Alfred Lee Loomis

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Alfred Lee Loomis

Alfred Lee Loomis (born November 4, 1887 in Manhattan , † August 11, 1975 in East Hampton , Long Island, New York) was an American lawyer, investment banker and inventor. He made important contributions to the development of radar and invented the LORAN radio navigation system.

Loomis came from a family of doctors, his mother was born Stimson and Loomis was cousin of US Secretary of State Henry Stimson . He attended Phillips Academy , studied at Yale University and graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1912 . He then went on to be a successful corporate attorney with the Winthrop and Stimson law firm . During the First World War, he worked as a ballistics officer at the US Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, where he invented a device with which one could precisely measure the muzzle velocity of artillery projectiles (Aberdeen Chronograph).

After the war, he went into the banking sector and with his brother-in-law bought Bonbright and Company, which they made very profitable by financing electricity companies in rural America. They became even wealthier when they anticipated the stock market crash of 1929 in good time and converted their investments into cash beforehand in order to then buy them cheaply. With the money he earned, he financed a private research institute (Tuxedo Park in New York) and turned to technical inventions. He also invited leading scientists from Europe to his institute (such as Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, James Franck, Niels Bohr).

Loomis developed electroencephalography (EEG) techniques with Edmund Newton Harvey and thus contributed to sleep research : in 1937 he and Harvey discovered the K-complex in the EEG. In 1939 he turned to experimental physics, financed Ernest Lawrence a 184-inch cyclotron in Berkeley and worked with MIT, with whom he collaborated at the beginning of World War II, particularly in the field of radar. He made contact with British physicists - John Cockcroft and Edward Bowen visited him in Tuxedo Park and presented him with their magnetron . Loomis, who had already experimented with radar before that, was soon instrumental in founding the MIT Radiation Laboratory, one of the main locations for radar research in the United States. There he also developed the LORAN system for radio navigation. In 1947 he retired into private life.

In 2013 he was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame . In 1934 he received the John Price Wetherill Medal with Harvey. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1941 . Loomis has three honorary degrees from Wesleyan University, Yale, University of California.

In 1912 he married Elizabeth Ellen Farnsworth from a distinguished Boston family with whom he had three sons. After the divorce in 1945, he married Manette Hobart. One of his hobbies was sailing - he competed in America's Cup races against other families of the East Coast elite such as the Vanderbilts and Astors. One of his sons was Alfred Lee Loomis Jr. (1913-1994), who in 1948 at the Olympics participated.

literature

  • Luis Walter Alvarez , Biographical Memoirs National Academy of Sciences, Volume 51, 1980, pp. 309-341, pdf
  • Jennet Conant: Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street tycoon and the secret palace of science that changed the course of world war II, Simon and Schuster 2002

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Luis Walter Alvarez , Biographical Memoirs National Academy of Sciences, Volume 51, 1980, pp. 309-341, pdf
  2. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/12/archives/alfred-lee-loomis-dead-at-87-physicist-financier-and-lawyer.html
  3. ↑ Robert Buderi, The consummate amateur, Review of the book by Conant in American Scientist in 2002
personal data
SURNAME Loomis, Alfred Lee
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lawyer and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH November 4, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Manhattan
DATE OF DEATH August 11, 1975
Place of death East Hampton , Long Island, New York