, Loomis was capable of playing two games of chess simultaneously while blindfolded. Although Alvarez said he never witnessed Loomis playing chess personally. Alvarez was a friend of Loomis, but he did hear these stories. But apparently Loomis was able to envision both games in his mind's eye. He didn't need to see the boards. He could keep track of all the moves just in his brain and be able to play both games. Uh, technically, I can do this, but I would lose track of the pieces and I would never win a game. But still I can play chess blindfolded, not by following the rules, and I'll never win, but I could do it. I do have a feeling that I would have enjoyed his company at this stage in his life a great deal, because I think we would compare magic tricks. Louis Alvarez knew Loomis for thirty five years. He was surprised by this story about chess because he had never seen a chess board and Loomis's possession, but he would eventually ask Loomis's wife about the game, and she replied that Alfred did keep a small chess set, but he did so for purposes of creating and then solving chess problems rather than to actually play games against other people. He did keep his love of magic throughout his life, though he would only perform for his children and grandchildren, not to adults. I can respect that too, because children delight in the performance of magic, while adults just bug you with attempts to suss out how you did it, or they ask you flat out how you did it, which is not the point of magic. In Alfred Lee Loomis enrolled in Yale University. He studied mathematics, but did not yet plunge himself into deep scientific studies. He did enjoy tinkering with technology and was known to build gliders, model airplanes, and even remote controlled automobiles. He also developed a strong interest in artillery weapons and their operation. Oh and he would spend afternoons throwing boomerangs outside with one of his professors while they tried to come up with ways to create a theorem that would describe the boomerangs flight behaviors, which I think is pretty charming and interesting. After completing his initial education, he enrolled in Harvard Law School to study law. He felt law was a good spring board for numerous career opportunities and he focused primarily on corporate law. His cousin, Henry Stimpson, who had a law firm called Winthrop and stinsom Uh, promised Loomis a space in the firm as a law clark. Right out of school. Loomis graduated in the top ten percent of his class in nineteen twelve, having also served as the editor for the Harvard Law Review. A few years later, he was a successful lawyer living in Tuxedo Park in New York. He married Ellen Farnsworth, and together they had three sons. When his sons reached the age of fourteen. By that eight time, Loomis was a successful businessman and was making an enormous sum of money. Loomas decided he would grant each of his son's a big old wad of cash when they turned fourteen, with the instruction that they could do with it whatever they wished, but it was meant for them to manage their own needs, essentially saying, this is what I'm giving you. It's meant to help you pursue whatever career path you want, but you can spend it however you like. It's your responsibility. Those three sons went on to become distinguished members of society. The oldest became a financier and an accomplished sailor, The middle son became a professor of biochemistry, and the third became the president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Anyway back to Loomis. When the United States entered World War One, Alfred Lee Loomis would join the army. He demonstrated to his peers that he had a deep knowledge of artillery just because he had been fascinated by it and he had been studying it. He also had many connections in the financial world, and through them he was able to put together information about the equipment that each country in Europe had at their disposal during the war, just based on their purchases. So he'd say, hey, based upon all this information I have, I can tell you how much how many UH guns this one country has artillery guns like the big big guns. This circumspect method of gathering intelligence proved to be quite valuable, and the army assigned him to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to conduct research on ballistics. He earned the title of Major while he was there, and at Aberdeen he began to work with distinguished scientists, including astronomers and physicists, his appreciation for science grew as a result. Now, one thing that was a challenge for ballistics experts was measuring the muzzle velocity of guns, That is, how fast does a projectile leave the weapon once it's fired. Only by knowing that information can you make precise charts that will predict where a fired shell will land, how far away from the gun land based upon its trajectory and muzzle velocity. These ballistic charts could help soldiers in the field make efficient use of their equipment, and without them, the matter of firing our artillery would come down to trial and error, which is not terribly safe or efficient when you're in the middle of a war zone. But this was an era before lasers, which are incredibly useful for measuring the speed of an object, particularly very fast moving objects. It was before photo electric cells, so there needed to be some way to measure the speed of those shells as they left the artillery, and Alfred Lee Loomis was about to come up with a solution. What was it. I'll tell you in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Loomis's solution to figuring out the muzzle velocity of these artillery guns was called the Aberdeen chronograph, and Loomis took the problem of measuring muzzle velocity and worked backward to create the methodology. It was itself an improvement on a previous chronograph called the Boulange chronograph. The principle is actually pretty simple. You stake out a couple of spots in front of an artillery gun. You know the distance between those two spots. You fire the gun so that it passes through those two spots, and you invent a way to measure when the projectile passes through it. By measuring the difference in time between when the projectile arrives at the first spot and the second spot, you know how fast the projectile is traveling. You then know the muzzle velocity of that piece of artillery. Now, in the case of the Aberdeen chronograph, here's how it worked. You had a pair of frames, large gigantic frames really, with wires attached to the frames and the other end of the wires went to the chronograph apparatus and a battery. Each frame had two sheets of ten and they were separated by a thin layer of building paper and paraffin. So when a projectile pierced the sheets. It would bring the two layers of tin in contact with one another, and this would form a circuit that would allow electric current to pass through one wire into the frame, through the other wire, and back to the chronograph. The chronograph had a metal disc on it, and on top of this metal disc was a roll of waxed paper tape. It was spooled there and it would slowly unwind, or not really slowly, but it would unwind and the disc would turn. It moves the paper tape. As the disc turns. When the incoming signal hit the chronograph, it would cause a spark, and the spark would make a burn mark on the tape. So let's say you're trying to measure the muzzle velocity on a particular piece of artillery. You'd started the muzzle of the artillery piece. You would measure out of space that's fifty feet or fifteen point two four meters in front of the artillery piece, and that's where you would place the first frame. You would stake it down and your first frame would be right there. You would then measure an additional fifty feet or fifteen point two four meters further out from the gun and place the second frame in line with the first, So the guns operator would aim down the sites at the frame with the goal of having the shell passed through both frames through its path. So you would fire the gun, the shell would fly out at fifty ft, it would hit the first frame, it would continue and in another fifty feet it would hit the second frame. And each time it hits it would create that electrical circuit that would cause a spark to burn a spot on the paper tape. So then you go back to the chronograph and you look at the paper tape, and by knowing how fast the paper tape is moving inside the chronograph, you can do some math to find out how much time it took the shell to pass through each of those frames. By knowing the amount of time it took, and knowing already that the distance between those two frames is fifty feet, you could then measure the shells speed. You'd say, all right, it took this amount of time to pass through fifty ft worth of space. That gives me the velocity of the shell. Loomis's improvement to chronographs was significant. His chronograph became a standard piece of testing equipment for both the U S Army and the Navy. While working at Aberdeen, Loomis became well acquainted with a scientist named Dr Robert W. Wood. Wood's specialty, at least starting out, was an optics and work with infrared and ultra violet light. He was famous for debunking the claims of prosper Rene blonde Lott, who had claimed he discovered a form of energy similar to X rays that he called in rays. While while Wood was visiting blonde Lot's lab to witness a demonstration of the supposed in rays, he very quietly removed a prism from blonde Lot's device, and when blonde Lot claimed to observe the mysterious energy after activating his machine, Would calmly pointed out that the prism, which was supposedly integral to the operation of the gadget, wasn't even in it. It was absent, and therefore the effects that were supposedly observed could not possibly have been there. It's essentially saying, hey, I took the batteries out of that device, so therefore it could not have work. There was no power source, so your claims are invalid. During World War One, would began to study the work of another scientist named Paul Langevin, who had been using ultrasonic frequencies in an effort to create a detection device that could detect submarines, would observed that high powered ultrasonic signals would cause bubbles to form in a process called cavitation. Those bubbles would grow and eventually implode in water, and they would release a tremendous amount of heat and pressure in the process. So would and Loomis struck up a friendship during this time, and Loomis would later become something of a patron for Woods continued experimentation in the field of ultrasonic applications. More on that. In just a second after World War One, Loomis entered the world of finance. He made a tremendous fortune in the process. He and his brother in law, Landon Thorn, began to cater to companies in the burgeoning electrical power industry, so, in other words, they became financiers for public utilities. And this was during a time of rapid growth in that industry, and they earned millions of dollars all in the years leading up to the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine and the Great Depression in fact, Loomas even made a huge profit while millions of people were finding themselves out of work in the process, not in the process, but during the Great Depression. It wasn't that the two things were directly related. Loomas actually was quite concerned about the Great Depression, and he also wasn't really fond of the whole cons of of making all this money. He was really good at it, but that wasn't really where he was focused. He wasn't obsessed with making money. In nine Loomis began visiting Robert Wood's home laboratory, which was inside a barn on Wood's property, and Loomis became a frequent visitor. Clearly he was interested in scientific pursuits, and he told Dr Wood that he would be willing to underwrite scientific experiments if Dr Wood had any projects he'd like to tackle that he otherwise would have trouble funding. So Dr Wood told Loomis about his ultrasonic experimentation and the effects that had on water, and he indicated that there could be significant applications in the fields of chemistry, biology, and physics. So Loomis thought this was a fascinating idea, and he decided to put money behind it. So he created a lab at his home and he invited Dr Wood to work at this lab. Later, Loomis would purchase an enormous estate in nineteen seven in the community of Tuxedo Park. He was already living in Tuxedo Park, but now he built this or He bought this enormous estate called the Trask Estate, and he converted it into his own private laboratory. Was space to house scientists who came there to do work, so a visiting scientists might find himself with a ladging at Loomis's enormous estate. He would host various scientists working on all sorts of interesting problems. He also hosted some of the world's most famous scientific minds, like Albert Einstein, for example. He would get involved in these pursuits as well on occasion. Among them were the ultrasonic experiments that his friend Dr Would was heading up. According to Dr Wood, and I apologize for this next bit because it makes me a little nauseated. The two used ultrasonic frequencies and tested their effects on numerous fish and mice, killing a whole lot of them in the process, and trying to determine exactly what the mechanism was that was killing the animals charming right, This was in a different time anyway. The point is that he was very much interested in funding scientific research, and there was a lot of work in various fields that would not have happened without his support. Now I've got more to say about Loomis and his involvement with technology and science, but before I go into the next section, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. When Loomas turned forty three, he retired from Wall Street. The Great Depression had hit, the stock market had crashed in ninety nine, and Loomis didn't care for the political direction the US was taking. As FDR spoke out against big business, he began dedicating his time and energy to science and tinkering. One of Loomis's failures was in the design of a racing yacht that competed in the America's Cup. So this is one of those times that I have trouble reconciling things, because the Great Depression is on. People are out of where. Meanwhile, rich people like the Vanderbilts and Loomis are spending huge amounts of money to construct racing yachts that have no purpose. Other than to race each other. I have a problem with that, but anyway, so it was something of a custom for stinking rich people to purchase and staff a J class yacht at this time for the purposes of racing in the prestigious America's Cup race. A J class yacht had a single mast and had to follow the universal rule, as established by Nathaniel Hairschoff. So what is the universal rule? Was actually a formula, and it told you the relationship of various parts of a yacht's dimensions, and if that relationship all fell within the same zone, then two different yachts would be said to belong to the same class, even if they were of drastically different size and shape. So the formula goes something like this. You take the link of the boat, you multiply that by the square root of the sale area, and you multiply that by point one eight. That number, by the way, would change over time, sometimes it was point to but point when it's a good rule of thumb. You take that product, that whole number that you just got from doing what I said, and you divide it by a third of the square root of the ship's displacement, Which sounds complicated, but the point of this whole thing was to determine what was called the rating for the yacht. Ratings are measured in units of distance, and if the yacht had a rating of between sixty five and seventy six feet, it qualified as a J class yacht. The system allowed yachts of different sizes and dimensions to potentially race against each other as long as those ratings fell within the same range. So it's all the different proportions. If they matched up properly, you would get the same rating, even though they might be a very different sizes. Loomis and his business partner Thorn, wanted to use scientific principles to create a superior J class yacht. They had in mind a system in which all the yachts operations could be performed below decks using various winches and controls, and the idea was that clearing the decks of people the top deck would improve the yachts speed. They worked with the m I T. Naval Architecture Department to design and build the yacht, paying for the construction themselves. Their yacht was called the Whirlwind. It launched in nineteen thirty. It was not a success and Ultimately, it was scrapped in nineteen thirty five. This I also have a problem with to spend that much money on something that lasts five years. Loomis and Thorn also made another purchase together. It was more than half of Hilton Head. That's an island off the coast of South Carolina. At the time, hilton Head was undeveloped, and the two used it for their own personal recreation, mostly riding around and hunting. Loomis's interests remained very He was particularly fascinated with time keeping and consistently was on a quest to find more accurate means of keeping the time, both in short term and long term applications. He even conducted experiments that showed the moon's effect on pendulum clocks by comparing some extremely high quality clocks against a coartz oscillator timekeeping methodology. He also worked with E. Newton Harvey to develop a microscope centrifuge. The microscope made it possible to observe the effect of high g forces on the deformation of cells. In other words, this device would spin samples at very high speeds to simulate a strong gravitational pull, whilst simultaneously allowing scientists to observe the effects on the cells inside the samples, which is pretty neat. He also became interested in the work of a guy named Hans Burger, who had discovered the existence of brain waves. The existence of such waves was still a matter of some debate in the nineteen thirties, and so Loomis, who had a deep wallet and and inquisitive mind, set up a testing lab in his own personal laboratory with a special screen cage designed to block electromagnetic interference during experiments so that they didn't have to worry about false positives. Loomis's work ended up validating Burgher's findings and paved the way for the e G. One other major project Loomas was involved in was creating the long range navigation system called Lauren l O R A N. I'll do a full episode on Lauren next, but it's too big a topic to tackle in this episode. It's pretty darn cool, however, and it's a really interesting means of navigating overseas. Work continued at his private laboratory until nineteen forty. Now by that time, World War two was in full swing in Europe, but America had not yet formally entered the War, however, Allied powers were trying to advance the science and technology of radar. Robert Watson Watt, a physicist and engineer, developed the first practical aid our system in nine but while it worked, it had some big drawbacks. One of those was that the wavelengths that they were using for radio signals in this radar system were very, very long, and that required enormous antennas, and it limited how accurate the system was. You'd be able to detect that there was an incoming aircraft, but pinpointing exactly where it was was much more difficult. British engineers named John Randall and Harry Boot created a technology called the cavity magnetron that they suspected would be a solution, but they needed help. Britain sent an envoy to the United States to enlist the help of American scientists and engineers to produce radar systems that could take advantage of the cavity magnetron. Now, a cavity magnetron is a special type of vacuum tube. The vacuum tube has special metal cavities, and when powered, the vacuum tube begins to eject electrons. I talked about vacuum tubes. In a recent episode of tech Stuff, these objected electrons would move have passed these metal cavities and they would be interacting with a magnetic field. And as the electrons would pass the cavities, this interaction would cause radio waves to oscillate inside those cavities and produced microwaves, the frequency of which would depend upon the physical dimensions of the cavities. The version that Randall and Boot created could produce microwaves at a wavelength of ten centimeters. The shorter wavelengths meant the antenna could be smaller and the waves could detect smaller objects as well and with greater precision. The reception in the US was positive. They said this is something that we will collaborate on, and a new lab began to take shape. Loomis had a hand in the creation of this lab, and it became known as the m I T Radiation Laboratory. Loomis himself became the head of the Radar Division for the US under the newly formed National Defense Research Committee or in d r C, and he oversaw the lab. He shut down his own personal lab in the meantime to focus solely on the RAT lab. As it was called. The lab was able to refine the design of radar, and the collaborative effort between the English and American engineers and scientists help spawn a technology that was instrumental no pun intended in war efforts. It also eventually led to the development of the microwave oven, but that's another story. Loomiss contributions were often behind the scenes. Uh he knew the right people in business and the patent office to help streamline efforts and make it easier for the engineers and scientists to do their work. While he didn't necessarily get involved in the labs with the research efforts, he made sure that the work could continue with as few obstacles in the way as possible. The rad Lab bustled with activity, but after America entered World War Two following Pearl Harbor, Loomis saw his lab rated for talent. On more than one occasion, several of his bright stars were leaving to go work for another project. It was a top secret project, one with a purpose only a few people knew. It was called the Manhattan Project and the purpose was to build a nuclear bomb. Loomis would continue to fund scientific work, going to Berkeley to help Ernest Lawrence raise funds to build a cyclotron particle accelerator. After World War Two ended, Loomis divorced his wife Ellen, and he married Minette sil Dreer's Hobart. He and Hobart had had an extramarital affair and decided to divorce their respective spouses and marry each other. The whole thing was a huge scandal in New York society, and Loomis and his new wife largely withdrew from public life to move into a single household. Now, I say all this not to drag Loomis's name through the mud, but to illustrate that while he was a remarkable person in both business and science, he was by no means perfect. In his later years, Loomis became more interested in biology. He spent time with his son Farnie, studying hydra, for example, and by that I mean the small organisms that demonstrate remarkable lity to regenerate from injuries. They also do not appear to age. Loomis lived long enough to tinker with computers, or at least calculators, owning a Hewlett Packard Modeled sixty five that's a handheld card programmable calculator that debuted in nineteen seventy four. It costs about four thousand dollars in today's money to buy one, and it could hold up to one instructions of six bits each. Loomis would pass away on August eleven nine, and he had very few friends at that point, not because he had alienated them, but just that he naturally gravitated to a fairly small social circle. But he was known as a very generous friend, someone who enjoyed spending time with his friends and supporting scientific endeavors. In fact, he was known for funding all sorts of scientific research throughout his lifetime and became part of the UH, the whole society of scientists in America, despite the fact that he was largely known as someone who worked behind the scenes and he kind of eschewed the public spotlight. So, Chris, thank you so much for this suggestion. It was fascinating looking into the life of Alfred Lee Loomis, And in our next episode we will look more closely at Lauren, the long range navigation tool that he designed, and talk about how it works and the math behind it, because it's pretty fascinating stuff. I look forward to doing that because despite being an English Lit major back in my youth, I also really love math, specifically algebra, and there's a whole lot of algebra when it comes to Lauren. So I'm looking forward to talking about that. If you guys have any subjects you would like me to tackle on episodes of tech Stuff, maybe it's a technology, maybe it's a person, maybe it's a company. Maybe there's someone you want me to interview or have on as a guest, send me an email. The address to use is tech Stuff at how stuffworks dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for the show at both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Don't forget we have an Instagram accounts, so go follow that. And remember I streamed these shows live, so you can watch them live at twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff on Wednesdays and Fridays. Just go to that u r L. You'll see the schedule there. You can join me and make fun of me as I tell terrible jokes to my producer Torii. I look forward to seeing you there and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot com

Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff Works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer here at how Stuff Works in not Love All Things Tech. In today's episodes, another listener request, listener Chris asked that I do a profile on an important person in tech history, someone who's often overlooked by a lot of people. His name is not terribly recognizable outside of a certain group of scientists and people who are fans of science. That would be Alfred Lee Loomis. Loomis would become incredibly important to the development of technology and science in the early twentieth century in America, and yet his name is not familiar to many, even those who do pursue science as a career. So Chris, here we go first. One of the many resources I used while researching this episode was a biography that was written by Louis W. Alvarez. He wrote this shortly after Louis's death. Loomis passed away in nineteen Alvarez likened Alfred Lee Loomis to wealthy individuals who used their financial independence to support themselves as they pursued intellectual interests. So in the days before organized science, when you had folks like Sir Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin who were really pursuing these these intellectual challenges, they were trying to push back ignorance and really learn how the universe works. A lot of them were independently wealthy. That's why they were able to do this. They didn't have to work for a living because they already had money, so they could actually pursued that. Not that they weren't working, but they were pursuing science which didn't have a salary attached to it. These were people who they could rely on their fortune to give them the time and energy to devote to pursuing knowledge. There was no need to demonstrate that this pursuit of knowledge would ultimately produce something of financial value. That's a big problem in funding sciences in general, especially if you're looking for government funding. A lot of government agencies want to know what the end result of your work is supposed to be. In other words, how can they apply whatever it is you are looking into. And it may be that you're doing exploratory research where you don't know what applications, if any, there might be to your work, but the work itself is still important so that we can actually have a deeper understanding of how our universe works. When you are telling that to someone who writes the checks, they say, well, yeah, but I need to have a reason why I'm going to give you money, as opposed to a reason that's bigger than just I wonder why this works the way it does. I need a better reason than that. I need a reason like I wonder why this works the way it does. And once I know I'm going to be able to build you a killer robot that can lay waste to your enemies, then I'm totally gonna fund your research. Well, if you're independently wealthy, you can research whatever the heck you want and you don't have to worry about producing results that are going to make anyone any money. You might still do that down the line, but that's not the reason why you're actually looking into things so alwardly. Loomis kind of falls into that category. That's how science progressed for centuries, by the way, before we get to organize science. Once you did get to the part of organized science, you begin to actually have universities forming these formalized scientific departments. Then you had the ability to earn a living as a professor and still pursue science on the side, so you could do experimental research as well as teaching. Right, you would teach in order to fund your scientific research pursuits. Uh. So you have two different eras the independent wealthy or maybe you found a patron who would uh support your scientific research. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was someone who would get patrons and the patronage would afford him the ability to think like the smarty pants person he was. Or you got to the point where you were a teacher and that's how you afforded it. Alfred Lee Lomis came from a family where he didn't have to worry about this too much. Uh. He was born on November fourth, seven and was born into a prestigious and well connected family. His grandfather, also named Alfred, had been a pioneer in treating tuberculosis. The Loomis Laboratory at Cornell Medical College and the Loomis Sanatorium in Liberty, New York were both named for Grandpa Loomis. Alfred's father was Dr Henry Patterson Loomis, and he was also a medical doctor and a professor of Clinical medicine at Cornell and New York Medical Colleges. In addition, Loomis's uncle on his mother's side was also a physician, and his cousin, Henry L. Stimpson, would serve as the Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover and as the Secretary of War during World War Two. So uh Loomis learned early on to leverage the relationships he made throughout his life for the benefit of many people, not just himself. Loomis's family was doing really well when he was a kid. They weren't ridiculously wealthy, but they were certainly a family of substantial means. From the ages of nine to thirteen, young Alfred Lee Loomis attended the St. Matthew's Military Academy in New York, but at thirteen he transferred to Phillips Academy and Over in Massachusetts, and that's a boarding school that's designed to prepare students for university. Loomis became an eager student of many fields. His two big loves as a child were chess and stage magic. Now, according to Louis Alvarez, Loomis was capable of playing two games of chess simultaneously while blindfolded. Although Alvarez said he never witnessed Loomis playing chess personally. Alvarez was a friend of Loomis, but he did hear these stories. But apparently Loomis was able to envision both games in his mind's eye. He didn't need to see the boards. He could keep track of all the moves just in his brain and be able to play both games. Uh, technically, I can do this, but I would lose track of the pieces and I would never win a game. But still I can play chess blindfolded, not by following the rules, and I'll never win, but I could do it. I do have a feeling that I would have enjoyed his company at this stage in his life a great deal, because I think we would compare magic tricks. Louis Alvarez knew Loomis for thirty five years. He was surprised by this story about chess because he had never seen a chess board and Loomis's possession, but he would eventually ask Loomis's wife about the game, and she replied that Alfred did keep a small chess set, but he did so for purposes of creating and then solving chess problems rather than to actually play games against other people. He did keep his love of magic throughout his life, though he would only perform for his children and grandchildren, not to adults. I can respect that too, because children delight in the performance of magic, while adults just bug you with attempts to suss out how you did it, or they ask you flat out how you did it, which is not the point of magic. In Alfred Lee Loomis enrolled in Yale University. He studied mathematics, but did not yet plunge himself into deep scientific studies. He did enjoy tinkering with technology and was known to build gliders, model airplanes, and even remote controlled automobiles. He also developed a strong interest in artillery weapons and their operation. Oh and he would spend afternoons throwing boomerangs outside with one of his professors while they tried to come up with ways to create a theorem that would describe the boomerangs flight behaviors, which I think is pretty charming and interesting. After completing his initial education, he enrolled in Harvard Law School to study law. He felt law was a good spring board for numerous career opportunities and he focused primarily on corporate law. His cousin, Henry Stimpson, who had a law firm called Winthrop and stinsom Uh, promised Loomis a space in the firm as a law clark. Right out of school. Loomis graduated in the top ten percent of his class in nineteen twelve, having also served as the editor for the Harvard Law Review. A few years later, he was a successful lawyer living in Tuxedo Park in New York. He married Ellen Farnsworth, and together they had three sons. When his sons reached the age of fourteen. By that eight time, Loomis was a successful businessman and was making an enormous sum of money. Loomas decided he would grant each of his son's a big old wad of cash when they turned fourteen, with the instruction that they could do with it whatever they wished, but it was meant for them to manage their own needs, essentially saying, this is what I'm giving you. It's meant to help you pursue whatever career path you want, but you can spend it however you like. It's your responsibility. Those three sons went on to become distinguished members of society. The oldest became a financier and an accomplished sailor, The middle son became a professor of biochemistry, and the third became the president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Anyway back to Loomis. When the United States entered World War One, Alfred Lee Loomis would join the army. He demonstrated to his peers that he had a deep knowledge of artillery just because he had been fascinated by it and he had been studying it. He also had many connections in the financial world, and through them he was able to put together information about the equipment that each country in Europe had at their disposal during the war, just based on their purchases. So he'd say, hey, based upon all this information I have, I can tell you how much how many UH guns this one country has artillery guns like the big big guns. This circumspect method of gathering intelligence proved to be quite valuable, and the army assigned him to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to conduct research on ballistics. He earned the title of Major while he was there, and at Aberdeen he began to work with distinguished scientists, including astronomers and physicists, his appreciation for science grew as a result. Now, one thing that was a challenge for ballistics experts was measuring the muzzle velocity of guns, That is, how fast does a projectile leave the weapon once it's fired. Only by knowing that information can you make precise charts that will predict where a fired shell will land, how far away from the gun land based upon its trajectory and muzzle velocity. These ballistic charts could help soldiers in the field make efficient use of their equipment, and without them, the matter of firing our artillery would come down to trial and error, which is not terribly safe or efficient when you're in the middle of a war zone. But this was an era before lasers, which are incredibly useful for measuring the speed of an object, particularly very fast moving objects. It was before photo electric cells, so there needed to be some way to measure the speed of those shells as they left the artillery, and Alfred Lee Loomis was about to come up with a solution. What was it. I'll tell you in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Loomis's solution to figuring out the muzzle velocity of these artillery guns was called the Aberdeen chronograph, and Loomis took the problem of measuring muzzle velocity and worked backward to create the methodology. It was itself an improvement on a previous chronograph called the Boulange chronograph. The principle is actually pretty simple. You stake out a couple of spots in front of an artillery gun. You know the distance between those two spots. You fire the gun so that it passes through those two spots, and you invent a way to measure when the projectile passes through it. By measuring the difference in time between when the projectile arrives at the first spot and the second spot, you know how fast the projectile is traveling. You then know the muzzle velocity of that piece of artillery. Now, in the case of the Aberdeen chronograph, here's how it worked. You had a pair of frames, large gigantic frames really, with wires attached to the frames and the other end of the wires went to the chronograph apparatus and a battery. Each frame had two sheets of ten and they were separated by a thin layer of building paper and paraffin. So when a projectile pierced the sheets. It would bring the two layers of tin in contact with one another, and this would form a circuit that would allow electric current to pass through one wire into the frame, through the other wire, and back to the chronograph. The chronograph had a metal disc on it, and on top of this metal disc was a roll of waxed paper tape. It was spooled there and it would slowly unwind, or not really slowly, but it would unwind and the disc would turn. It moves the paper tape. As the disc turns. When the incoming signal hit the chronograph, it would cause a spark, and the spark would make a burn mark on the tape. So let's say you're trying to measure the muzzle velocity on a particular piece of artillery. You'd started the muzzle of the artillery piece. You would measure out of space that's fifty feet or fifteen point two four meters in front of the artillery piece, and that's where you would place the first frame. You would stake it down and your first frame would be right there. You would then measure an additional fifty feet or fifteen point two four meters further out from the gun and place the second frame in line with the first, So the guns operator would aim down the sites at the frame with the goal of having the shell passed through both frames through its path. So you would fire the gun, the shell would fly out at fifty ft, it would hit the first frame, it would continue and in another fifty feet it would hit the second frame. And each time it hits it would create that electrical circuit that would cause a spark to burn a spot on the paper tape. So then you go back to the chronograph and you look at the paper tape, and by knowing how fast the paper tape is moving inside the chronograph, you can do some math to find out how much time it took the shell to pass through each of those frames. By knowing the amount of time it took, and knowing already that the distance between those two frames is fifty feet, you could then measure the shells speed. You'd say, all right, it took this amount of time to pass through fifty ft worth of space. That gives me the velocity of the shell. Loomis's improvement to chronographs was significant. His chronograph became a standard piece of testing equipment for both the U S Army and the Navy. While working at Aberdeen, Loomis became well acquainted with a scientist named Dr Robert W. Wood. Wood's specialty, at least starting out, was an optics and work with infrared and ultra violet light. He was famous for debunking the claims of prosper Rene blonde Lott, who had claimed he discovered a form of energy similar to X rays that he called in rays. While while Wood was visiting blonde Lot's lab to witness a demonstration of the supposed in rays, he very quietly removed a prism from blonde Lot's device, and when blonde Lot claimed to observe the mysterious energy after activating his machine, Would calmly pointed out that the prism, which was supposedly integral to the operation of the gadget, wasn't even in it. It was absent, and therefore the effects that were supposedly observed could not possibly have been there. It's essentially saying, hey, I took the batteries out of that device, so therefore it could not have work. There was no power source, so your claims are invalid. During World War One, would began to study the work of another scientist named Paul Langevin, who had been using ultrasonic frequencies in an effort to create a detection device that could detect submarines, would observed that high powered ultrasonic signals would cause bubbles to form in a process called cavitation. Those bubbles would grow and eventually implode in water, and they would release a tremendous amount of heat and pressure in the process. So would and Loomis struck up a friendship during this time, and Loomis would later become something of a patron for Woods continued experimentation in the field of ultrasonic applications. More on that. In just a second after World War One, Loomis entered the world of finance. He made a tremendous fortune in the process. He and his brother in law, Landon Thorn, began to cater to companies in the burgeoning electrical power industry, so, in other words, they became financiers for public utilities. And this was during a time of rapid growth in that industry, and they earned millions of dollars all in the years leading up to the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine and the Great Depression in fact, Loomas even made a huge profit while millions of people were finding themselves out of work in the process, not in the process, but during the Great Depression. It wasn't that the two things were directly related. Loomas actually was quite concerned about the Great Depression, and he also wasn't really fond of the whole cons of of making all this money. He was really good at it, but that wasn't really where he was focused. He wasn't obsessed with making money. In nine Loomis began visiting Robert Wood's home laboratory, which was inside a barn on Wood's property, and Loomis became a frequent visitor. Clearly he was interested in scientific pursuits, and he told Dr Wood that he would be willing to underwrite scientific experiments if Dr Wood had any projects he'd like to tackle that he otherwise would have trouble funding. So Dr Wood told Loomis about his ultrasonic experimentation and the effects that had on water, and he indicated that there could be significant applications in the fields of chemistry, biology, and physics. So Loomis thought this was a fascinating idea, and he decided to put money behind it. So he created a lab at his home and he invited Dr Wood to work at this lab. Later, Loomis would purchase an enormous estate in nineteen seven in the community of Tuxedo Park. He was already living in Tuxedo Park, but now he built this or He bought this enormous estate called the Trask Estate, and he converted it into his own private laboratory. Was space to house scientists who came there to do work, so a visiting scientists might find himself with a ladging at Loomis's enormous estate. He would host various scientists working on all sorts of interesting problems. He also hosted some of the world's most famous scientific minds, like Albert Einstein, for example. He would get involved in these pursuits as well on occasion. Among them were the ultrasonic experiments that his friend Dr Would was heading up. According to Dr Wood, and I apologize for this next bit because it makes me a little nauseated. The two used ultrasonic frequencies and tested their effects on numerous fish and mice, killing a whole lot of them in the process, and trying to determine exactly what the mechanism was that was killing the animals charming right, This was in a different time anyway. The point is that he was very much interested in funding scientific research, and there was a lot of work in various fields that would not have happened without his support. Now I've got more to say about Loomis and his involvement with technology and science, but before I go into the next section, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. When Loomas turned forty three, he retired from Wall Street. The Great Depression had hit, the stock market had crashed in ninety nine, and Loomis didn't care for the political direction the US was taking. As FDR spoke out against big business, he began dedicating his time and energy to science and tinkering. One of Loomis's failures was in the design of a racing yacht that competed in the America's Cup. So this is one of those times that I have trouble reconciling things, because the Great Depression is on. People are out of where. Meanwhile, rich people like the Vanderbilts and Loomis are spending huge amounts of money to construct racing yachts that have no purpose. Other than to race each other. I have a problem with that, but anyway, so it was something of a custom for stinking rich people to purchase and staff a J class yacht at this time for the purposes of racing in the prestigious America's Cup race. A J class yacht had a single mast and had to follow the universal rule, as established by Nathaniel Hairschoff. So what is the universal rule? Was actually a formula, and it told you the relationship of various parts of a yacht's dimensions, and if that relationship all fell within the same zone, then two different yachts would be said to belong to the same class, even if they were of drastically different size and shape. So the formula goes something like this. You take the link of the boat, you multiply that by the square root of the sale area, and you multiply that by point one eight. That number, by the way, would change over time, sometimes it was point to but point when it's a good rule of thumb. You take that product, that whole number that you just got from doing what I said, and you divide it by a third of the square root of the ship's displacement, Which sounds complicated, but the point of this whole thing was to determine what was called the rating for the yacht. Ratings are measured in units of distance, and if the yacht had a rating of between sixty five and seventy six feet, it qualified as a J class yacht. The system allowed yachts of different sizes and dimensions to potentially race against each other as long as those ratings fell within the same range. So it's all the different proportions. If they matched up properly, you would get the same rating, even though they might be a very different sizes. Loomis and his business partner Thorn, wanted to use scientific principles to create a superior J class yacht. They had in mind a system in which all the yachts operations could be performed below decks using various winches and controls, and the idea was that clearing the decks of people the top deck would improve the yachts speed. They worked with the m I T. Naval Architecture Department to design and build the yacht, paying for the construction themselves. Their yacht was called the Whirlwind. It launched in nineteen thirty. It was not a success and Ultimately, it was scrapped in nineteen thirty five. This I also have a problem with to spend that much money on something that lasts five years. Loomis and Thorn also made another purchase together. It was more than half of Hilton Head. That's an island off the coast of South Carolina. At the time, hilton Head was undeveloped, and the two used it for their own personal recreation, mostly riding around and hunting. Loomis's interests remained very He was particularly fascinated with time keeping and consistently was on a quest to find more accurate means of keeping the time, both in short term and long term applications. He even conducted experiments that showed the moon's effect on pendulum clocks by comparing some extremely high quality clocks against a coartz oscillator timekeeping methodology. He also worked with E. Newton Harvey to develop a microscope centrifuge. The microscope made it possible to observe the effect of high g forces on the deformation of cells. In other words, this device would spin samples at very high speeds to simulate a strong gravitational pull, whilst simultaneously allowing scientists to observe the effects on the cells inside the samples, which is pretty neat. He also became interested in the work of a guy named Hans Burger, who had discovered the existence of brain waves. The existence of such waves was still a matter of some debate in the nineteen thirties, and so Loomis, who had a deep wallet and and inquisitive mind, set up a testing lab in his own personal laboratory with a special screen cage designed to block electromagnetic interference during experiments so that they didn't have to worry about false positives. Loomis's work ended up validating Burgher's findings and paved the way for the e G. One other major project Loomas was involved in was creating the long range navigation system called Lauren l O R A N. I'll do a full episode on Lauren next, but it's too big a topic to tackle in this episode. It's pretty darn cool, however, and it's a really interesting means of navigating overseas. Work continued at his private laboratory until nineteen forty. Now by that time, World War two was in full swing in Europe, but America had not yet formally entered the War, however, Allied powers were trying to advance the science and technology of radar. Robert Watson Watt, a physicist and engineer, developed the first practical aid our system in nine but while it worked, it had some big drawbacks. One of those was that the wavelengths that they were using for radio signals in this radar system were very, very long, and that required enormous antennas, and it limited how accurate the system was. You'd be able to detect that there was an incoming aircraft, but pinpointing exactly where it was was much more difficult. British engineers named John Randall and Harry Boot created a technology called the cavity magnetron that they suspected would be a solution, but they needed help. Britain sent an envoy to the United States to enlist the help of American scientists and engineers to produce radar systems that could take advantage of the cavity magnetron. Now, a cavity magnetron is a special type of vacuum tube. The vacuum tube has special metal cavities, and when powered, the vacuum tube begins to eject electrons. I talked about vacuum tubes. In a recent episode of tech Stuff, these objected electrons would move have passed these metal cavities and they would be interacting with a magnetic field. And as the electrons would pass the cavities, this interaction would cause radio waves to oscillate inside those cavities and produced microwaves, the frequency of which would depend upon the physical dimensions of the cavities. The version that Randall and Boot created could produce microwaves at a wavelength of ten centimeters. The shorter wavelengths meant the antenna could be smaller and the waves could detect smaller objects as well and with greater precision. The reception in the US was positive. They said this is something that we will collaborate on, and a new lab began to take shape. Loomis had a hand in the creation of this lab, and it became known as the m I T Radiation Laboratory. Loomis himself became the head of the Radar Division for the US under the newly formed National Defense Research Committee or in d r C, and he oversaw the lab. He shut down his own personal lab in the meantime to focus solely on the RAT lab. As it was called. The lab was able to refine the design of radar, and the collaborative effort between the English and American engineers and scientists help spawn a technology that was instrumental no pun intended in war efforts. It also eventually led to the development of the microwave oven, but that's another story. Loomiss contributions were often behind the scenes. Uh he knew the right people in business and the patent office to help streamline efforts and make it easier for the engineers and scientists to do their work. While he didn't necessarily get involved in the labs with the research efforts, he made sure that the work could continue with as few obstacles in the way as possible. The rad Lab bustled with activity, but after America entered World War Two following Pearl Harbor, Loomis saw his lab rated for talent. On more than one occasion, several of his bright stars were leaving to go work for another project. It was a top secret project, one with a purpose only a few people knew. It was called the Manhattan Project and the purpose was to build a nuclear bomb. Loomis would continue to fund scientific work, going to Berkeley to help Ernest Lawrence raise funds to build a cyclotron particle accelerator. After World War Two ended, Loomis divorced his wife Ellen, and he married Minette sil Dreer's Hobart. He and Hobart had had an extramarital affair and decided to divorce their respective spouses and marry each other. The whole thing was a huge scandal in New York society, and Loomis and his new wife largely withdrew from public life to move into a single household. Now, I say all this not to drag Loomis's name through the mud, but to illustrate that while he was a remarkable person in both business and science, he was by no means perfect. In his later years, Loomis became more interested in biology. He spent time with his son Farnie, studying hydra, for example, and by that I mean the small organisms that demonstrate remarkable lity to regenerate from injuries. They also do not appear to age. Loomis lived long enough to tinker with computers, or at least calculators, owning a Hewlett Packard Modeled sixty five that's a handheld card programmable calculator that debuted in nineteen seventy four. It costs about four thousand dollars in today's money to buy one, and it could hold up to one instructions of six bits each. Loomis would pass away on August eleven nine, and he had very few friends at that point, not because he had alienated them, but just that he naturally gravitated to a fairly small social circle. But he was known as a very generous friend, someone who enjoyed spending time with his friends and supporting scientific endeavors. In fact, he was known for funding all sorts of scientific research throughout his lifetime and became part of the UH, the whole society of scientists in America, despite the fact that he was largely known as someone who worked behind the scenes and he kind of eschewed the public spotlight. So, Chris, thank you so much for this suggestion. It was fascinating looking into the life of Alfred Lee Loomis, And in our next episode we will look more closely at Lauren, the long range navigation tool that he designed, and talk about how it works and the math behind it, because it's pretty fascinating stuff. I look forward to doing that because despite being an English Lit major back in my youth, I also really love math, specifically algebra, and there's a whole lot of algebra when it comes to Lauren. So I'm looking forward to talking about that. 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