WALTER A. ROSENBLITH (1913-2002)

BY PAUL E. GRAY

WALTER ALTER ROSENBLITH served the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, National Academies, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of California at Los Angeles, and South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Fluent in several languages, he was widely known and respected in the international academic community. His pioneering research in psychophysics (also called “communication biophysics,” the term he preferred) led to important scientific and engineering discoveries. His service as chair of the faculty, associate provost, and provost at MIT played a significant role in transforming MIT into a science-based research university. Rosenblith died on May 1, 2002, at age 88.

Rosenblith was born in Vienna, Austria, on Sept. 21, 1913. His father, David Alexander Rosenblith, migrated to Vienna from Russia via Siberia to escape the pogroms and became a businessman in the food industry; his Viennese mother, Gabriele (nee Roth),² was a concert pianist. Rosenblith was exposed to classical performance — opera and ballet, in particular — from the age of 2.

For business reasons, the family moved to Berlin in 1924, where Rosenblith completed his public schooling and spent part of a semester at the University of Berlin. In the early 1930s they moved to Paris. Rosenblith spent a semester at the University of Lausanne and several semesters at the Sorbonne, studying mathematics, physics, psychology, and diplomatic history. He then enrolled at a technical school in Paris and later at the University of Bordeaux, where he earned a degree in communications engineering (Ing. Radiotélégraphiste) in 1936. He continued his studies at the École Supérieure d’Électricité, earning a second degree (Ing. Radioélectricien) in 1937.

When the Nazis annexed Austria and cancelled all Austrian passports, he became a stateless person resident in France, which made it very difficult to find employment. For a time, he worked at MGM in Paris to establish the proper acoustic environment for dubbing movies. In 1938 he was hired by an expert in occupational medicine, André Salmont of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, to assist in a study of the impact of high-noise industrial environments on workers’ hearing. After a year, Salmont asked him to travel to the United States to gather more data. As a stateless person, however, he had trouble securing travel documents.

Help came from a friend in the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Service who persuaded an officer at the American Embassy in Paris to grant him a temporary visa. Even though this document allowed for an extended stay, immigration officials in New York stamped his papers for one month only. He arrived only weeks before the opening salvo of World War II, when Germany invaded Poland. Rosenblith’s parents arrived in America as permanent immigrants shortly thereafter, and he helped them settle into their new lives in New York City.

Rosenblith could not secure paid employment because of his nonimmigrant status. For a year he did unpaid research in physics at the Bronx facility of New York University with Professor Richard Cox, measuring the velocity of the impulse that initiates voltage differentials in electric eels. In the summer of 1940 he continued his studies of the electric eel with a fellowship at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. That fall he moved to Los Angeles to assume a paid fellowship in physics at the University of California at Los Angeles where he published both the electric eel work and his data on noise and hearing.

At a meeting of the UCLA International Club, Rosenblith met Judy Olcott Francis, an undergraduate in psychology at UCLA. He invited her to a picnic in the desert with a group of his friends. They married in September 1941, the start of a six-decade partnership as intellectual soulmates.

Rosenblith became a teaching fellow at UCLA in the fall of 1941. In December, soon after the United States declared war, he was assigned to teach physics to Army and Navy officers. He resigned from the fellowship to focus on teaching military officers in 1942.

In 1943 Rosenblith became an assistant professor at the South Dakota School of Mines, teaching physics and electrical engineering to recruits and draftees under the Army Specialized Training Program.

His assignment to teach feedback control systems for fire control required him to go to the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT, the prime location for this new technology. He needed a security clearance, which was difficult for a noncitizen to obtain. He carried with him a letter from the governor of South Dakota to the head of the laboratory, Gordon Brown (NAE 1965), confirming that the School of Mines was a government-run institution and that Rosenblith’s participation in Brown’s program was essential to the war effort. Brown agreed and Rosenblith joined the next class.

When the training program ended (December 1944), enrollment at the School of Mines plummeted. Rosenblith became the Physics Department head and continued teaching many subjects. He was involved in planning for the return of students in greater numbers and laying the groundwork for hiring new faculty.

When the war ended, he traveled around the state visiting service clubs, colleges, high schools, and women’s and business groups, explaining some of the consequences and implications of atomic energy. He described this time, when he learned to connect with ordinary citizens, as “the Americanization of Walter Rosenblith.”³ He became a U.S. citizen while in South Dakota. The Rosenbliths — by now with two young children — were eager to move somewhere more welcoming to Jews, where his career could advance, and where Judy could enroll in a doctoral program. During a trip to New York to visit his father, who had suffered a serious heart attack, he took a side trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to follow up on an opportunity for Judy. By sheer chance he came across a sign for the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory —PAL, for short — at Harvard, where he introduced himself and spent the day with the lab’s director, Professor S. Smith (“Smitty”) Stevens. Stevens offered him a three-year appointment as a research fellow, later extended to four years. Judy was admitted to Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. In March 1947 the family drove cross-country to Cambridge, where Rosenblith lived and worked for the rest of his life.

At PAL, Rosenblith joined a group of distinguished experimental psychologists, biophysicists, and others working together in a creative, interdisciplinary environment. While his knowledge and expertise in electronic instrumentation were of immediate value, his involvement went far beyond the technology. Rosenblith was an author on 29 papers, and his interests shifted from his early work on the effects of noise on hearing toward psychophysics and the neurophysiology of hearing, specifically how sounds affect the brain; “I got sucked into the brain through the ear,” he once remarked.

Through his relationships with PAL scientists and in the Psychology Department, he got to know MIT’s internationally renowned Norbert Wiener, author of the seminal Cybernetics (John Wiley, 1948). Wiener organized and ran a supper seminar that met regularly at a restaurant near MIT. The dinner group included members of Harvard’s psychology group as well as representatives of many other disciplines. A number of MIT faculty —electrical engineers, acousticians, physicists, mathematicians, and linguists — also showed up regularly.

In the course of the Wiener seminars Rosenblith struck up a friendship with Jerome Wiesner (NAE 1966), director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). In 1951 when Rosenblith’s Harvard appointment ended, J.C.R Licklider (NAS) recommended him for a faculty appointment at MIT. Wiesner supported the suggestion and arranged laboratory space for him in RLE. MIT’s Electrical Engineering Department offered to appoint him associate professor of electrical engineering, but he asked instead for the title associate professor of communications biophysics. He was told that he would have to seek approval from Professor Francis Schmitt (NAS), head of the Biology Department. Schmitt queried Rosenblith about his plans and gave his approval but asked him, “Haven’t you come 200 years too early?”

While Rosenblith kept an office in the Electrical Engineering Department, he spent most of his time in RLE near his laboratory. He studied the electrical activity of the nervous system, using experiments in which sounds stimulated the brains of anesthetized hamsters and cats and became a pioneer in the application of early digital computers to biological research. The computer-based statistical models he developed in his study of the stochastic responses in the nervous system and brain became an important new tool in psychophysics.

He needed an anechoic chamber for his work and began by using the one in the Acoustics Laboratory. Other users of the chamber were unhappy about the smells and other related consequences of research using live animals, leading to the construction by RLE of a separate anechoic chamber for use by the communications biophysics group.

The mission of the RLE in the early years was described colloquially as the study of electronics “in a non-narrow sense,”⁴ which was perfectly suited to Rosenblith’s keen, wide-ranging interests and intellect. In fact, his interests predated by at least two decades the current strong coupling of engineering and the life sciences.

Together, Rosenblith and linguist Morris Halle (NAS) in the Department of Humanities created a new graduate subject: hearing, speech, and language, a precursor of the vibrant Department of Linguistics that would later bring Noam Chomsky (NAS), Roman Jakobson, and other top scholars in the field to MIT, via RLE.⁵

Rosenblith’s interdisciplinary research and teaching program was increasingly international with a growing cadre of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the RLE Communications Biophysics Laboratory (CBL). The Office of Scientific Research of the U.S. Air Force provided support for an international symposium on sensory communications that led him to tour Europe in the summer of 1958 to visit laboratories to identify symposium attendees. The 1959 symposium included 39 invited participants, of which 18 were from abroad. He edited the symposium proceedings and published the book Sensory Communications.⁶ His care in selecting participants and editing the papers resulted in a classic publication that was reprinted several times, influencing generations of students and scientists.

By the early 1960s many MIT engineering faculty were active in health-related research, often in collaboration with physicians and medical faculty in the Boston area. In May 1964 Gordon Brown (NAE 1965), MIT dean of engineering, asked Rosenblith to lead a committee to assess the projected space and laboratory needs and future faculty and research appointments of this emerging direction. 

Two years later, leadership at the NIH and the Office of Science and Technology Policy visited MIT to encourage the institute to establish a “new health care school,” motivated by congressional concerns including the growing impact of science and technology on health and medical care. Rosenblith was charged by MIT leadership with crafting a response. After extensive exploration and deliberations within MIT and beyond, Rosenblith recommended that MIT decline the offer. He concluded that the funding offered would be insufficient and that MIT “lacked a basic competence in the traditional emphases of medical education.” His recommendation was accepted.

Consideration of MIT’s possible role in medical education, however, continued, ultimately leading in 1977 to the creation of the Harvard Medical School-MIT inter-university Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), which sought “to apply the complementary strengths of both universities to the development of new kinds of physicians and other health professionals and to the application of modern science and technology to health and medical problems.”

In 1966 Rosenblith was elected to a two-year term as chair of the faculty at MIT. Significant changes in policies affecting undergraduate education occurred during his term, including the MIT-Wellesley College Exchange Program and Pass-No Credit grading for first-year undergraduates.

In the fall of 1968 Rosenblith became associate provost under Wiesner, just as protests against the war in Vietnam were increasing. He played a key role in ensuring that the rules of the faculty prevailed in key contentious and fractious faculty meetings and that MIT business moved forward effectively.

When Wiesner was elected president of MIT in 1971, one of his first acts was to name Rosenblith as provost, a position he held for nine years, until his (and Wiesner’s) retirement in 1980. He played a key role in the creation of the inter-institutional Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE); the wide-ranging interdisciplinary Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), a component of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; and the continuing development of HST.

In 1970 Rosenblith was elected a member of the newly formed Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering in 1973 and to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1976. With this third election he became only the fourth person honored by membership in all three branches of the National Academies. In 1975 he was appointed institute professor, the highest honor that MIT bestows on a faculty member. In 1988 the Engineering Academy of Japan elected him a foreign associate.

The assignments he undertook on behalf of the National Academies were manifold and diversified.⁷ From 1977 to 1986 he was a member of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, a group that led the way in renewing academic relations with China after the reopening of interactions between the U.S. and China. He served as foreign secretary of NAS beginning in 1982 and was involved in the creation of joint programs with other honorific societies. He established and maintained contacts with scientists in the Soviet Union, China, and developing countries. At the close of his term as foreign secretary he was appointed chair of the World Bank’s International Committee, working with a Chinese counterpart to aid in reestablishing the Chinese universities after the Cultural Revolution.

His passion for international engagement manifested in other roles as well, including providing leadership in key international meetings that considered critical issues in the links between the pure and the applied sciences; ethics and the social responsibility of science; and the need to involve scientists in issues of concern to society and to communicate science better to society, as well as the desire to work with a variety of partners from the social, engineering, and medical sciences.

Beginning during his service as MIT provost, Rosenblith assumed multiple public responsibilities. In 1973 he was appointed a founding trustee of the private foundation that annually awards the John and Alice Tyler Prize for environmental achievement, “the premier award for environmental science, environmental health and energy conferring great benefit upon mankind.” He helped arrange a permanent institutional home for the foundation at the University of Southern California.⁸

In 1980 he became a founding member of the Boston-based Health Effects Institute (HEI), an independent research institute funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the worldwide motor vehicle industry, focusing on the science of air pollution as it affects health. In 1998 HEI created the Walter A. Rosenblith New Investigator Award, which has been presented annually since 1999 “to bring new, creative investigators into active research on the health effects of air pollution. It will provide three years of funding for a small project relevant to HEI’s research interests to a new investigator with outstanding promise at the assistant professor or equivalent level.”⁹

In retirement Rosenblith continued working on studies and reports for the National Academies and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and traveled widely. Smitty Stevens once said of him: “For Walter, the most natural form of breathing is talking.” He was very good at listening as well; the accuracy of his predictions, invariably based on astute observation, was remarkable. In his mid-80s he began a biography of his best friend, Jerry Wiesner, completed posthumously by his wife, Judy, and published as Jerry Wiesner: Scientist, Statesman, Humanist (MIT Press, 2003).

In 1994 MIT created the Walter A. Rosenblith Professorship in Neuroscience. Four years later MIT established Rosenblith graduate fellowships shared among its five schools, in recognition of the breadth and depth of his accomplishments.

In 1999 he was awarded the Okawa Prize of Japan “for outstanding and pioneering contributions to the progress of biomedical engineering, especially the use of ‘on line’ computer analysis of brain activity, and to auditory biophysics as well as to the promotion of international scientific cooperation.”¹⁰

At the time of Rosenblith’s passing, he had witnessed two world wars, several regional conflicts, the Great Depression, the blossoming of research at American universities, and remarkable advances in science and technology, including the transformation of MIT from the premier engineering school to a science-based research university. An inspiring, vigorous teacher, he was a willing, helpful mentor to junior colleagues, a distinguished contributor to the field of communication biophysics, a wise adviser to universities and organizations around the world, and a splendid friend. We who had the good fortune to work with him at MIT are but a small fraction of those who benefited from his friendship, his collegiality, his extraordinary breadth of intellect and experience, and his highly productive life.

Acknowledgement

I am indebted to Elizabeth Andrews and Nora Murphy of the MIT Archives and Special Collections for their generous help in locating source materials.

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Adapted with permission from Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (available online at www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/). The NAS memoir includes some additional details, citations, and a selected bibliography.
² This tribute draws extensively on an oral history created in 2000: MIT archives, Walter A. Rosenblith, MC55, Box 7.
³ Oral history, session 1, p. 39.
⁴ Rosenblith WA. 1961. Sensory Communication. MIT Press and John Wiley.
⁵ MIT archives, Rosenblith paper, MC55, Box 8.
⁶ MIT archives, Office of the Provost, AC7, Box 45.
⁷ Private letter from Frank Press, former president of NAS, March 2010.
⁸ www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/tylerprize/
⁹ www.healtheffects.org/rosenblith.html
¹⁰ www.okawa-foundation.or.jp/en/activities/prize/list.html