Interview with Walter Rosenblith by Eden Miller Marstons ... · childhood. Where were you born? WR: I was born in Vienna in 1913. That was before the First World War had broken out,

Rosenblith - Session 1 - Page 1

Interview with Walter Rosenblith by Eden Miller Marstons Mills, Massachusetts Session 1 - July 10, 2000 TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE EM: Today is July 10, 2000. My name is Eden Miller, and I am in the home of Walter

Rosenblith in Marstons Mills, on Cape Cod, where I will be speaking with Walter and

his wife, Judy. Walter Rosenblith began his career at MIT in 1951 as an associate

professor in electrical engineering and eventually became provost of the university

before retiring in 1980. Today we will be speaking about Walter's pre-MIT years and

his recollections while at the university. Let's start off simple. Let's talk about your

childhood. Where were you born?

WR: I was born in Vienna in 1913. That was before the First World War had broken out,

and I think my childhood -- there were some events that were rather unusual that had

an influence over my whole life. My father had come from Russia, and my mother

was Viennese. He had come because he had been fighting the pogroms in the

Ukraine and had to leave the country. As a matter of fact, he first went to Siberia --

he was sent to Siberia. After he left the country, he came to Austria -- came to

Vienna -- and he had to support himself. He was basically a student. He supported

himself in a variety of ways. He went to the horse races on Sundays and would

describe the fashions that ladies wore as if he had the competence in it to Vogue. He

also became very quickly an opera fan, and whether it was because of that -- my

mother was a student at the conservatory to be a concert pianist. He lived nearby and

I guess her parents invited him for meals because he looked like a poor student. And

they got married. And as time went on -- he was of course not a citizen at that time --

but after I had been born he had to find what he thought in the temper of the times a

real job. And so he got into a business that had to do with sausages -- the casings (the

real ones). And he knew languages and was able to help the business to get good

connections with the countries where these casings were available. And the fact is

that there was a problem that each time when he came back from business he smelled


like his sausages. (JR - the sausages or the casings?) The casings, and he was very

touchy about that, as you can imagine. Anyway, as time went on, not very long, but

he had become an opera fan and so, given the fact that my mother was musically

absorbed, they took me to the opera when I was two. Not only to ballet, but they took

me to real operas. And when I learned how to read, I didn't have great subtlety. Now

many of these things that I'm telling you really come from what my parents told me

about my childhood. It's not so that I can really say…. I loved opera too, and I

thought I could sing, but the neighbors were not greatly enthusiastic about this

because I was not subtle enough. There were the libretti and then there were scenic

instructions and I considered that as part of the opera and I sang that too. (laughter)

But that leads to one of the early career plans I had -- to be an opera conductor.

Needless to say, I didn't do that. The other thing, I don't really know how that came

about, but my father told me about the sky, and I got interested in what one would

call primitive astronomy. And I was so interested that my parents considered buying

me a telescope, but the landlord wouldn't allow it. So this was a career that was also

bypassed. (JR: Was that in Berlin or Vienna?) Vienna.

EM: Why wouldn't the landlord allow a telescope?

JR: [?] his roof.

WR: And for people who were obviously not trained -- I don't know whether he felt that

my father was really not a Viennese -- you know, immigrants everywhere [are

suspect]. But out of this I got an interest in numbers. And at age -- I can't remember

any more -- three or four I was able to calculate the number of seconds in a year.

That of course made me a kind of wunderkind, and I was shown off that way. And

that led me to be not particularly modest, but it put me into the direction of

mathematics and quantitative things at a very early age. Now my parents thought that

the schools where we lived were not too good so they instructed me [at home] in the

first year.


That I think are some of the influences that I remember from my childhood. Again,

it's second- or third-hand. When we are upstairs you will see -- my parents wanted

me, for reasons that I couldn't understand but when I saw the guests we had this

weekend -- they were people from Turkey who brought along a nine-months-old

baby, and that baby is ready for being painted -- so they wanted me to be painted, but

I was five or six years old, and you will see a a painting upstairs. But the painter,

who was a friend of my father's, said he wouldn't paint me unless he could also paint

my mother. So you'll see it upstairs -- it's something that we have obviously kept and

it is a stunning picture.

So this is the way it started, and then I went to school in what is undoubtedly a public

school, and I did rather well in school.

EM: Is this still in Vienna?

WR: Still in Vienna. In Vienna, of course, there was the First World War, and once we

even heard planes flying overhead, and that was a frightening experience. Everybody

had to go down to the cellar, and so on. We stayed in Vienna, and towards the end of

the war – also you can see a picture of my uncle -- my uncle was a person who was

responsible for the provision of foods to the city -- to bring the food in from the

countryside. How these Russian-Ukrainian boys got that job, I don't know

(laughter), but they did.

My mother tried to get me to play the piano. She tried seven times, and I just

wouldn't practice. So she gave up. But when my brother was born, who is younger

than I am, obviously, he was wise and he picked the violin (JR: At four) at four. And

he gave his first public concert, obviously to a group of friends, when he was six, and

he has been a superb violinist all his life. But we'll leave it there in terms of

childhood influences.


I didn't do any active music, but I have always had a great interest in music, opera,

and so on, and my [interest in] acoustics undoubtedly stems back to that, and the

mathematics -- I remember that in what would have been grammar school, I knew

how to factor numbers into prime numbers, and so people always thought that I might

go in that direction. And then the other thing was that I was never shy in terms as

talking, as you can now see. And so people said, well, he'll be a lawyer. I never have

touched the law, but I've used the abilities of my tongue, I guess, together with my

brain.

JR: You ought to also mention how your uncle died.

WR: Yes. At the end of the First World War, there was a famous grippe epidemic (flu) -- I

think it was known as the Spanish Grippe in Austria. Somewhere else, it was

undoubtedly a different country. He got the Spanish Grippe and he got pneumonia,

and people didn't know what to do, and he died. He was a great influence on me. He

was sort of anarchistic, and he said if you go somewhere (And that goes back to

what you [JR] said.) You don't have to take off your hat. You are just as good as the

other people. So he was a rebel in that respect. And I have over the years been less

and less of a rebel. Maybe I have been a rebel in the sense that I couldn't select a

single discipline to stick with it. (To JR: Is that what you had in mind? You only

knew the stories about him though.) But the stories about him -- he was an influence

in our house. Also, my father's stepmother, I guess, was a very orthodox Jew, and our

house was not kosher because my father was secular in his outlook and my mother

didn't know what kosher meant practically. Her family had never been. So the

interesting image of this was that the stepmother of my father, who was disliked by

the whole house, built walls of bricks so that the steam from what my mother was

cooking should not go over to her. It was a kind of naivete that accompanies that

kind of orthodoxy.

EM: How did you end up going to school in France?


WR: Oh, not so fast lady! I think the business that my father was in after the First World

War was disorganized by the war, and he, having been involved in the defense of

Jews against pogroms before coming to Austria, published a Yiddish newspaper in

Vienna. There were many refugees from Russia and from Poland who read only

Yiddish. And that took more and more of his time. I mean he spoke Yiddish, and I

was taught Yiddish -- can't speak it any more, I can barely read a few things. He was

also involved when after the First World War the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke

apart and Austria became a republic, and he knew the social democrats there. So he

could see that there wasn't much possibility of, shall we say, doing something that he

wanted to -- I mean he was always interested in making things progress -- maybe you

would say, enlarge -- and Austria was not the best framework for that. So he found

somehow -- and the details of that I can't remember -- but he somehow was invited to

become what you would call the second-in-command of a company in Berlin. So in

1924 we moved to Berlin. And so all of my high school education I had in Berlin. It

was only the primary school part in Vienna.

In Berlin he did all sorts of things. I think there must have been some venture

capitalist who sort of saw his desire to do big things and among other things he was --

after he had had success in other things -- people used him for his financial talents.

Some of the movie directors -- I remember that there was a café house, as it is called,

in Berlin -- das Romanishe Café -- where the intellectuals got together in the evening

and they talked about everything, and I remember that one of the movies that he was

involved in a very peripheral way -- nothing to do with the movie as such -- was

Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang, who was the great director. But again, he took me to the

Romanische Café so that I was exposed to all kinds of intellectuals. And for a young

boy this was not very kind[?]. So we went to Berlin, and we stayed in Berlin until I

finished High School. And you heard last night that I couldn't make a choice between

all these things. And then he had a good nose for the fact that Hitler was going to

come to power. So he transposed some of his business to Paris. But before that we

spent a period in Berlin where the Nazis were already very strong. I had been elected

by the high school, by my classmates, three times president of the school. I mean this


was a period I think still as an aftermath of what had happened in World War I where

all kinds of people broke out of past molds and for instance as president of the school,

I went to visit other schools and see how their curricular were put -- besides I was a

good chess player, so.… and a good ping pong player -- so I had a kind of, not just

the school I went to, but I had an acquaintance with quite a lot of the Berlin high

schools, and I spent half a semester at the University of Berlin, but my father was

already in Paris. And then I went for a semester to the University of Lausanne, and

then we came to Paris

In Paris, of course, the school systems of the two countries were not meshed very

much. They are still trying in the European Union how to mesh these things together.

And when I came to Paris I spent several semesters at the Sorbonne, and then I

realized that as a non-citizen I wouldn't be able to work because people only who

were citizens could be paid for work. So I asked myself, what else could I do. And so

I went first to a rather primitive engineering school. And of course the French were

very influenced by what happened in the Spanish Civil War, and so a friend of mine

had gone to the University of Bordeaux and recommended that I might go there and

maybe there it would be easier to find a job.

EM: What had you been studying at the Sorbonne?

WR: At the Sorbonne, again, I had mathematics and physics and diplomatic history from a

man who had been involved the Versailles business, and -- I don't think I had any

biology -- and psychology with Wallon. There were many refugees at that time in

Paris, and so there was a refugee community again. There were certain cafés on the

Montmartre where people got together in the evening and obviously talked about

what a horrible man Hitler was, and so on, but the refugee community did not really

integrate with the French. My father had problems with his health -- trouble with his

gall bladder -- and finally got a good physician who really saved him. (In some sense,

it reminds me of Dr. Black.1 Nobody else had succeeded.) That physician later on

1 Dr. Black installed the shunt that reversed Walter’s downhill spiral. JR.


turned out to be the physician of Charles de Gaulle. And that physician also had

connections all over Paris. And connections in the country when you are an

immigrant are terribly important. So he said to my father, who was looking for

something that I could do, well, your son has studied engineering. And after the

engineering I passed with such grades in Bordeaux that they accepted me into what

was known as the Ecole Superieure d'Electricite, which is what the French used to

call grandes écoles. I read last night in the New York Times that these grandes

écoles are now falling apart. It's a very different period, obviously.

Ater that I went to the office of MGM in Paris where they were dubbing movies. [ I

was sitting in a room and then they called in people to be interviewed by the director

of that office, and finally I was called in. They had assumed that I was there in order

to try out for a voice, and it was Clark Gable that they wanted me to do. And I said,

that's not my business. I came here to be an engineer. And then they recognized the

mistake -- I was no Clark Gable.]2 (laughter) So they hired me to help them dub

movies. Dubbing is quite an elaborate process -- you must create the same acoustic

environment, you see, and that's again a connection to acoustics -- and they hired me

to help with the acoustic environment in the dubbing process. And for a while I did

that there, and finally I found -- (JR: Before you go to "finally you found," you didn't

say anything about your experiences as a student at the Ecole Superieure.)

Yes. At the Ecole Superieure, this was a period in which the government in France

was not on good terms with the military. The Ecole Superieure had mainly military

officers, and the military officers that they had were men of a certain rank, not

Lieutenant Commanders necessarily -- but they had their tech sergeants with them

who did the experiments. Well, I had no tech sergeants -- I did them myself. So it

turned out that I was among the best of the students there, and at the end of the year --

that was the year when the British king abdicated because of his affair with Mrs.

Simpson, and that was also the evening of the ball at the Ecole Superieure

d'Electricite. Now I had a British date whom I had met among the various

2 Edited by JR to clarify.


international groupings of students that existed. And she was crying. But when we

came to the ball, the people who ran the school and the ball said, the military don't

want to do that; would you be kind enough to watch the president -- the president of

France -- he likes to drink too much. So I had the job of trying to push him away from

the bottle. So I always remember when the king abdicated. That showed how later on

the military in France were certainly a very reactionary group and wouldn't let the

Popular Front be. And relationships with Spain were very much influenced by that.

EB: What was the ratio of students who had tech sergeants versus students who weren't

citizens?

WR: Well, the whole thing was not a big thing. There were no other non-citizens. Matter

of fact, when the Austrian -- that was still in '36, '37 -- there was a world's fair in

Paris and somehow the Austrian ambassador invited me. At that time Austria was not

yet under Hitler. He came and said, I hear that you have been admitted -- somehow,

how he did, undoubtedly by devious means -- that you have been admitted to the

Ecole Superieure so keep your eyes open. We might find useful the information that

you learn there. So I was invited by the Austrian ambassador to be a minor spy,

which I didn't take to. But it was interesting in the sense that -- you asked what the

ratio was -- there was no other foreigner there. They thought that Austria and the fact

that I had excellent grades let me in. In general, you enter these Ecoles Superieures

by concours (by tests). But since my grades in Bordeaux had been so good, they said

I could enter that way direct. They were maybe thirty students altogether. There

were a few French civilians, and then there were about maybe half a dozen French

civilians, then there were about.…[lost at end of tape]

TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO

WR: The thing that one should remember is that it was then -- after Ecole Superieure and

after the episode with MGM -- that somehow again there was a contact to a professor

at a quasi-medical school -- it was somewhat different than a straight medical school -

- who had heard about what I could do and as a physician who was interested in what


we would call occupational medicine. He found out that I could deal with the kind of

electronic equipment that existed then, which he couldn't. (It was like people now at a

certain age can't do computers.) And he was interested in what was happening to

people who were exposed to very loud noise. So I got a job with him. It wasn't a very

good job, but it was the only thing that I could get, and I stayed with him I think

about a year. And then, his wife was American. He was French -- Dr. Salmon And

he was persuaded by his colleagues and maybe his wife that the Americans knew a lot

more about noise than the French did, and why didn't he send me, since I spoke

presumably some English, to the United States to see what they were doing here.

Now the problem -- there were quite a few problems -- there was the problem of how

would I get what we would call today a visitor's visa, especially since the French did

not recognize -- that was already after Hitler had occupied Austria -- at that time I had

to make a choice -- whether I wanted to be German or I wanted to be ex-Austrian,

which the French recognized as a category. I had said ex-Austrian, but the United

States did not have that category. So the question came, how would I get this visa.

And that's where the HIAS came in, which was a Hebrew -- I think you have that

somewhere (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Service). Incidentally, the guy in the HIAS who

made the connection for me at the American embassy in Paris is the uncle of

Professor Smullin. So there is an MIT connection there, though I didn’t know it then.

Anyway, I got the visa. The man who at that time was the visa person at the

American embassy was Murphy. (Later on during the war he was involved as the

American sort of diplomatic connection to North Africa, and later on became an

important diplomat in this country.) My plan was to come for a couple of months

here to the United States and then go back to France. (JR: Say why.) Because I was

going to get married to a young French woman, Nicole De Barry She came from a

diplomatic family -- we made contact undoubtedly through a student organization.

And my parents didn't like the idea whatsoever because she was small, not Jewish,

and they thought that she was going to be sickly.

JR: The objection to being small is very funny because Walter's mother was four-foot-

maybe-eleven, and his father was five-foot-three. But she was small and thin.


WR: So I sort of broke up with my parents. My father at that time felt very much like

emigrating from France because he thought that France would be taken over by Hitler

too. He had a good nose for these things. And so it was difficult for me to get a

temporary visa when at the same time my parents and my brother were trying to get

bona fide emigration visas for this country. And you might tell that part of the story.

JR: Why?

WR: Because I have probably by now…

JR: Well, he did plan the timing of this trip to be here when his parents would come

because he had more English than any of them did, so that he could help them settle

in -- even if he had broken with them. And so this made the whole issue of his

temporary visa and their permanent one extremely complicated. When he finally got

his temporary visa in France, it was I think stamped for two years. And the minute he

got to this country, they said, ex-Austrian? There's no such thing. No nationality.

Two years? -- ridiculous. Two months.

WR: Yes. So the first problem that I had -- I mean I really wanted to only spend a couple

of months partly because of the family of Nicole Du Barry, who being a not very rich

but very French family, said that people don't get married during the summer. They

have to wait for the fall so that people are back in town. So that's why we postponed

that marriage. And then the war came in between. And here I was on a temporary

visa, and I had to try to somehow make connections to get that visa prolonged.

EM: So it was partly by coincidence that you ended up in America?

WR: That's correct -- by luck. And you might say something about Nicole.


JR: Well, you have to say first that the French wouldn't let you go back. You tried to go

back.

WR: The French said, if you go back, we'll put you into a camp.

JR: So he had no choice in the matter at that point. And he also, for financial reasons

because he was no longer being paid by his French professor, had to live with his

parents, who were happy that he couldn't go back and get married. So he had all the

business of dealing with the visa, living in what was for him a very unpleasant

environment at that time, and at the same time nevertheless trying to be of some

assistance to his parents. And like in France, on temporary visas, you can't work and

earn money. So you can tell what you did next.

WR: Well, what I did -- I went around to various places in order to get fellowships.

JR: You went originally looking for just what you could do. You didn't know about

fellowships then.

WR: Somebody told me about fellowships because…

JR: That was after you were at NYU.

WR: Yes, but the fact is that I had had a fellowship originally, remember, from Cornell.

So I had the idea of fellowships. So I went to see the dean of engineering at

Columbia University.

EM: How did you get a fellowship from Cornell?

JR: It was earlier, and he didn't take it.

EM: This was after you were already in the United States?


WR: No, that was while we were in Paris. Somehow I got a fellowship, but I didn't even

have the money to go to America. But anyway -- I mean, you know, this is fairly

fuzzy in my memory about exact dates or causal relations -- but the fact was this one

memory of the dean of Columbia I will never forget. I went to see this man. I

explained my situation and asked, what about a fellowship, what advice can you give

me? He said, do you think Mr. Hitler is so bad? That was in 1939. And I couldn't

persuade him about that. All I wanted was a fellowship. So I went somewhere else,

and finally at New York University Uptown -- there are two, uptown and downtown -

- uptown there was a physics department that said, we will take you on for something

that would be called a dollar-a-year man. In other words, they didn't have the money

to pay me or they couldn't pay me, but if you take a symbolic dollar a year, that

would be possible.

EM: How do you live off of a dollar a year?

WR: I was living with my parents to some extent, and I ate at that time in the neighborhood

-- that was in the Bronx, near Fordham -- and at that time you could get a sandwich

for five cents. So it was still the after effects to some extent of the depression. So I

spent there some time at the physics department, and I worked with people who later

on were quite important in the Manhattan Project.

EM: Any names of people who…

WR: Huntoon, and others that I could name -- if I looked at some of the members of the

Academy.… I didn’t realize that he and others would become famous. New York

University wasn't a great university, but it was a place where they were willing to

take somebody on as a hand. But somehow there was a professor there, Richard Cox,

who worked on regular classical physics but also with electric eels. And the electric

eels have a history in physics -- Farraday started with electric eels -- these are fish

that live in the -- you probably know -- in the tropical waters, and they can deliver a


shock that sometimes goes to 600 volts. And he was working on that, and this is the

same field that Chagas3 was also in. So you see there's a connection there.4 And I

worked with Cox and the man who was the head of the Brooklyn aquarium where

they had some electric eels. The first study that I participated on was the question,

how does the electric impulse travel along the electric eel which gets up to six feet in

length. And there are other electric fish, but the electric eel is something special and

it had been studied in the history of it. So on the one hand I did that, and then I

published my data that I had taken on noise and deafness also. So I had two things

that I had produced in the first year as a refugee here. And the question was what

kind of a fellowship could I get. And it turned out that I got a fellowship at UCLA in

acoustics.

EM: What happened to your temporary visa for two months?

WR: Oh. We had again connections with somebody who was a congressman's secretary --

you know, the Jewish community has a variety of connections especially in that

situation -- and so we got this prolonged, first for a few months, and then I don't

remember for how long. But the war in the meanwhile changed the perception of

these things and so I got the prolongations and of course the idea was that eventually I

would be able to become a citizen. But when I went to UCLA -- as a foreigner one

couldn't get fellowships at that time. So I had a first-rate fellowship of $50 a month.

(JR: $45) $45, yes.

But that again was luck. Because the man who was the dean of the graduate school at

UCLA -- his field was acoustics, and so there was a connection there. That's I think

why I got the fellowship. So in the summer of 1940 I traveled by train three days to

Los Angeles. I got off the train, and I said I want to go to UCLA. Well, take a bus at

the Pershing Square. The bus took more than an hour since that's far out from the

center of LA, and I went there and tried to find a place to live. A couple who were

3 The Brazilian scientist who became head of the Papal Academy of Science. 4 I.e., Walter became a friend of Chagas who later had a (visiting) appointment at MIT. JR


members of the biology department at UCLA had one room to rent, and so I got that

room and then I became a fellow in the physics department at UCLA. And that was

in 1940 in September. And I worked through, and there, being a foreigner, I had

some interest in what was known as the International Club at UCLA. There were

quite a few foreigners there, and maybe my wife should take up from there.

JR: Well, by chance, which is always a big factor in life, I transferred from a small

undergraduate college to UCLA in 1940, and I was planning to graduate at UCLA

and go to Berkeley for graduate work in psychology, and I wanted to live at the

International House when I got to Berkeley, so I joined the International Club too.

EM: Why did you want to live in the International House?

JR: I think probably because my father, as a result of his experiences in World War I, was

a Francophile. He had always dreamed about sending me around the world on a tramp

steamer -- an unusual goal for a daughter, especially in those days. So I belonged to

the International Club at the small school, but we didn't have very many international

students. It was just an interest group there. But at UCLA it was more than that.

WR: But the fact, of course, is that the war -- even though the United States was not yet

involved in it -- created interests among students.

JR: Nevertheless, I would say that the minority of the members were Americans.

EM: So that's how you met?

WR: Well, there's a little more to the story. (laughter)

JR: The first real interaction that we ever had consisted of a young Austrian woman in the

club coming and asking me…


WR: A refugee.

JR: Yes. …coming and asking me if I would drive -- because I often could get my

mother's car -- Walter and his date to a dance the club was holding. And he was sort

of tagging behind her, and he said, no, no, no, and I said yes, yes, yes. Well, I didn't

drive them because I was in bed with pneumonia at the time, but not very long after

that he and some of his friends invited me on a picnic to the desert. And I think I

practically made up my mind then -- this man was for me. (laughter)

WR: Because of the food.

JR: Not very logically, they had said they would take care of the food, and there was not a

single thing that they had to eat on that picnic that I had ever eaten in my life before --

rye bread, kosher dill pickles, salami, Limburger cheese. (laughter)

WR: Well, you could probably fit in here where you were born and…

JR: I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and we were not Mormans.

EM: But your background isn't Jewish either.

JR: No. And my parents moved to the Los Angeles area when I was two. I grew up in

that area, the largest single place being Manhattan Beach, California. Went to

Occidental College for two years, from there to UCLA. Originally, starting way back

before high school days, I planned to be a medical doctor. I started working in a

doctor's office when I was fourteen and lived away from home to do so -- in a Jewish

family. And did it by commuting three hours a day when I was fifteen and kept that

up until after I knew Walter. Also, I had traveled much more than any other children,

especially in that depression era. Both because my father was a traveling salesman

and I traveled all over California with him, and because he took me to New York to a

reunion of the First Division of the Army when I was eight and then the summer I


was thirteen I met my aunt in Chicago and went to the World's Fair and spent the

summer in Pittsfield, where my dad had grown up. Then went to Washington and

New York, and back to LA. So I'd had a lot more exposure to other places and to my

father's hatred for the Germans and his love for the French.

EM: So by the time you met, you had both had extensive travel experience. How soon

after this fateful picnic did you two get married?

WR: Well, there's another story to this. For a long time when I lived with my parents in

the hotel I used to write every day to Nicole and it became clear that...

JR: …there never were any answers, and you didn't know what…

WR: Yes. And the war dragged on, and I think Judy, by practicing psychology, told me

that we would not be the same people after the war.

JR: That her experiences and yours during the war, if indeed she was alive at the end of

the war -- she was in the Resistance and he could have predicted that -- would have

been so very, very different, it was unlikely that they would be the same people. But

from the very beginning, he said this can't be anything serious because I'm engaged.

And I had to sort of work him out of that view. (laughter)

WR: Well, the real event was when we went looking for an apartment for a colleague of

mine at the university and myself.

JR: And I was at the same time looking for an apartment for my parents to move closer to

UCLA so that I could live at home and save expenses. And there were no dorms at

UCLA in those days. And when the realtor was out of the room, as we stood in one

apartment, I looked at him and I said, this is ridiculous. We ought to be looking for

an apartment for ourselves. As I said to my daughter when she asked, how did Daddy

propose? -- and that was a proposal of marriage in those days. (laughter) That was


August probably, and we got married in September. So from January to September

was the period in which we knew each other.

WR: And her parents weren't very happy about that either.

JR: My father was an anti-Semite.

EM: And your parents?

JR: They would have been against it but he didn't tell them till it was over, since they'd

been against the first engagement. (laughter)

WR: We sent a telegram: We have gotten married.

EM: So what did they say?

WR: Well…

JR: It's a mistake.

WR: It took quite a while to…

JR: I knew very well that as soon as my mother saw I was happy, she would accept our

marriage. I don't think my father ever accepted our marriage. He wouldn't tell me he

was an anti-Semite -- I know that from his other relatives -- but there was some of it

with my grandmother and my dad at home too, but he blamed it on economics. What

are we going to live on? And I had left my mother to tell him we were getting

married. He said he wouldn't come to our wedding, which I had arranged with a

friend of the family who was a judge in Manhattan Beach. Then my mother said

well, she wouldn't come if he wouldn't come. I finally persuaded her the morning we

were getting married that I could get my father there and she should go ahead and go


-- to the judge's house. I knew that my father was in Manhattan Beach visiting his

sister and niece (my cousin), and we stopped there on our way to the judge's house.

One of the big unifying factors in our family was a common dislike for my mother's

mother who lived with us a great part of the time. I said, you know I couldn't get

married at home because she would be there and I don't want my grandmother at my

wedding, and so forth. I got him to go to our wedding. But the pictures are of a very

grim looking pair of parents.

EM: But there was a set of parents t the wedding.

JR Yes. My parents were there and a young couple, and the boy who had the car to bring

Walter to pick me up and take us there. (laughter) That was the wedding party.

WR: Yes. So now we are married and we found an apartment not too far from UCLA and

we listened to the Symphony on Sunday, and that's the Sunday on which the Japanese

bombed Pearl Harbor. (December 7.) So of course the question of what would

happen to me was: was I going to be interned? And Judy had at that time the job…

JR: You had switched from your fellowship to being a teaching fellow -- $65 a month.

WR: Because of the war there were special groups of Navy and Army students, and I

taught physics.

JR: And I had an NYA job (National Youth Administration -- one of Franklin Roosevelt's

wonderful devices) -- 50 cents an hour working for an anthropology professor.

WR: In Indian languages.

JR: American Indian. Not that I knew the languages.

WR: But it was on an old typewriter, and when she came back, I had…


JR: For every hour I worked, he needed to massage me an hour. They'd cut the keys off

an old typewriter and welded phonetic symbols onto half of the key and then welded

the keys back on to the typewriter. So you had to [demonstrates pounding each key].

TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE

EM: Today is July 10, 2000. My name is Eden Miller, and I am in the home of Walter and

Judy Rosenblith in Marstons Mills, on Cape Cod, where we are continuing our

conversation about Walter's recollections while at MIT.

WR: …that we should say about Nicole that two years ago…Judy, you tell the story of the

luncheon.

JR: Well, I think we should specify that Walter's breaking his engagement and marrying

me did not spoil our friendship with his original fiancée. She did survive the war, she

had been interned several times, she was married and had had tuberculosis, but there

was a cure for it by then. Quite a while after the war Walter was giving a lecture

someplace and she and her husband turned up…

WR: -- in Marseilles --

JR: …in Marseilles. And after that we saw them whenever we were in Europe, and I saw

them if I was in Europe without Walter. Two years ago she came and visited --

stayed with us here at the Cape, and we were having a luncheon for some of Walter's

colleagues at MIT -- mostly from STS (Science, Technology, and Society) -- right

after she arrived practically, and we took her to it. And when I introduced her, I said

that she was the only person in the room who had known Walter longer than I had.

(laughter) Right now we keep in e-mail communication with her. We saw her when

we were in Paris on our way home from Tokyo.

EM: So your parents were wrong. She's not sickly.


JR: Well, she has health problems now, but she is after all -- well, our age.

WR: Okay. But I think that we had to put that semicolon at least on it. So where are we

now? We are still at UCLA.

EM: And you had just finished talking about the typewriters.

WR: Yes. And as things went along, my possibility of becoming a citizen went along too,

and the way this was set up at that time I would have to go through a process called

pre-examination in Washington at the State Department. After the State Department,

I would have to leave the country and re-immigrate. So we had to prepare the

procedure at the State Department.

JR: You could send letters and you could have witnesses. But it meant that poor graduate

students that we were, we had to cross the country to get to that hearing.

WR: During the war. That wasn't easy.

JR: On that trip was the first time I ever met my in-laws.

EM: What did you think? What was your initial reaction?

JR: They were cute. (laughter)

WR: She didn't always think that. But they were very -- by that time with all the things

that they had gone through, I think they had become very more rigid in some respects,

though in others, less so.

JR: I don't think your father was rigid.


WR: Well…

JR: Never mind.

WR: He certainly had the greatest variety. At the service for him the rabbi who spoke said,

here was this man who had known seven languages, had lived in all these countries,

and always had a good nose for what was happening. And Nicole, as a matter of fact,

also felt that way about him, at least in later years.

Anyway, shall we go back now to -- pre-examination. That was the procedure in

Washington. And her father had to write a letter for me. No matter how he felt, he

did it, and that was a hard thing.

JR: He said to me afterward, "But he does have ideas like some of those Commies."

WR: Her mother -- I think at that time that we had no difficulty -- even though I didn't like

her lamb roast. (laughter) And then…

JR: Well, you had to get approved at the pre-exam. You sit very much like in a

courtroom but with a whole row of judges across the top. There is a representative

from every department of the government asking the witnesses -- one by one, of

course -- questions about the character and the past and the beliefs and the this and

the that of the individual. It is a very awesome experience. And then if they approve

you, after that you go out of the country and they guarantee to the country that you go

to that they will let you back in here. And that's what the hearing amounts to.

WR: Yes. And after the hearing, we said that at UCLA, though I was a teaching fellow

now, that was nothing to be the top of the line. So he went after the hearing to the

National Academy of Sciences, and they were trying to find people who could teach

certain things in certain institutions -- colleges or universities. And, as a matter of

fact, we went there… You probably have a slightly better memory of it than I have.


JR: Well, they said that there was an assistant professorship at the South Dakota School

of Mines and Technology, where they desperately needed somebody with his kind of

electronic background to teach an Army group. And I said, Oh fine, we'll go through

Rapid City on our way back to Los Angeles. Well, it turns out you can't do that. The

train runs from Minneapolis to South Dakota, to Rapid City, it turns around and goes

back. It goes from Chicago to Rapid City, turns around and goes back. You can't get

through there by train. You would have to then change to a bus and go to someplace

in Wyoming, then change back to a train. We said, forget it, and went back to UCLA.

WR: Yes. But not long afterwards, we got letters and various attempts on the part of the

South Dakota School of Mines to persuade us to come. They told us that they even

had a concert series. Then we investigated about the question of what is the climate

in Rapid City from a meteorologist friend. Rapid City is an interesting place because

it is right outside the Black Hills and therefore its climate is quite different from the

eastern parts of the plains. In winter it is less cold, and in summer it is less hot. That

of course leads to the question of what did Judy's parents and doctor think about our

going there. That's your department.

JR: When I came home from our pre-examination trip, I was running a low-grade fever

every afternoon. And I went to my doctor about it, and they looked for this and that

and the other explanation, and didn't find one. They finally did a chest x-ray -- on an

armplate because it was wartime and you couldn't get the right x-ray plates or films.

And my doctor turned it over to her boss, for whom I had worked as a kid, who told

me I had a serious lung infection and that I should not go to South Dakota. And then

when I said I was going anyway and that it was a good place for lungs, he said I

should stay in bed all but one hour a day. So we moved off to a new job with a slight

social handicap. And I should take my temperature every hour and record it and

send it to him every week. (laughter)

EM: Did you really have to stay in bed?


JR: I did stay in bed more or less that way. We took our meals at a boarding house.

Walter shopped for whatever else we needed in the way of food and more or less

fixed whatever it was. But it got to be more and more embarrassing and we started

accepting invitations to go on jaunts into the Black Hills and things like that. And

then I discovered that my temperature would be lower when I came home from one of

those jaunts than it was when I was lying in bed. At which point, I went off to a local

doctor in Rapid City and asked for a complete physical. And he said, Why did you

come here? I told him. And he said, You're the healthiest specimen I've ever seen.

Go home and throw away your thermometer. (laughter) Then I said, You mean I can

have a baby? And he said, Anytime you want. So I went home and started looking

for a job so we could afford a baby because we had had to borrow the money to make

that trip to Washington. We had to pay that off first. And I worked first in a radio

station as a jack of all trades. I typed the bills, I wrote commercials, I read

Hollywood news on the air, and I had access to the restricted AP line that gave war

news hours before it was released to the public. And then I got a job teaching high

school. I'd applied for that earlier, and they said, Oh you're too young. You wouldn't

be able to keep discipline.

EM: How old were you?

JR: I was twenty-two. That was in the fall when the semester started. I was too young.

They had a teacher who bailed out and went to do something else and then they hired

the wife of the chairman of his (Walter’s) department, who had taught there earlier, to

come back. She quit because the students were giving her a nervous breakdown.

And so suddenly I had become old enough to teach these students. They had no

choices. By that time, I was pregnant. Some kid I think did me a very big favor. He

came up to me my first day in class and handed me his absence excuse for the

previous day. He looked at me and he said, How long are you going to stay? And I

said, I will be here through the end of the school year. I never had a discipline

problem with any of my classes. I had one student who needed psychiatric help, and


we had no such thing in Rapid City. But other than that, there were no discipline

problems.

EM: And how was your (WR’s) teaching?

WR: Before we came there, the chairman of the Department of Physics, who hired me, told

the Army Specialized Training Program that he was almost sure that, while I had an

accent, he was sure that I was not Jewish. And that I found later on, when I became

chairman of the department, in the files. And the irony of this was that most of these

boys who were there were Jewish boys from New York. And he wasn't aware of that.

But there was a lot of anti-Semitism and we found out in that…well, let's not jump

ahead.

But the teaching there went quite well. I taught at the beginning Army Specialized

Training Program people who had not finished their undergraduate degrees, and many

of them hadn't really gotten beyond high school But these were people who were

being trained for more or less technical things in the Army.

JR: Well, they were selected to be bright.

WR: Yes. But I taught twenty-nine hours a week. So even I didn't talk much when I got

home. Then came the Battle of the Bulge, and these young men were pulled out from

the program and were sent to various places in Europe. And I was left with a few

local students who weren't in the Army for some reason and taught them physics and

electrical engineering. But what happened is that before too long [after I arrived?]5

the Army Specialized Training Program had to teach fire control. And that of course

had to do with feedback mechanisms and all the rest. And MIT at that time had a

program for people who had to teach this at various places because MIT had a

laboratory that did this. So they sent me to MIT for that course, and the problem was

only that I was not a citizen and had no security clearance. So they got the governor

5 JR unsure of this chronology. Thinks fire control was there before reduced to locals.


of South Dakota to send a letter that since South Dakota School of Mines is a

government-run institution, that I needed to do that. That was interesting itself --

Gordon Brown, who was the man who ran that course, said, Well, if the governor

says so, this is equivalent to clearance. I mean, clearance wasn't a thing that was very

legally established yet -- and especially with a war on, if you had to do something,

somebody had to do it. And so I went to MIT, which was not the first time I had gone

to MIT. When I had been at NYU, I had a friend who invited me to -- I had gone to

Yale and then on the trip I had gone to Boston and I stayed in a single room on

Beacon Street. And I went and saw Harvard, and I saw also MIT, and it was clear to

me that MIT was a great long corridor. And I had no feeling for that. But after I had

had this course on fire control and so on, I got a different feeling about MIT. And

then we jump back to Rapid City, and you (JR) are looking for a job.

JR: Well, while we were in Rapid City and he was doing that teaching, we did have our

two children. And for the only time in my life I was active in women's organizations,

and he and I were both active in a playacting group run by the American Association

of University Women in town. And we built that up a lot in the time that we were

there.

Meanwhile, he had revised the curriculum of the school, he had hired a new teaching

staff for the physics department, and was ready to move on, and I was ready to move

back to school. And we were an unusual couple because I applied to graduate schools

in towns where it seemed likely he could find employment, instead of the other way

around. In the meantime, his father, who had had so many travails, had a heart attack,

so during the summer period he needed to go see his father because it wasn't clear

whether he was going to thoroughly recover from that. I had told him on the basis of

seeing all that prejudice in Rapid City -- a lot of it at the radio station, and also at the

boarding house where we ate until after our daughter was born. So I applied at Penn

and at Hopkins and one other, but I don't remember what the other one was. But I

wanted to do a study of prejudice before I went back to school.


EM: Can you say a bit more about the anti-Semitic feelings that you encountered while in

South Dakota?

JR: At the radio station a lot of it was just semi-dirty jokes. And I was too young to

answer back. I had never learned to do that, after all. It was more subtle at the

boarding house, which was mostly school teachers from the elementary and high

school -- one from college. And then the most clear-cut thing is a story that Walter

has to tell.

WR: Yes. But we should say that the anti-Semitism fits into the whole pattern of

prejudice.

JR: Yes. The fact is that there was a tremendous amount of prejudice against the Indians.

Well, there were Indians. There was a tremendous amount of prejudice against the

Blacks. There was not a single Black person who lived in the town.

WR: Only the Pullman porters.

JR: No, they didn't live there, they just went through. There was anti-Norwegian or

Swedish -- anti-Scandinavian prejudice…

WR: Anti-Finnish.

JR: And the anti-Scandinavian prejudice was like some of the things one heard about

Jews: Oh, they get in and they take over. So I wanted to expand on a study that had

been done by a Harvard professor and his students in the East on relationships and

life background factors in prejudice -- and to contact the professor for permission to

expand it to include American Indians and Scandinavians in South Dakota, not just

Rapid City, actually. As I said, I was a little on the young and naïve side in those

days, and so I asked Walter to stop at Harvard and get the professor's permission for


me to use and adapt his questionnaire. And he went to Harvard on his way home

from seeing his father…

WR: Yes. But I have still to tell the story that she asked about. During the summer when

there were no more programs with the armed services at South Dakota, the professors

had to do something in order to survive -- to earn money. And so we did a variety of

things like surveying the countryside, for which I had no competence, which

happened so often in my life. But I remember we shared a car to where we surveyed

the local creek. They, of course, had heard what the professor, the chairman of

physics, had said about me…

JR: …or may have…

WR: …or may have, yes. Anyway, there were people who spoke and said, Well, the only

thing that Hitler was right on was the Jews. And that was said to me, and then I said

to them, I am one. They couldn't believe it. Then after this, the guy who did this --

they grew victory gardens, and they brought us things from their garden.

JR: But he had first said, I'm sure Hitler's glad to have so many unpaid agents because I'm

sure he's not paying you. And that didn't phase them at all. Then finally, he said,

Well, I am Jewish.

WR: Yes.

JR: Now the general atmosphere is such that if you're in trouble, everyone is exceedingly

helpful. If you've got a flat tire, if you're stuck in the snow, if you've run out of gas…

You can't be there more than a few instants before someone stops to help you. So

you have this contrast of these very helpful people, but who hold very prejudiced

ideas but don't even recognize a Jew when they see one.

WR: There were six Jewish families in town.


JR: They did at least exist.

WR: With the Indian -- there is a big hotel in town -- the biggest hotel -- where the bar was

called The Indian Room and it said Indians and dogs not allowed. That is why I said

the whole culture of prejudice is not particularized in terms of -- I mean the Swedes,

the Scandinavians, the Finns they are drunkards, and so on -- they have stereotypes.

That's the niches for them.

Then while I was at the School of Mines, the bomb was dropped. And we had had an

alumni meeting -- of the alumni of the School of Mines -- just before the bomb was

dropped, and one of the guys there was bragging that all of you guys are doing

whatever for the war effort, but I am really working on something that will change the

world. And I had worked at NYU, I told you, with some of the people who later

worked on the Manhattan Project, so I came back and said to Judy, I have to read up

on this. So after the bomb was dropped -- less than a week afterwards -- I gave

lectures. And I gave lectures all around that area.

JR: Both in South Dakota and in Nebraska -- on what does the atomic bomb mean.

EM: Was it more from a science angle or from a political angle?

WR: It was at that time mainly from a science -- people had no idea what were atoms and

so on. But I also did some from a political angle because the man who was the

senator from South Dakota -- (Mundt) -- he belonged to the isolations.

JR: He belonged to the KKK!

WR: Yes. And so there were all kinds of aspects, and I really learned to [interact?] with a

lot of people. I talked to the Rotary Clubs, to the churches, and so on. And that made

me in some sense -- (we haven't talked about the fact that I went into Canada and


came back and became a citizen while we were in Rapid City), but that really was the

Americanization of Walter Rosenblith. South Dakota and the surrounding area and

the fact of talking to all kinds of people and trying to explain science to people who

had no background in that.

But also, later on, there was a group of scientists who got together to say we shouldn't

really drop any more. And they got in touch with me -- and to some extent it was

because on the trip to the pre-examination, we had stopped in Chicago (we didn't

know that Chicago had a top secret project) to see a friend of ours from UCLA who

worked there. We went there [the Fermi Lab] and said we would like to see him, and

people thought that maybe we wanted something secret. But all we wanted was to see

our friend Professor [Charles] Coryell. We were kept in the waiting room and Coryell

was brought out to see us there and not in private.

JR: Did Coryell later go to MIT? Yeh.

WR: Yes. So, you know, the scientific community at that time was much smaller than it is

today. So people knew each other. And we had met Coryell at UCLA and he knew

that I had been at NYU in physics before that.

Now, Judy said I stopped at Harvard, and the professor that I was supposed to talk to

about her prejudice studies wasn't there. His name was an interesting name because it

was Professor Boring.

JR: No, no, no. The one who was there…

WR: The one who was there was Boring. He is a famous historian of psychology and I had

seen his books at Judy's. So I went in -- [Gordon] Allport wasn't there but Boring

was. And I said, Professor Boring, I saw a truck downstairs and it was marked

"Psycho-acoustic Laboratory." What is that? So he says, “Young man, look out of

the window and recognize the ugliest building in the landscape. And go the basement


and you'll find the Psycho-acoustic Laboratory.” So I did. And the man who was the

director had not much to do that day [Walter’s inference], so he invited me in and I

spent the day with him. And then you can say what I said when I came back.

TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO

JR: So when Walter came home after his visit at Harvard, he said, Harvard is trying to

hire Dr. von Bekesy, a name that he was familiar with.

WR: The director of the Psycho-acoustic Laboratory had written a book called Hearing,

and I had studied that in connection with my studies.

JR: So when he got down to that basement, Professor S. Smith Stevens, known as Smitty,

spent the day with him. And Walter said, If they don't hire him, I wouldn't be

surprised if he would offer me a job. And ten days later he got a wire saying, Bekesy

coming, can you come too? So he looks at me with my graduate school applications,

and I said, Well, there are enough schools in Boston that I can certainly find a place

to go to graduate school. Meanwhile, I had gotten my courage up and written a letter

to Professor Allport, so in fact, when I applied to Harvard, I could arrive there with a

trunk with 800 questionnaires from eight schools in South Dakota, which I'm sure is

why I was allowed in when the pressure of ex-servicemen attending college was very

great.

WR: Well, so in March '47, we took our car on the road, and that was the first trek. We

took our two children, we took some luggage in the trunk and we sent the

questionnaires, and we drove from Rapid City to Boston. On the way we stopped in

Kansas, and we stopped in New York with my parents. Then we arrived on the 15th

of March, if I'm not mistaken…

JR: Which was the first time his parents had seen the grandchildren.

WR: Yes.


EM: How old were they?

JR: Nine months and eighteen months.

WR: You might tell the story about Sandy's[?] reaction to the man in Hannibal.

JR: On our way, we ate lunch one day in Hannibal, Missouri, and I got a different kind of

look at Roots of Prejudice, which was the title of the original article. It was late for

lunch in the hotel dining room of the Mark Twain Hotel, and the personnel were all

what we now call African-Americans. And our daughter looks and in her nice piping

little-girl voice says, Oh, who's that man with the dirty hands and face? Let's dive

under the table, folks. (laughter) A reaction repeated four months later when we

moved into an apartment -- an apartment? a quonset hut -- not quite (laughter) -- in

Cambridge, and there was a Black neighborhood boy along with the Harvard people

in the group there And I suggested that we ask him in to have some cake with us.

And my daughter said no. And I took her in the house and asked her why she was

saying no, and she said, Well, he has dirty hands and face, and his mother clearly

wouldn't be baking cakes for him.

EM: How old was she?

JR: She was two. I took my kids cross-country on the train one year without him

(Walter) -- California. When we came back and drove through the section of

Cambridge to pick up Daddy at work at the Psycho-acoustic Lab -- you go past

Rindge Tech and Cambridge Latin It was just when school was getting out, and my

son said, Look at all the Pullman porters. He was two then.

EM: So you had great fieldwork right in your own home. (laughter)


JR: So you may have to teach prejudice to children, but you sure don't have to teach

discrimination on the basis of physical features.

WR: Now we have arrived at Harvard, and they said that they would have housing for us.

But it turned out the only housing they had was forty-two miles away. Fort Devons --

at a fort that was no longer used. So we stayed there for a couple of months. Then

we moved into town into very temporary housing -- I have not only for ex-Austrians

for all the temporary things -- I mean my life has been a series of temporaries. And at

Harvard Dr. Bekesy arrived, and I went together with the associate director of the

laboratory to pick him up and bring him from Kennedy Airport and bring him to

Boston. At that time, he was very well known. He hadn't yet obtained his Nobel

Prize, but he was an interesting figure too and in some sense we have leaned a great

deal from our contact with him. When we talk about interesting people, which we

will do at the end, I think that he is one of the most interesting people we have

known.

EM: Why?

WR: Well, he was basically an engineer in the telephone part of the postal system in

Budapest, and he was interested in how do people understand what's being said in the

other room -- hearing through walls. And he got more and more interested in hearing

and the ear. And when he came to Harvard...

JR: Well, first he went to Sweden.

WR: Yes. He was invited to Stockholm when things looked bad in Hungary, so he went to

Stockholm and he had contact there with biophysicists mainly. But then when Smitty

Stevens brought him to Harvard, he hadn't really done anything there [i.e., in Sweden]

-- he had no equipment -- and he built it up over the years. But the first thing -- he

and I wrote together a paper about the history of theories of hearing. And that


certainly had a lot of working between us. For years I was the only coauthor he had

had, so I got a reputation of having worked with him.

JR: That was the first paper he had ever co-authored.

WR: So I think that's why I would put him among the extraordinary… I would also put

Smitty Stevens on…

JR: Well, certainly in terms of influence on us. Well, von Bekesy also was interesting

because he was the caricature of a caricature of a scientist. Complete sort of lone

wolf. We invited him to dinner not too long after he had come to Cambridge. He

came, he was a pleasant dinner companion, and when he left he said, “Please don't

invite me again. I don't spend my time going out to dinners.” (laughter)

WR: Needless to say, he was a bachelor. You might just finish up in Hawaii.

JR: Well, our contact with Bekesy extended beyond his period at Harvard or certainly our

periods at Harvard. He ultimately moved to the University of Hawaii, where the two

of us visited him at one time and where I was on sabbatical once in Hawaii and had

contact with him then.

WR: But I mean he was -- what Judy said about the caricature -- he didn't go to parties. He

just worked.

JR: And he was a fairly small, stoop-shouldered man always seen in a white coat.

WR: Also a man who was interested in art. And he went to places to give lectures if they

had a good museum.

JR: He could turn down people that didn’t.


WR: But the other thing is the story about the Rockefeller's art collector.

JR: He had a real reputation as a collector. Bakesy collected early Chinese and African

art. And someone who was in charge of collecting for the Rockefellers told an art

dealer one time, Don't be taken in by that... (laughter) because he frequently had

snatched up something they had their eye on.

WR: And he collected the art, and when he tried to show it to us, it was in his filing

cabinets, if you can imagine.

EM: So that's the scientist coming through?

WR: Well, I mean I just mentioned that name because it might be somebody I would

certainly want to mention among people who had a very different influence on me

and on Judy too.

JR: Not sure he had an influence on me, he was just a case study. (laughter) An

interesting one.

WR: Well, he went and picked Hawaii because he thought that captains from boats with

this art…

JR: …would have left things in Hawaii that he could get his hands on.

WR: And when the Psycho-acoustic Laboratory moved into another building and the

president of Harvard, who had no understanding for what Bekesy was doing, didn't

renew his appointment in some sense, and so Bekesy said he didn't want to move into

something new and build up a new laboratory. And he went to the place where

perhaps at least art was going to come to him.

JR: And he built up a new laboratory.


WR: Okay, so we are still at Harvard. And Harvard was certainly a place where I got

acquainted with the academic community of Boston. Perhaps there are two particular

features of that. The one thing is there were a lot of refugees from Europe in Boston,

and by that time Harvard was no longer a restricted environment. I mean, for a long

time Harvard had quotas.

EM: Quotas for who? For Jews?

WR: For Jews. On students and especially on faculty.

EM: And the motivation for these quotas was…?

WR: Well, that was the way the New England elite looked at it. I think…

JR: When I went, in 1957, to Brown University, they had one tenured woman and one

tenured Jew. No other tenured… and no tenured Blacks, of course.

WR: But in this country…

JR: …there has been change.

WR: But in this country I think prejudice -- not perhaps as bad as in South Dakota -- was

quite common. And it was the normal thing. I mean people didn't feel that they had

to apologize for it.

JR: It was much more subtle in New England than in South Dakota..

WR: Yes.

EM: Were you accepted at Harvard in this quota system?


WR: This was not a professorial appointment. I was a research associate with the

equivalent rank of associate professor.

JR: But as a four year and go away appointment.

WR: And, as a matter of fact, there were other people who did not fall into any of these

categories but this was a general formula, so that was acceptable. But at Harvard, as I

said, my contact with two groups -- especially the refugees who came from the

Vienna circle, which was a circle of people who had a positivist philosophy. They

came there and I quickly became a member of that circle. And that brought all kind

of science, all kinds of disciplines in. And the second thing was that I got into touch

with a man who at that time, at the end of the '40s, published a book called

Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener. And Norbert Wiener was a mathematician, who had

been a great mathematician, and Dirk Struik undoubtedly says a good deal about him.

But MIT -- the kind of mathematics that he did was too esoteric. And it was known

as a service department -- mathematics -- you see. Norbert Wiener's colleagues in

mathematics certainly recognized him, but it was only when he wrote this book,

Cybernetics, that he became a national -- an international figure. And he had the

Supper Seminar (in one of the things that you [EM] have probably read). I went to

that Supper Seminar, and I think that had a good deal to do -- most of the people were

not from MIT, but there were a large number. Maybe most of the people were from

MIT, and it met at the Smith House, a restaurant not far from MIT, in the evenings.

And people -- economists, all kind of… anthropologists, and so on -- came to talk

there. (JR: And Jerry Wiesner…) And Jerry Wiesner was a member of that too. So

that's perhaps where I had the greatest contact with… also with people from the

Harvard Medical School. So this again was a quite, how shall I say, catholic

exposure. In a sense, I think Norbert Wiener certainly is going to be among the

people that had a great influence on me. And it’s interesting because out of this there

have come not only scientific contacts, but also friendships. The difference between

Harvard and MIT, I think, is that MIT did not have -- MIT from the very beginning


had people internationally. There were lots of women who came from Japan, even at

the beginning.

EM: Define "lots of."

WR: I can't define it. That's not possible.

EM: Order of magnitude.

WR: MIT was a small school at that time. I don't really know. But the fact was that there

were people who were from the Orient. I mean you see a school that is mainly

science and engineering has a common language, which Harvard in terms of the

humanities does not have. So the people who came from various places…

JR: …from China…

WR: from China -- they fit in very much more naturally. The question is how good a

person is in that field. Today MIT has -- I don't know what the figures are -- but

certainly the number of Asian students is very large. If you go around MIT on

Sunday, you can see a lot of Asian students.

EM: Did MIT ever have quotas like Harvard?

WR: I don't believe so, but…

JR: They probably had anti-Semitism without quotas.

WR: Yes. But I'm not so sure about this. I have never talked to Killian about this. I'm

going to look at the Killian book6 -- you [EM] have seen it? -- whether there is

anything of that sort.

6 James Rhyne Killian, The Education of a College President: A Memoir (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).


JR: I don't think he would talk about it if there were.

WR: No. Because he belonged to that generation when that was implicit in some sense.

JR: But I think what you're really saying is that MIT is more based on a meritocracy…

WR: Yes.

JR: …than on the other kinds of labels that one can give to people.

WR: Categorizations, yes. I think that MIT also is very different from Harvard in terms

that it is much more a family. And there are many things that way, compared to

Harvard.

EM: A family in what sense?

WR: Well, people who are -- MIT has different periods, about which I know very little, but

when I came to MIT it's clear that Dr. Compton, who had been the president just

before Killian, started a series of things that former presidents started to live near

MIT. 100 Memorial Drive, top floor, has been where the presidents have lived and

where the chairman of the board has lived.

JR: More the chairman of the board. The president's house…

WR: But altogether, there is more of a family relationship.

JR: But when the president leaves the president's house, they often move to 100

Memorial Drive.


WR: I think the interesting thing about the family is still that I think it's easier in sciences

to recognize the fact that we all belong into something of the same sort, but in the

humanities, I think there are very often sharp discontinuities. But that's another thing

that ought to be studied. But MIT -- people are always amazed -- MIT has

humanities? MIT has history? MIT is the oldest architecture institution in the

country.

JR: Music.

WR: Music. Much of that was -- the architecture was long earlier, in the last century --

music came to a large extent after various refugees came.

JR: Art even more, I think, after the refugees. Music preceded them.

WR: Yes.

EM: How did the refugees bring art and music to MIT?

JR: Well, for example, the founding head of the Visual Arts Center at MIT is an artist by

the name of Kepes -- Hungarian -- who had belonged to the Bauhaus group in Berlin,

so this was in some sense an outgrowth of that. And the Center for Visual Arts grew

gradually in importance, and one of the influences on that was an idea you picked up

from Homi Baba in 1962…

WR: …in India…

JR: …he [WR] went to the inauguration of a building that Baba had been responsible for,

and Baba pointed out the art, and he pointed out that he designated a percentage of

the cost of the building for art. And Jerry [Wiesner] started doing that at MIT.

EM: Was this Homi Baba, the nuclear scientist, or Homi Baba the anthropologist?


WR: Homi Baba, the nuclear scientist. He invited me -- I don't know why -- we had never

met before -- but I gave four lectures at the inauguration of the Tata Institute. But I

think we are now sort of at a difficult period to structure things. So we have the

connection through those three -- the Viennese circle, and the connection through the

Wiener seminar, which after Harvard said, your time is up, I at that time had to look

various places. People suggested that I should go to the National Institutes of Health.

So I went down there and was interviewed by a man, a general, and I at that time had

a large beard. And as I came in, I introduced myself, and he said, "I'm General Such

and Such; I deloused Naples." (laughter) So I didn't feel very welcome there.

JR: On the other hand, when, probably due to Jerry Wiesner, he was hired at MIT, they

told him he could shave his beard off please. They had a beard already. Norbert

Wiener had a beard. (laughter) [Leo Beranek says he is the one who brought Walter

to MIT because of acoustics.]

EM: So there was a beard quota? (laughter)

WR: It's interesting. I felt very offended by the general…

JR: …but you accepted an offer at MIT.

WR: Yes. I was not very sensitive to that. I’ve had so many beards that it doesn't really

count. I even, the other day when I didn't shave -- and by the way, I don't shave right

now; I haven't for quite a while -- I felt that maybe I should try to grow one here.

JR: And a slightly fuller one than he has had. So we're experimenting with that.

(laughter)

WR: In some sense, beards have been an area of my experimentation.


EM: How long were you at Harvard?

WR: I was at Harvard from '47 to '51. And MIT -- I was not that happy because they

offered me a job without tenure.

JR: I'd forgotten that.

WR: Yes. And it took some time before I got tenure -- five years or something like that.

At Harvard I had colleagues who worked in the more physiological part of hearing,

and I had also colleagues who -- look, there was Galambos-- the others were mainly

psychophysicists

JR: Well, then visitors like Karl Pribram, Jerzy Rose, etc.

WR: Well, there were visitors who came in -- but Karl I brought in -- Karl. And Galambos

was basically the major figure vis a vis physiological studies at Harvard’s Psycho-

acoustic Lab. I think that I had my difficulties with Galambos because he had been

trained by Davis, and I was much more of the view that Smitty had. I mainly did

psychophysics at Harvard. But there were people whom I taught mathematics of a

sort that they never had had before -- […ian?] mathematics.

EM: Can you define what psychophysics is?

WR: Psychophysics is one of the oldest branches of psychology. Who would you

recognize as one?

JR: Wundt.

WR: Yes. But you know more about Wundt than I do.


JR: We're not going to talk about Wundt. I would define psychophysics -- and I had

nothing to do with it, so you're going to have to correct it -- as people

(psychophysicists) who study the relationship between an input and an output, in the

sense that how much change in the sound do you have to make in order to have it be

painful. But instead of just extremes, measuring various kinds of responses to the

stimulus, be it light or sound or what have you, and relating the strength of the

stimulus to the strength of the response.

WR: It is a kind of quasi-mathematical relationship, and very often it's a just noticeable

difference. And Smitty Stevens was probably the leading psychophysicist. So when

I came there, I absorbed that…

TAPE THREE, SIDE ONE

EM: This is July 10, 2000. This is Eden Miller speaking, and I am talking with Walter and

Judy Rosenblith in their home, and we're continuing our conversation about Walter's

days preceding MIT.

WR: Okay. So in the basement of Memorial Hall people got together at 1:00 o'clock for

lunch. And that lunch was known as Professor Boring's lunch. People argued all

kinds of things that had to do with what they were doing in terms of science, so one

learned again a great deal from that Boring lunch. And visitors, if they were judged

to be of sufficient interest, were brought into the Boring lunch. But there was also a

question of almost a quota of who was invited to the Boring lunch. Even though I

didn't have a professorial rank, the equivalent that I had brought me in there, and

Boring was a fair person. Boring was one of the people who in the history of

psychology recognized the contribution of Jews.

JR: And talked about the role of Jews in psychology.7

7 But also wrote letters of recommendation that dealt with the presence or absence of “Jewish” characteristics. JR


WR: So to be in Boring's lunch was somehow -- and Smitty Stevens, who was the director

of the place where all this took place left it to Professor Boring to be considered the

senior person.

JR: The lunch was actually, you should say, a combination of the psychology department

and the Psycho-acoustic Laboratory. Boring was the senior person in the department;

Smitty was the senior person in the laboratory. And Boring was senior in years to

Smitty.

WR: Yes. I think it only broke apart when Fred Skinner came.

JR: You still had the lunch, but it was more contentious.

WR: Yes.

EM: So the atmosphere of these lunches was always belligerent?

WR: No. It was discussion -- serious discussion. You weren't supposed to make small

talk. You had to have something that was substantive. And that was an interesting --

how shall I say -- exercise. Social relations went to the Faculty Club -- most of the

time to the Faculty Club.

JR: I don't think they did things jointly.

WR: (laughter) I see. We weren't just social.

Now what else do you want me to talk about? As you see, her memory is -- Oh, I

have never said that when Judy was graduating she wrote a thesis -- undergraduate

thesis -- on brain waves.

JR: EEG.


WR: EEG. And I had never heard about this, and she didn't get it done on time because we

had been awake all night -- a blackout in Los Angeles -- and so I typed it -- part of it.

That was the first time I had heard about brain waves. So when in Norbert Wiener's

seminar the brain wave issue came up, as to what mathematics would do for it -- later

on I tried to build, or have built, computers to study brain waves. That went back to

that period. That's part of the physiological history.

EM: Did you think of computers immediately?

WR: No. But in connection with Norbert Wiener I had a lot of exposure to that, and I think

when I came to MIT I gave a lecture on the 2nd of July, 1951, and I said I came to

MIT, grandiosely, to study how new electronic things like computers can be used in

the study of the senses. That was my agenda. Little did I know that it would take

quite a while. (laughter)

EM: If your time hadn't been up at Harvard, do you think you would have wanted to stay?

WR: I don't know. I didn't know enough about MIT at that time. I knew people like Jerry

Wiesner, who was my friend. But I don't know. And Judy certainly didn't encourage

me to stay at Harvard.

JR: I may have degrees from Harvard, but I have a profound dislike for it.

EM: Because of prejudice you encountered there, or because of other reasons?

JR: Oh, a lot of it because of prejudice. I was in social relations, although I took seminars

in psychology also, there was no female professor in the department -- either

untenured or tenured. Very, very briefly, for one year there was one woman who

later went to Wellesley. And there wasn't another woman even in an untenured slot

in the whole rest of the time I was there. At the same time you had women -- no, as a


matter of fact, there was one tenured woman in all of Harvard at that time, a professor

of astronomy -- and you had in various departments women who either had the title of

lecturer, and were never entitled to be on the tenure track, or women who were

research associates at various levels and ages, but who never could teach because they

weren't professors. I had been tuned in to discrimination against women at a very

early age, and it galled me. And then what I considered the great superiority complex

of the people at Harvard who were so sure they were better than anybody else in the

world galled me. And it galled me that I was a teaching fellow, but my title was

Teaching Fellow at Radcliffe. But most of the students that I supervised or graded

papers for were men at Harvard. So that whole complex of things left me extremely

unhappy with Harvard.

EM: Did you have any exposure to MIT at this time as well?

JR: No. Not really…

WR: Kurt Lewin?

JR: No. He moved to Michigan from MIT. I'd met social psychologists at meetings who

were from MIT. But they weren't part of my everyday environment.

WR: MIT didn't have a psychology department for a long time.

JR: They had a group of social psychologists who were very, very interesting during the

war. Kurt Lewin and various disciples and students of his, “Doc” Cartwright, and so

on. And I guess they were all in the Sloan School maybe -- well, it wasn't the Sloan

School yet.

WR: The economics department.


JR: So they were in a peripheral role at MIT, and they sort of moved en masse to

Michigan at some point.

WR: We have talked maybe too much about anti-Semitism. Samuelson, who's the first

American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. He got his doctor's degree at

Harvard and Harvard wouldn't pick him up because he was a Jew. So he came to

MIT, and made MIT's department the best in the world. MIT was less prejudiced,

much less.

JR: Yes, that's what I say, it was a meritocracy -- much more. And to some extent I found

that very famous professors were sometimes very petty people.

WR: Well, that isn't only at Harvard.

JR: But I don’t think I knew that before I was at Harvard. The professors that I had at

UCLA were not terribly famous. They also -- most of them weren't petty, though I

certainly knew some that were. And that was just different.

EM: So you received the job offer from MIT, and you decided to accept it?

WR: Yes. We had some problem about my title The job offer came from the Department

of Electrical Engineering, which was the only department which at that time was sort

of -- how shall we say -- something in which new units could be developed. What do

you call it for babies? Well, we'll get to the phrase…I don’t have it right now.

Anyway, when Professor Hazen, who was the chairman of the Department of

Electrical Engineering, said we'll make you an associate professor of electrical

engineering, I said no. I would like a title of professor of communications

biophysics. He said, Well, I can't give you that in electrical engineering. And he

said, There is some biophysicist already on this campus -- and it's Professor Schmitt

in biology, and you have to discuss with him whether he would accept such a title in

the electrical engineering department. I had known Schmitt from other things. So we


discussed this title and then, when I told him what I wanted to do, he said, Haven't

you come 200 years too early? (laughter) I will never forget that phrase. And fifteen

years later…

JR: I thought originally you asked for biophysics, and Frank (Schmitt) vetoed that, and

then you said communications biophysics and he accepted that.

WR: That's possible, honey. I don't remember. I remember the other phrase, Haven't you

come 200 years too early?

EM: Because of the interdisciplinary nature?

WR: Because I had no single thing that I was zeroing in on, and using the computer at that

time seemed crazy to biologists. And he was essentially a biochemist. And then he

had a brother who was a professor of electrical engineering somewhere else, so he

said, Why don't just take that? My brother is happy with it. I said, What he's trying

to do and what I'm trying to do is not the same thing. So that was the only, what you

might say, initial friction at MIT. But then the first thing at MIT was that I had four

offices. And about that, we'll talk the next time.

TAPE THREE, SIDE TWO

Not used

[End of session]

Documents

Interview with Walter Rosenblith by Eden Miller Marstons ... · childhood. Where were you born? WR: I was born in Vienna in 1913. That was before the First World War had broken out,