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Alfred Lee Loomis. Education Yale Harvard - Law School Cum Laude . Established Loomis Laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York, and funded scientific research for two decades after the stock market crash of 1929. Background.
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Alfred Lee Loomis Education Yale Harvard - Law School Cum Laude Established Loomis Laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York, and funded scientific research for two decades after the stock market crash of 1929.
Background • Lieutenant Colonial during first World War in charge of development and experimentation. • He then became a millionaire as an investment banker as well as trading stocks
Underground Laboratory • During the day Loomis did big business in the street • At night Loomis would work in his garage laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. • Loomis worked with a fellow war veteran Robert Wood on ultrasonic sound waves and spectrometry. • During this time he received patents on many inventions: Aberdeen chronometer, a microscope centrifuge, and a pressurized fire extinguisher
Tuxedo Park Laboratory • Loomis worked with many famed scientists in his underground lab. • During the second World War Loomis funded many scientists with his wall street success. • Loomis expanded his lab into a nearby mansion now famed as The Tuxedo Park Laboratory.
War Time • Loomis became a major figure in a technology that would soon be accredited for winning World War II. Radar.
RADAR • The first practical radar system was produced in 1935 by the British physicist Sir Robert Watson-Watt. • Its main downfall was that it could not track small objects such as individual airplanes in the sky. • It was also neither compact enough to be mounted on planes nor accurate enough to be effective at night.
Cavity Magnetron • A few of America’s smartest men along with two British men gathered into Loomis’ Tuxedo Park Lab. • On September 29, 1940, the men put together a small box that they guaranteed would provide the power needed for a quality radar system. • 1,000x as much power at just a 10cm wavelength. • They called it the Cavity Magnetron
MIT Rad Lab • Immediately following their finding 10 Nobel Prize laureates along with 4,000 workers came together at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and within 6 weeks built radar devices capable of detecting U-Boats, navigation and bombing, and air-to-air fighter interception.
LORAN • Loomis invented and patented LORAN (Long Range Aid to Navigation) • A LORAN net, or chain, requires a master station, initiating the pulse, and a series of slave stations. In very simplified terms, the master transmits and the slave responds. • While it suffered from atmospheric effects it was very efficient on the sea. Thus providing efficient navigation for boats.
Atomic Bomb • Many of the scientists involved in the development of RADAR later worked on the creation of nuclear weaponry. • It was said that “Radar won the war; the atomic bomb ended it” • Loomis had a major role in both technologies