A New York Times bestseller! The untold story of the eccentric Wall Street tycoon and the circle of scientific geniuses who helped build the atomic bomb and defeat the Nazis—changing 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. Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Remarkable...the story of a genuinely extraordinary man [told] uncommonly well. Kurt Vonnegut A brilliant account of the all but vanished reputation of an amateur physicist who became a friend and peer of the greatest scientists of his time. Timothy Ferris Jennet Conant's Tuxedo Park illuminates an important but little-known chapter in American science, and does it with a deft, knowing touch that brings it to life. The Washington Post Book World The story of how radar made its passage from the drawing board into the cockpits of Allied fighter planes is incredibly dramatic, and Jennet Conant tells it uncommonly well. The Wall Street Journal Understanding just how America wins wars is a pressing task these days, which makes the story of Alfred Loomis especially timely -- and instructive....[His] remarkable story is being told now only thanks to Ms. Conant, a journalist who combines a graceful writing style with her own family connections to his secretive life. 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. Chapter 1: The Patron Ward was smiling but that did not mean that he was amused. The smile was a velvet glove covering his iron determination to get under way without any lost motion. -- WR, from Brain Waves and Death On January 30, 1940, shortly after ten P.M., the superintendent of the building at 116 East 83rd Street noticed that a bottle of milk delivered that morning to one of his tenants had remained in front of the door all day. The young man who rented the three-room apartment had not said anything about going out of town. He was a conspicuous fellow, extremely tall -- at least six feet four -- and lean, with piercing blue eyes and a shock of dark hair. After knocking repeatedly and failing to get an answer, the superintendent notified the police. William T. Richards was found dead in the bathtub with his wrists slashed, blood from his wounds garlanding the walls of the bathroom. He was dressed in his pajamas, his head resting on a pillow. A razor blade lay by his hand. He was a former chemistry professor at Princeton University who was currently employed as a consultant at the Loomis Laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He was thirty-nine years old. His personal papers mentioned a mother, Miriam Stuart Richards, living in Massachusetts, and the detective at the scene asked the Cambridge police to contact her. As The New York Times reported the following morning, William Richards was from a prominent Boston family, son of the late professor Theodore William Richards of Harvard, winner of a Nobel Prize in chemistry, and the brother of the former Grace (Patty) Thayer Richards, wife of the president of Harvard, James B. Conant. Although his death was clearly a suicide, everything possible was done to hush up the more unpleasant aspects of the event, and the Boston papers never published the details. Richards' brother, Thayer, was immediately dispatched to New York, and he saw to it that most of what had transpired was concealed from his mother and sister. A suicide note that was found by the tub was destroyed, and its contents were never revealed. The Richards family was naturally concerned about its reputation, but there were also pressing concerns, of a rather delicate nature, that made it vitally important that Bill's suicide be kept as quiet as possib