Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II

The untold story of an eccentric Wall Street tycoon and the circle of scientific geniuses he assembled before World War II to develop the science for radar and the atomic bomb. Together they changed the course of history.

Legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the twentieth century--Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others--at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York, in the late 1930s. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Jennet Conant, the granddaughter of James Bryant Conant, one of the leading scientific advisers of World War II, enjoyed unprecedented access to Loomis' papers, as well as to people intimately involved in his life and work. She pierces through Loomis' obsessive secrecy and illuminates his role in assuring the Allied victory.

Author: Jennet Conant
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 05/06/2003
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.96d
ISBN13: 9780684872889
ISBN10: 0684872889
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Science & Technology
- Biography & Autobiography | Rich & Famous
- Science | History

About the Author
Jennet Conant is the author of Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist, and the New York Times bestsellers The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington and Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II. She has written for Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, Newsweek, and The New York Times. She lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.