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Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street tycoon and the secret palace of science that changed the course of World War II by Jennet Conant, Simon & Schuster, $26, ISBN 0684872870

NUCLEAR weapons ended the Second World War, but it was radar that won it. Everyone has heard of the Manhattan Project, but few are familiar with the great story of how MIT developed radar technology. One of the prime movers-and-shakers behind the Radar Lab was Alfred Loomis. An autocratic Wall Street tycoon, who shunned publicity, he became an influential physicist. While he was coining it on the stock market (making $50 million in the first few years of the Depression), he set up a world-leading physics laboratory in his home in the New York suburb of Tuxedo Park. 鈥淎 palace of science鈥� it was called by Einstein, one of the many luminaries who visited the place and became friendly with Loomis.

Jennet Conant pleasingly relates Loomis鈥檚 singular life story in Tuxedo Park, and describes at some length how he became a key player in scientific politics during the war. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, his greatest achievement was to set up the huge Radar Lab and help it to deliver a technology desperately needed by the Allied forces.

Loomis deserves to be remembered as one of the most enlightened business executives ever to become involved in science and its administration. For him, the most important thing was to expedite good science; bureaucracy was anathema. Today鈥檚 administrators of science, please note. Graham Farmelo edited It Must be Beautiful (Granta)