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

330 pp. Black-and-white plates. 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.