dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

"Reed" Hastings-real name Wilmont- maternal great grandfather was Alfred Loomis

Alfred Lee Loomis was a Wall Street tycoon, a famous scientist, a lawyer and a true legend in the history of the United States. Born of upper-middle-class parents, Loomis was a brilliant mathematics major and inventor at Yale University. After attending Harvard Law School, he joined a prominent Wall Street law firm and in short order became one of its brightest young stars, specializing in complicated corporate financial transactions. During the first World War, he used his undergraduate training in mathematics and science, along with his detailed knowledge of European field artillery—an interest developed in college-to secure the assignments he wanted: first to the old Army proving ground at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and later to the new Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, which opened for business in January 1918. There, as a lieutenant colonel in charge of development and experimentation, he invented a number of instruments (two of which were later patented) that would be used for the next twenty-five years in measuring external ballistics.

After the war, he entered investment banking and made a huge fortune with his brother-in-law Landon Thorne by spearheading the complex financing of the nascent electric utility industry, handling upward financing of over $1.6 billion US dollars at the time. The two also helped to organize many important mergers and acquisitions, and in the process acquiring numerous seats and untold influence on the resulting boards of directors. They were lauded not only for their success, but for their application of scientific principles and long-term economic planning to the management of public resources and provision of cheaper and more reliable service to consumers. Fortune magazine described them, in February 1930, as "the most potent force in shaping the present and future organization of America's huge, complex power and light business." Sensing the oncoming Depression, he cashed out of the market, protecting the assets that would support his extravagant and idiosyncratic lifestyle. Loomis alone earned an estimated $50 million during the early years of the Depression. Throughout the years, while he traded vast sums of money on the financial market during the week, in the evenings and at weekends he worked with the world's greatest scientists at his own secret laboratory in New York. In the early 1920s Loomis and his staff conducted experiments in sound waves, spectrometry and precise time measurements. He was credited with the inventions of the Aberdeen chronometer, a microscope centrifuge, and a pressurized fire extinguisher.

moar here:

http://www.ob-ultrasound.net/loomis.html