My highlights from the book: 

1. Few men of Loomis’ prominence and achievement have gone to greater lengths to foil history. 

2. Independently wealthy, iconoclastic, and aloof, Loomis did not conform to the conventional measure of a great scientist. He was too complex to categorize—financier, philanthropist, society figure, physicist, inventor, dilettante—a contradiction in terms. 

3. He rose to become one of the most powerful figures in banking in the 1920s. 

4. Loomis was eccentric and disdained the glamorous swirl around him. 

5. He had amassed a substantial fortune, which allowed him to act as a patron. 

6. Loomis purchased an enormous stone mansion in Tuxedo and turned it into a private laboratory. 

7. Loomis was a bit stiff, with the bearing of a four-star general in civilian clothes. He was strong and decisive. 

8. He was an intensely private man. 

9. He was enthusiastic about American know-how and was not inclined to sit idly by until the military finally determined it was time to take action—particularly if just catching up with the Germans proved to be a monumental task. 

10. He carried himself with composure, but his politeness was merely a habit; he was preoccupied. 

11. When duty called he helped reinvent modern warfare. 

12. He was an unconventional person. He was not motivated by money or fame. He never needed the approval of other people. He was that sure of himself. He was motivated by the adventure. 

13. He was aloof as if detached from society. 

14. He attacked new problems with single-minded zeal. 

15. He became an enthusiastic champion of the new armored tanks. He became such an expert on tank construction, he built a scaled-down model in his garage in order to see if he could make further improvements in the design. When his cousin came to visit, Loomis rolled into the rail station in his light armored tank to meet the train, kicking up dust and causing quite a scene. 

16. He was not a man to do things by halves. 

17. Thorne talked Loomis into throwing over a promising legal career for the much more speculative investment banking business.

18. Almost at once, they began specializing in public utility issues and quickly emerged as leaders in financing and developing of the electric power industry. 

19. Loomis had no respect for the old school Wall Street capitalist’s skills. He relished the opportunity to reinvent their creaky methods and along the way rewrite the rules as he saw fit. 

20. Rural electrification [what Loomis helped finance] was the key to the growth of factories, industries, and economic opportunities. Loomis had complete confidence in the new technology as a force for change and a force for good. If they could speed the growth of the power industry, both Bonbright [his firm]—and the country—would benefit. 

21. They helped create utility holding companies by bundling the management and facilities of smaller operators into larger integrated systems. This allowed the operating companies to obtain funds by issuing securities and thereby enlarge their operations. The holding companies were a better medium for investors. 

22. He hired R.W. Wood as his private tutor. R.W. Wood taught Alfred Loomis physics. 

23. Loomis’ private laboratory was rapidly acquiring world fame as a center of research. It had truly become, in Einstein’s phrase, a “palace of science.”

24. Loomis would later maintain that everybody on the Street knew the crash was coming, the only difference was that he and Thorne refused to bank on its being inevitably delayed. 

25. Loomis and Thorne liquidated their remaining securities and converted everything into treasury bonds and cash. 

26. Loomis made an estimated $50 million during the first few years of the Depression.

27. Alfred just totally lost interest in business. He felt he had enough money to do whatever he wanted, and what he wanted to do was science. 

28. Without so much a backward look, Loomis quit Wall Street for good.

29. Loomis was not someone you could argue with. He would listen patiently to an opposing opinion. But his consideration was nothing more than that—an act of politeness on his part. 

30. Alfred was a very premeditated person. He had it all figured out. 

31. He was very troubled by what he learned about the highly developed state of applied scientific research in Germany. He heard unsettling things about advanced weaponry and the work German physicists were rumored to be doing in nuclear physics. 

32. After the shock of the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915, Thomas Edison said that Americans were “as clever at mechanics as any people in the world” and could defeat any “engine of destruction.” Edison had advocated for preparedness without provocation, and to Loomis, it seemed as wise a course in the present as it had been then. 

33. At the start of the last war, Edison had recommended that the government create “a great research laboratory” whose purpose would be to develop new weaponry so that if war came, the country could “take advantage of the knowledge gained through this research work and quickly manufacture in large quantities the very latest and most efficient instruments of war.” Loomis adapted Edison’s ideas to his own laboratory. 

34. Aggressive and enthusiastic, Loomis insisted on getting started right away. 

35. Radar held the key to revolutionizing warfare by providing a better means to track the enemy and accurately destroy targets. 

36. For the next four years, he would drive himself and his band of physicists almost without break to develop the all-important radar warning systems based on the magnetron. 

37. He drew a striking parallel between the present international situation and the financial situation prior to the crash. He said that now people are asking him when we will enter the war just as in 1928 his friends were asking him when the stock market crash was coming. He said that in both cases such a question is quite beside the point. He said that once a person admitted a stock market crash was coming a prudent individual will immediately get out fo the stock market and not consider when the crash is coming and thereby try to hang on and make some more profits. Likewise, at the present time it is of secondary importance when we will get in; of first importance is the admission that we are going to get in, and our action accordingly should be that of preparing just as though we were actually in the war! 

38. Loomis had one important characteristic. His ability to concentrate completely on the chief objective, even at the cost of neglecting matters that appear to other people to be of equal importance. 

39. War was a great stimulus to science, but it was not a stunt that could be repeated in peacetime. 

40. He wanted nothing more than to return to the solitary wizardry of men like R.W. Wood, lone experimentalists who, working practically by themselves in a private laboratory, succeeded in making major contributions to the frontiers of knowledge.

41. “He’s probably the only man who ever, on the one hand, took the guys down in Wall Street for a ride and made a lot of money out of them; and on the other hand got elected to the National Academy of Sciences on the basis of his accomplishments in physics.” —Vannevar Bush

Learn more ideas from history's greatest entrepreneurs by listening to Founders podcast. Read more highlights.