A Culture of Innovation Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN

Chapter 1. Founding a Culture of Engineering Creativity [7]
and by 1955 we occupied the entire Eliot Street building. In 1956, we boasted 50
full-time employees plus several part-time employees or consultants. We moved into
an existing building at 50 Moulton Street in Cambridge in 1957 and added a two-story
building adjacent to it in 1959. Figure 1.3 showsLabate andNewmanatthe 1959
groundbreaking for our Moulton Street addition; Figure 1.4 is arecent photo ofthat
facility’s entrance.
Figure 1.2. The home of BBN in 1953: 16 Eliot Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
(Photo from author’s personal collection.)
Jordan Baruch and Sam Labate had been with usonapart-time basis almost from
the day the company was formed and were admitted to partnership in January 1952.
Jordan Baruch was the most brilliant of my students. He had come to MIT to be an
electrical engineer and was a straight-A student. He had taken my acoustics course in
1948, the second year that Itaught it.Jordan was one of 160 in the class. He was quick
to understand what Iwas teachingandaskedsomany questions that, after aweekor
so, I suggested that he yield more time to others.
Jordan wanted to do a joint-department research project, and he was told that this
was only possible in the acoustics laboratory. He elected to have athesis committee
from the departments of electrical engineering, physics, and mechanical engineering.
Jordan’s father was not well off and Jordan needed financial assistance if he were to
continue for adoctorate. I arranged for him to receive the Celotex Fellowship one
year and the Armstrong Cork Fellowship another year, or two years. He went on to
receive his doctorate in 1950. His thesis wasoninstrumentation for measuring the
transmission of sound through panels.
Jordan had what I would call a photographic memory. For example, at BBN he read
a five-volume set of military procurement books in just a few days, yet ably referred to