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Birth:          24 Mar 1900 Mass.
Death:          30 Jan 1940 New York, N.Y.
Cause of Death: suicide

Notes
1981 book:
William was a professor of architecture at Princeton Univ. Unmarried
studied chemistry under his father 
1900 in Cambridge, Mass.
1910 in Cambridge, Mass.
1920 in Cambridge, Mass.
1930 in Princeton, N.J. boarder, university professor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_William_Richards
http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=18&pid=411728&agid=2
from Tuxedo Park:
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 possible. Miriam Richards, desperate to avoid 
any scandal, drafted a reassuring letter attempting to put the untimely death of her son 
in a better light, copies of which she sent out to important friends and relations. She 
explained that Bill had long been "nervously, seriously ill" and had never properly 
recovered from severe abdominal surgery several years earlier. She also supplied him 
with an end that left open the possibility that his death was accidental, writing that 
"Bill died of an overdose of a sleeping draught." It is entirely possible that this is what 
she had been told. 

"William Theodore Richards was beyond any doubt one of the most brilliant members 
of our class," began his Harvard obituary, based on the fond reminiscences of his 
friends and scientific colleagues. He was interested in new scientific phenomena, the 
originality of his ideas leading him into experimental work. But he had the kind of 
restless, wide-ranging intelligence -- he was a talented painter and musician and 
briefly considered playing the cello professionally -- that made him, according to one 
friend, "a veritable Renaissance man." He was a chemist at his father's insistence, 
but his heart was not in it, and he found it difficult to force himself to undertake the 
routine proofs and laborious accumulation of data that would have given him more 
publishable material and more recognition in his field. He had "a mentality which could 
be called great," wrote his classmate Leopold Mannes, a fellow scientist and 
musician, who speculated that Richards despaired of ever meeting the onerous 
demands he imposed on himself. "In his attitude towards life, towards science, 
towards music -- of which he had an astounding knowledge and perception -- and 
towards literature, he was a relentless perfectionist, and thus his own implacable 
judge. No human being could be expected fully to satisfy such standards." 

Richards was a solitary man, confining his friends to a small, clever circle. He kept 
most of his contemporaries at bay with his caustic wit, which made quick work of any 
human frailty, whether at his own expense or someone else's. With complete abandon, 
he would ruthlessly mimic anyone from Adolf Hitler to some sentimental woman who 
had been foolish enough to confide in him. To most, he seemed cordial, cold, and a 
bit superior, his moodiness exacerbated by periods of poor health and depression. He 
eventually quit his job at Princeton and moved to New York, where he worked part-
time as a chemical consultant while devoting himself to an arduous course of 
psychotherapy. The Harvard memorial notes concluded that "after a brave struggle for 
ten years to overcome a serious neurosis, which in spite of treatment grew worse, Bill 
died by his own hand." 

Richards' death was nevertheless "shocking" to Jim Conant and his wife, Patty. 
Richards had celebrated Christmas with them only a few weeks before and had stayed 
in the large brick mansion at 17 Quincy Street that was the official residence of the 
Harvard president. Although his psychological condition had always been precarious, 
he had seemed "to be making real progress," his mother later lamented in a letter to a 
close family friend, so much so that "last summer and autumn he was so happy and 
well that for fun he wrote a detective story." Richards had submitted the manuscript to 
Scribner's, which "had at once accepted it." 

Just a few weeks after he took his own life, his book, Brain Waves and Death, was 
published under the pseudonym "Willard Rich." It was, in most respects, a 
conventional murder mystery, with the added interest of being set in a sophisticated 
modern laboratory, where a group of eminent scientists are hard at work on an 
experiment designed to measure the electrical impulses sent out by the brain. In a 
twist on the standard "hermetically sealed room" problem, Richards staged the murder 
in a locked experimental chamber that is constantly monitored by highly sensitive 
listening devices and a camera. The book earned respectful reviews, with The New 
York Times describing the story as "ingeniously contrived and executed" and 
awarding Willard Rich "an honorable place in the ranks of mystery mongers." None of 
the critics were apparently aware that the author was already dead or that he had 
rather morbidly foreshadowed his imminent demise in the book, in which the first victim 
is a tall, arrogant young chemist named Bill Roberts. 

At the time, only a small group of elite scientists could have known that while the 
method Richards devised to kill off his literary alter ego was of his own invention -- a 
lethal packet of poison gas that was frozen solid and released into the atmosphere 
when warmed to room temperature -- the actual science and the laboratory itself were 
real. George Kistiakowsky, a Harvard chemistry professor and one of Richards' closest 
friends and professional colleagues, guessed the truth immediately, "that it was a 
take-off on the Loomis Laboratory and the characters frequenting it." Despite its 
contrived plot, the book was essentially a roman ? clef. No one who had ever been 
there could fail to recognize that the "Howard M. Ward Laboratory" was in reality the 
Loomis Laboratory in Tuxedo Park and that the charismatic figure of Ward himself was 
transparently based on Alfred Lee Loomis, the immensely wealthy Wall Street tycoon 
and amateur physicist who, among his myriad inventions, claimed a patent for the 
electroencephalograph, a device that measured brain waves. 

The opening paragraphs of the book perfectly captured Loomis' rarefied world, where 
scientists mingled with polite society and where intellectual problems in astronomy, 
biology, psychiatry, or physics could be discussed and pursued in a genteel and 
collegial atmosphere: 

The Howard M. Ward Laboratory was not one of those hospital-like institutions where 
Pure Science is hounded grimly and humorlessly as if it were a venomous reptile; the 
grounds of the Laboratory included a tennis court, bridle paths, and a nine-hole golf 
course. Guests there did not have to confine themselves to science, they could live 
fully and graciously.
It was Richards who had first told Kistiakowsky about Loomis' private scientific 
playground in Tuxedo Park, a guarded enclave of money and privilege nestled in the 
foothills of the Ramapo Mountains. Tuxedo Park, forty miles northwest of New York 
City, had originally been developed in 1886 by Pierre Lorillard, the tobacco magnate, 
as a private lakefront resort where his wealthy friends could summer every year. The 
rustic retreat became the prime meeting ground of American society, what Ward 
McCallister famously called "the Four Hundred," where wealthy moguls communed with 
nature in forty-room "cottages" with the required ten bedrooms, gardens, stables, and 
housing for the small army of servants required for entertaining in style. Leading 
members of the financial elite, such as Rockefellers and Morgans, numbered among its 
residents, as did Averell Harriman, who occupied a vast neighboring estate known as 
Arden. Over the years, Tuxedo Park, with its exclusive clubhouse and fabled balls, 
had taken on all of the luster and lore of a royal court, and although it had dimmed 
somewhat since the First World War, it still regarded itself as the Versailles of the New 
York rich. 

Loomis, a prominent banker and socialite, was very much part of that world and owned 
several homes there. According to Richards, however, Loomis was also somewhat 
eccentric and disdained the glamorous swirl around him. He had developed a passion 
for science and for some time had been leading a sort of double life: as a partner in 
Bonbright & Co., the thriving bond investments subsidiary of J. P. Morgan, he had 
amassed a substantial fortune, which allowed him to act as a patron somewhat in the 
manner of the great nineteenth-century British scientists such as Charles Darwin and 
Lord Rayleigh. To that end, Loomis had purchased an enormous stone mansion in 
Tuxedo, known as the Tower House, and turned it into a private laboratory where he 
could give free rein to his avocation -- primarily physics, but also chemistry, 
astronomy, and other ventures. He entertained lavishly at Tower House and invited 
eminent scientists to spend long weekends and holidays as his guests. More to the 
point, as Richards told Kistiakowsky, Loomis also extended his hospitality to 
"impecunious" young scientists, offering them stipends so they could enjoy elegant 
living conditions while laboring as skilled researchers in his laboratory. 

Richards had seen to it that Kistiakowsky -- "Kisty" to his pals -- secured a generous 
grant from the Loomis Laboratory. The two had met and become fast friends at 
Princeton in the fall of 1926, when as new chemistry teachers they were assigned to 
share the same ground-floor laboratory. They were both tall, physically imposing men, 
with the same contradictory mixture of witty raconteur and reserved, introspective 
scientist. In no time they had discovered a mutual fondness for late night 
philosophizing and bathtub gin. As this was during Prohibition, the Chemistry 
Department had to sponsor its own drinking parties, and the two chemists "doctored" 
their own mixture of bootleg alcohol and ginger ale with varying degrees of success. 
Richards, who was subsidized by his well-heeled Brahmin family, had soon noticed 
that his Russian colleague, a recent ?migr? who sent money to his family in Europe, 
was having difficulty managing on the standard instructor's salary of $160 a month. 
Knowing any extra source of funds would be welcome, Richards had put in a good 
word with Loomis, just as he had when recommending Kistiakowsky to his "uncle 
Lawrence" -- A. Lawrence Lowell, who was then president of Harvard, and Bill's uncle 
on his mother's side. Grinning into the phone, he had provided assurances that 
Kistiakowsky was not some "wild and woolly Russian" and, despite being just off the 
boat, was "wholly a gentleman, had proper appearance and table manners, etc." 

Richards' own introduction to Loomis had happened quite by accident a few months 
prior to his arrival at Princeton. While Richards was completing his postdoctoral 
studies at G?ttingen, he had been sitting in the park one Sunday morning, idly reading 
Chemical Abstracts, when a paragraph briefly describing an experiment being carried 
on in the "Loomis Laboratory" had caught his eye. He had immediately sent off a letter 
to the laboratory, "suggesting that certain aspects of the experiment could be further 
developed," and he had even outlined what the result of this development would 
probably be. Some months later, he received a response from the laboratory informing 
him that they had carried out his suggestions and the results were those he had 
anticipated. This had been followed by a formal invitation to work at the Loomis 
Laboratory. 

Over the years, Richards and Kistiakowky had often commuted from Princeton to 
Tuxedo Park together on weekends and holidays and had conducted some of their 
research experiments jointly. Richards had arranged for them both to spend the 
summer of 1930 as research fellows at the Loomis Laboratory. What a grand time that 
had been. Not only was the room and board better than that of any resort hotel, but 
weekend recreation at Tower House -- when the restriction against women was 
relaxed -- included festive picnics, drinks, parties, and elaborate black-tie dinners. 
Back then, they had both been ambitious young chemists at the beginning of their 
careers and had reveled in the chance to work with such legendary figures as R. W. 
Wood, the brilliant American experimental physicist from Johns Hopkins, whom Loomis 
had lured to Tuxedo Park as director of his laboratory. Working alongside Loomis and 
a long list of distinguished collaborators, they had carried out series of original 
experiments, including some of the first with intense ultrasonic radiation, and had 
proudly seen their lines of investigation published in scientific journals and taken up 
by laboratories in America and Europe. 

Kistiakowsky, who by then had joined Harvard's Chemistry Department and become 
close friends with Conant, never publicly revealed that Richards' book was based on 
Loomis and the brain wave experiments conducted at Tower House. In his carefully 
composed entry in Richards' Harvard obituary, he made only a passing reference to a 
"Mr. A. L. Loomis of Tuxedo Park," diplomatically noting that Richards' work at the 
laboratory had afforded him "one of the keenest scientific pleasures of his career." 
However, it is typical that he could not resist dropping one hint. Observing that very 
few physical chemists possessed his late friend's keenness of mind, Kistiakowsky 
concluded that no one could ever match Richards' own concise presentation of his 
work, "which was always done in the best literary form." 

At the time of Richards' death, Kistiakowsky was still working for Loomis on the side. 
But the stakes were much higher now, and the project he had undertaken was so 
secret, and of such fearful importance, that Richards' parody of the Loomis Laboratory 
must have struck him as a wildly precipitous and ill-conceived prank. Richards had 
always thumbed his nose at authority and convention and had been disdainful of the 
narrow scope of his scientific colleagues, whom he once complained talked about 
"nothing but the facts, the fundamental tone of life, while I prefer the inferred third 
harmonic." But for Kistiakowsky, a White Russian who at age seventeen had battled 
the advancing Germans at the tail end of World War I, and then fought the Bolsheviks 
before being wounded and forced to flee his country, the prospect of another 
European war took precedence over everything. While in the past he might have 
joined Richards in poking fun at Loomis and his collector's attitude toward scientists, 
Kistiakowsky now appreciated him as a man who knew how to get things done. Loomis 
was a bit stiff, with the bearing of a four-star general in civilian clothes, but he was 
strong and decisive. 

Kistiakowsky did not have to be told to be discreet, though he may have been. Loomis 
was furious about the book and threatened to sue for libel. He was an intensely 
private man and was horrified at the breach of trust from such an old friend. Richards 
had been a regular at the Tower House for more than ten years and was intimately 
acquainted with the goings-on there. In the months directly preceding his suicide, 
Loomis had plunged the laboratory into highly sensitive war-related research projects. 
Loomis wanted no part of the gossip and notoriety that might result either from 
Richards' unfortunate death or his book. 

Neither did Jim Conant, who regarded the book as a source of acute embarrassment. 
It was bad enough that his wife's family continuously vexed him with their financial 
excesses and emotional crises, here was his brother-in-law stirring up trouble from the 
grave with this incriminating tale. Patty Conant was so distressed that she begged her 
brother, Thayer, to have the book recalled at once. But it was too late for that, and it 
was not long before Conant discovered that Brain Waves and Death was not 
Richards' only legacy. 

With his instinctive ability to home in on the latest developments on the frontiers of 
research, Richards had followed up his first book with something far more sensational. 
Among the papers collected from his apartment after his death was the draft of a short 
story entitled "The Uranium Bomb." It was written once again under the pseudonym 
Willard Rich. The slim typed manuscript, bearing the name and address of his literary 
agent, Madeleine Boyd, on the front cover, was clearly intended for publication. 
Richards was an avid reader of Astounding Science Fiction and probably intended to 
place his story in the magazine, which regularly carried the futuristic visions of H. G. 
Wells and was a popular venue for the doomsday fantasies of scientists who were 
themselves good writers. Richards' story opens with the meeting in March 1939 
between a rather callow young chemist named Perkins (Richards) and a Russian 
physicist named Boris Zmenov, who tries to enlist the well-connected American to 
warn his influential friends, and ultimately the president, "to suppress a threat to 
humanity." The Zmenov character, who is convinced the Nazis want to build a bomb, 
explains that there had been a breakthrough in atomic fission: the uranium nucleus 
had been split up, with the liberation of fifty million times as much energy as could be 
obtained from any other explosive. "A ton of uranium would make a bomb which could 
blow the end off Manhattan island." 

Richards outlined Zmenov's theory, "tossed off with the breezy impudence of a 
theoretical physicist," describing the principles of atomic fission and the chain 
reaction by which an explosion spreads from a few atoms to a large mass of material, 
thereby generating a colossal amount of power. When Perkins professes disbelief, 
Zmenov becomes furious: "I am on the verge of developing a weapon," he declares, 
"which will be the greatest military discovery of all time. It will revolutionize war, and 
make the nation possessing it supreme. I wish that the United States should be this 
nation, but am I encouraged? Am I assisted with the most meager financial support? 
Bah." 

As Conant read the manuscript, he realized it was an accurate representation of the 
facts as far as they were known. While not exactly common knowledge, Conant was 
aware that a great deal of information about uranium had been leaking out in scientific 
conferences and journals over the past year. His brother-in-law could have easily 
picked up many of his ideas just from reading The New York Times, which had 
extensively covered the lecture appearances of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and 
his outspoken remarks about the destructive potential for fission. Even Newsweek had 
reported that atomic energy might create "an explosion that would make the forces of 
TNT or high-power bombs seem like firecrackers." For his part, Conant, an 
accomplished scientist who had been chairman of Harvard's Chemistry Department 
before becoming president of the university, was far from convinced atomic fission 
was anywhere near to being used as a military weapon. He was still inclined to believe 
the only imminent danger from fission was to some university laboratories. But he was 
not ready to dismiss it, either. 

Richards' story was disturbing, and if it cut as close to the bone as his novel had, it 
was potentially dangerous. There were too many familiar names for comfort, including 
an acquaintance "prominent in education circles" by the name of "Jim," which Conant 
must have read as a sly reference to himself. More troubling still, the physical 
description of Zmenov -- very short, round, and excitable -- matched that of the 
Hungarian refugee scientist Leo Szilard, who was known to be experimenting with 
uranium fission at Columbia University in New York. Szilard was always agitating within 
the scientific community about the importance of fission and had even formed his own 
association to solicit funds for his work. In a scene that rang especially true, Perkins 
arranges for Zmenov to meet a wealthy banker, and Zmenov is crestfallen when he 
does not pull out his checkbook. "Perhaps Zmenov thought all bankers were crazy to 
find something to sling their money into," Richards wrote in yet another thinly 
disguised account of Loomis' exploits. This time, Harvard's cautious president did not 
wait for Loomis to tell him that the story revealed too great a knowledge of high-level 
developments in the scientific world, and at the very moment external pressures were 
coming to a peak. Conant made sure the story was suppressed. 

Conant was too guarded to ever fully confide his doubts in anyone, but he expressed 
some of his reservations to his son, Ted, who was thirteen years old at the time. The 
boy had come across the story when going through the boxes of books and radio 
equipment Richards had left to him and insisted that it ought to be published 
according to the wishes of his beloved uncle. Anything short of that, he argued, "was 
censorship." The fierce row between father and son that followed was memorable 
because it was so rare. Conant was a calm, controlled man who rarely lost his temper. 
He was also coldly practical and not given to old-fashioned sentiment. His angry retort 
that Richards' story was "outlandish" and "unworthy of him," coupled with his 
uncharacteristic claim that "the family honor was at stake," suggested there was 
something more to his opposition than he was letting on. His son reluctantly let the 
matter drop. 

By the time Conant discovered Richards' manuscript, many of the events described in 
the story, although slightly distorted, had in fact already transpired. Szilard had 
befriended Richards and was regularly updating him on the work he was carrying on 
with the Italian ?migr? physicist Enrico Fermi, who had won a Nobel Prize and had 
recently joined the staff of Columbia University. After the French physicist Fr?d?ric 
Joliot-Curie published his findings on uranium fission, Fermi lost patience with Szilard's 
passion for secrecy and insisted that their recent experiments be published. In a hasty 
note to Richards on April 18, 1939, Szilard broke the news: 
Dear Richards: -- 
It has now been decided to let the papers come out in the next issue of Physical 
Review, and I wanted you to be informed of this fact. 

With kind regards, 
yours, 
[Leo Szilard]
As Richards cynically noted in his story, Szilard's interest in him was primarily as a link 
to private investors like Loomis, whom Szilard desperately wanted to bankroll the 
costly experiments he planned to do at Columbia University. At the same time, Szilard 
had been busy wooing other Wall Street investors, enticing them with the promise of 
cheap energy. In a letter to Lewis L. Strauss, a New York businessman interested in 
the atom's commercial potential, Szilard wrote tantalizingly of "a very sensational new 
development in nuclear physics" and predicted that fission "might make it possible to 
produce power by means of nuclear energy." At one point, Szilard arranged for himself 
and Fermi to have drinks at Strauss' apartment and asked Strauss to invite his wealthy 
acquaintance Lord Rothschild, but the two physicists could not persuade the English 
financier to underwrite their chain reaction research. Part of the problem was that 
while Szilard needed backers, he was desperately afraid Germany would realize 
fission's military potential first. He was obsessed with secrecy. He was determined to 
protect his discoveries and cloaked his project in so much mystery that he often 
appeared as "paranoid" as Richards portrayed him in his sharp caricature. After all his 
efforts to find private investors had met with failure, Szilard wrote to Richards on July 
9, 1939, pleading for money to prove "once and for all if a chain reaction can be 
made to work." His tone was urgent: 


Dear Richards: 
I tried to reach you at your home over the telephone, but you seemed to be away, and 
so I am sending this letter in the hope that it might be forwarded to you. You can best 
see the present state of affairs concerning our problem from a letter which I wrote to 
Mr. Strauss on July 3rd, a copy of which I am enclosing for your information and the 
information of your friends. Not until three days ago did I reach the conclusion that a 
large scale experiment ought to be started immediately and would have a good chance 
of success if we used about $35,000 worth of material, about half this sum 
representing uranium and the rest other ingredients...I am rather anxious to push this 
experiment as fast as possible...I would, of course, like to know whether there is a 
chance of getting outside funds if this is necessary to speed up the experiment, and if 
you have any opinion on the subject, please let me know. 
If you think a discussion of the matter would be of interest I shall of course be very 
pleased to take part in it...Please let me know in any case where I can get hold of you 
over the telephone and your postal address.

During the summer of 1939, Szilard and Fermi worked out the basis for the first 
successful chain reaction in a series of letters. Encouraged by their correspondence, 
but frustrated by his continued failure to enlist any financial support for his 
experiments, Szilard turned to his old mentor, Albert Einstein, for help. Einstein was 
sixty years old and famous, someone with enough stature to lend credibility to his 
cause. After meeting with Szilard and reviewing his calculations, Einstein was quickly 
persuaded that the government should be warned that an atomic bomb was a 
possibility and that the Nazis could not be allowed to build such an unimaginably 
powerful weapon. On August 2, Szilard drafted the final version of the letter Einstein 
had agreed to send to the president. Szilard called a part-time stenographer at 
Columbia named Janet Coatesworth and, speaking over the telephone in his thick 
Hungarian accent, dictated the letter to "F. D. Roosevelt, president of the United 
States," advising him that "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" could now be 
constructed. By the time Szilard read her the signature, "Yours very truly, Albert 
Einstein," he was fully aware that the young woman thought he was out of his mind. 
That incident, no doubt exaggerated in Szilard's gleeful retelling, bears close 
resemblance to a passage in Richards' story in which a young secretary comes to see 
Perkins and confides her concerns about Zmenov. "I'm afraid he's getting himself into 
the most dreadful trouble," she tells him. "You know how impetuous he is. He's a 
genius, and when other people don't see that, he gets impatient." 
Einstein's letter to Roosevelt would result in the convening of a government advisory 
committee to study the problem. Roosevelt appointed Lyman J. Briggs, director of the 
National Bureau of Standards, the government's bureaucratic physics laboratory, as 
chairman. On October 21, 1939, Szilard went to Washington and reported to the first 
meeting of the Briggs Advisory Committee on Uranium. He explained how his chain 
reaction theory worked and put in his usual plea for funds to conduct a large-scale 
experiment -- the same test he had been writing to Richards about for months. To 
Szilard's astonishment, the committee agreed to give him $6,000 for his uranium 
research. 

Even then, Szilard did not cease his efforts at fund-raising and kept up his letters and 
calls to promising prospects. Twelve days after the meeting in Washington, he sent a 
brief note to Richards and included an eight-page memorandum for his "personal 
information only," summing up his report to the Briggs committee. The memo laid out 
exactly how much uranium and graphite he and Fermi would need for their 
experiments, how much it would probably cost, and which companies could supply the 
materials -- a blueprint for building a bomb. "It seems advisable we should talk about 
these things in greater detail before you take up the matter with a third person..." 
Szilard was never able to pin down the elusive Loomis, who a f

Parents
RICHARDS Theodore William (31 Jan 1868 - 2 Apr 1928)
THAYER Miriam Stuart (30 Jun 1866 - Sep 1957)

Siblings
RICHARDS Grace Thayer ("Patty") (1 Feb 1898 - 31 Oct 1985)
RICHARDS William Theodore (24 Mar 1900 - 30 Jan 1940)
RICHARDS Greenough Thayer (17 Oct 1905 - 24 Nov 1953)

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