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Wednesday, November 4, 2009
MassTLC honoree Beranek traces a trail of tech and business achievement
MHT managing editor Rodney Brown on NECN: 22 tech companies give back to community
Flash Slideshow: Mass High Tech All-Stars Thought Leadership Roundtable
See video footage of the interview here.
Leo Beranek, one of the founders of BBN Technologies— recently acquired by Raytheon Co. —and a pioneer in the field of acoustics as an MIT professor and Boston television as a co-owner of WCVB-TV, Channel 5, will be presented with the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council Commonwealth Award for lifetime achievement on Thursday. Reflecting back through his business career, even as a youth in Iowa, Beranek, 95, shared his thoughts on technology, education and entrepreneurship with MassTLC chairman Steve O’Leary and Mass High Tech editor E. Douglas Banks recently.
O’LEARY: Is there any one element in your background that contributed to set you on the course for the achievements you’ve and success you’ve had?
BERANEK: Well, I suppose you have to look at your parents. I think my mother insisted even though there had been no history of that in the family that I go to college. Not quite true, she went to Iowa State Teacher’s College for two years and taught school and that’s probably why she urged that I should go. My father then did things that made my future what it is. First of all he bought the drums that I learned to play, and that helped me earn my way through college. He also bought a correspondence course on radio when I was in high school. From it learned to repair radios, and I had a radio repair business in my college years. So my parents were very important.
O’LEARY: Woven through your history are three recurring themes: innovation, entrepreneurship and a unique ability to connect with people. On the innovation front you describe how farm boys love to tinker. Would you recount for us your early interest in radio technology and how this influenced your life?
BERANEK: It’s sort of simple. My father in about 1924 came home with a Crosley one-tube radio. In those days you had to have a big antenna outside, so I had to string the antenna up, drive a ground stake into the ground and bring the cords in. Then I tried to learn how this little set worked, what made it go. This really developed my interest in radio, which was the basis that I went forward on up until the time that I got to Harvard.
O’LEARY: Your passion for music and particularly classical music takes a large part of your memoir, and obviously contributes to your career success in acoustics. Tell us about your interest in music and how this contributed to your business success?
BERANEK: Of course, my music started with playing the drums in high school and that’s something that I enjoyed very much, first in the band, and when I got to college I played in the college symphony. I played the tympani, and I took some lessons from a Chicago tympani player to become more proficient. When I got to Harvard I played in the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra. Then at BBN, some opportunities came to consult on concert halls, and the music and the business sort of combined.
O’LEARY: On entrepreneurship, your memoir recounts a remarkable series of entrepreneurial ventures. And these began at an early age and were really indicative of your ability to bootstrap your way not through through life. Can you tell us about some of your early ventures?
BERANEK: As a way to make some additional money while I was going to high school, I sold this Real Silk hosiery, even to my female teachers. They used to giggle when they’d buy their underwear from me. But that was an important start in my ability to meet people and to try to convince them to do things. Selling is obviously convincing people to do things. Then one of my big convincings was with the building committee at Cornell College. They were building a new dormitory, and radios of that time needed antennas. You couldn’t just sit them down and play. If you’re going to have 100 students, you couldn’t have 100 antennas. So I convinced them to put in a master antenna system. I learned that I could buy the components from RCA and as a college student, they had to take a gamble that I even knew what I was doing. But I put it in and it worked.
O’LEARY: How did you develop such an ability to connect with people?
BERANEK: Part of any person’s success is his ability to approach people and convince them that his point of view is worth considering. I never had much trouble with that, and this shows up all through my life where I’ve started things, people had to take me on the basis of what I said I might be able to do and I usually performed.
O’LEARY: You detail in your book the LP phonograph. You helped develop the pick-up arm, the tone arm, the small bookshelf speakers that we all have in our homes, and even the performance of military headsets during the war. How were you and your team so prolific in the creation of these new innovations?
BERANEK: Well, they didn’t look as though we were trying to be prolific. They came up one at a time and we did them.
O’LEARY: Could you talk a little bit about, let’s just say the LP phonograph?
BERANEK: Well, Professor Hunt was the inventor of that. He hired me as an assistant. I was in my second year of graduate school. So, he asked me to develop a loud speaker for demonstrating it. So I had an opportunity to see him think through the development of that pick-up. Of course I discussed with him various things when it needed damping and an improvement in tone quality.
O’LEARY: The speakers at the time were very large, and if I recall, you had large bass speakers and then you had treble speakers and they were all encased in these, almost room sized (cabinets).
BERANEK: I was teaching a course called acoustics, and I had a book which I wrote later called “Acoustics,” in which I brought forth new circuits, like the equivalent of electrical circuits today. That was the first time that anyone had put a circuit down that had the electrical, the mechanical and the acoustical thing in one electrical circuit. Two of my students decided to look at these circuits and see if they could make something different. They brought up this idea of an air suspension, and air suspension enabled them to get a high quality at a lower frequency in a small box. But the whole thing came from them looking at my circuits.
O’LEARY: From your role as a researcher and innovator in those years and from your years as a Harvard overseer, how can all of us make better use of the incredible resources of these universities in Boston to create new and innovative businesses?
BERANEK: First of all, the schools have to figure out how to recognize talent in their graduate students, and some graduate students should be given more leeway as you recognize their ability to do new and original things. Then, the school, after they give them their degrees and train them, should encourage them to start businesses. One reason Bolt, Beranek and Newman got started was (James) Killian, the president of MIT encouraged us to start the business. This is one reason that MIT has spawned so many new businesses.
But in addition, you’ve got to find money. You’ve got to have venture capital or bank support to get these businesses going. Without money they won’t go. So the venture capitalists have to get confidence that people that come to them from these universities are worthy of supporting. That’s why MIT has built up such a group of companies around it.
birth of bbn and hiring smart people
O’LEARY: So the reputation attracts the capital, and on top of that there is a climate where the professors and general management of the university encourage this. When you started Bolt, Beranek and Newman did you take external capital?
BERANEK: We did not have venture capital. We borrowed money from the banks. And, the Bank of Boston at that time was quite willing, they’d give you rather liberal loans on a new business. Venture capitalism really didn’t start until General Doriot came into the picture with the American Research and Development Corporation. But until then the banks were doing it. The banks were not taking any stock. They just lent you money, so they didn’t get to make any big profits from it.
O’LEARY: Can you tell us a little bit about the remarkable culture that BBN had and that it’s long been known for?
BERANEK: There were two things. One, the three of us were well thought of in our respective departments. I was in electrical, Dick Bolt was in physics and Bob Newman was in architecture. When we formed the company we made a rule that we would never hire anybody unless they raise the average level of competence in the firm, which meant that we had to have people that were smarter than we were. That’s one reason the company succeeded, we made a policy of hiring only first class people.
O’LEARY: You started the company in 1948. What was the entrepreneurial climate like? How have you seen that change over the last 60 years?
BERANEK: All I know is it was the good time. It was right after World War II. There were these people who got new ideas at the radiation laboratory at MIT. And, of course, Los Alamos, that was something a little different. But in the process of this there were several companies that came up. High Voltage Engineering came up, then they formed the Lincoln Lab and then the Digital Equipment Corporation came up. And these things were part of the culture of MIT, it was encouraging us to do things that would lead to new products.
O’LEARY: So again it reverts to MIT and its initiatives to catalyze entrepreneurship.
BERANEK: Right.
O’LEARY: Can you talk a little bit about the background and how you got into digital computing? If I recall it started with buying a computer back in 1957.
BERANEK: I hired JCR Licklider, and the reason I hired him was that I decided that BBN was never going to be able to grow to a sizeable company if we were only going to be in acoustics. I harkened back to my wartime experiences of running the systems research laboratory in World War II at Harvard. I had worked with psychologists as well as with physicists and engineers. So I said, maybe we ought to do something that combines psychology and engineering and maybe the word is manned machine systems. I was thinking of blind landing of aircraft as an example. I thought of all the things that go into trying to win the Americas Cup in sailing where they have to have equipment in electronics and weather and all the characteristics of the boat and everything and bring all this together as a man machine combination.
I had known a fellow at Harvard by the name of Lickliter, and he had come to MIT as a professor, and I talked him into coming to BBN as a vice president. I gave him a liberal stock option to get him there too. One of the first things he wanted to do was to buy a digital computer, this Royal McBee thing. He said if BBN is going to amount to anything in the future it’s got to be in computers. So I went back to my partners, we talked it over and we said we’d spend $30,000 on something we don’t know what we’re going to do with it. It seems kind of excessive, especially since we never bought anything more expensive than a drinking fountain before. And we made the investment.
With Lickliter learning digital programming, we were able to respond favorably then when Digital Equipment and Ken Olson came around and said, we’ve got a new prototype computer. We’d like to have somebody do what we call a beta test on it. So they gave us the computer, the PDP-1.
O’LEARY: And this was the very first PDP?
BERANEK: That was the 0 model one, the one they never sold. We brought it over to our company and Lickliter and others worked on the thing and used it for a month and then wrote a report to them on how they could make it more user friendly, which was the way we thought about making a computer worthwhile. Digital Equipment did those things and then we bought serial number 1, PDP 1 from them.
O’LEARY: What did this machine look like? What was a PDP 1 in those days?
BERANEK: Well, it looked like as I remember it looked like two or three refrigerators standing side by side. And one of them had a little desk in front and of course a tube to look at.
O’LEARY: OK, so there was a visual interface to program into. So you bought this PDP 1. You spent $150,000 which was a princely sum in 1960. And you began to try to secure contracts. And tell us a little bit about what you actually put this machine to use for.
BERANEK: The first thing we tried to do with it was to develop time sharing. That came about because John McCarthy came over from MIT and said, you know, you can take a computer and time share it. People’s normal typing and so on are so slow you could put a lot of things in between the different key pushes. So this is what time sharing is. We set it up to have four different time sharing branches on that little computer, and we made our first demonstration of time sharing by having one person in Washington, D.C. and two in Cambridge. We showed that all three were able to work with the computer without any of them knowing what’s going on in the other person’s use of it. We went to the National Institutes of Health and got them to finance us to put in a computer system in the Mass. General Hospital. That was the first time any hospital had any thought of using computers.
O’LEARY: And this was for electronic patient records as I recall, an initiative we’re still pursuing today.
BERANEK: And it’s – the trouble is it’s very difficult to get the doctors to use them but they are using them now. In those days it was not easy.
Then Lickliter left us to go work for ARPA, and he got ARPA to put money out to all the big universities so they would put time sharing into their local computers. That made each computer more useful in their own universities. So Lechleider was responsible for getting time sharing spread around the country.
O’LEARY: And you actually started your own time sharing business. Telcomp if I recall.
BERANEK: That’s right.
O’LEARY: Tell us a little bit about that.
BERANEK: It worked for a while and it was going to build up into really a big business. We started even to think about making it national, and all of a sudden GE undercut us. They had a bunch of computers they couldn’t sell. They went up to Dartmouth and got time sharing put onto their computer. Then they offered the same service we were giving but because they had no depreciation costs they could undercut us in price. They put us out of business.
O’LEARY: Another famous name that was affiliated with you in this early 1960s period was Marvin Minsky. He was pursuing artificial intelligence if I recall?
BERANEK: That’s right. Well, Minsky and John McCarthy came to us as consultants, and worked full time one summer. Then we set up a business in artificial intelligence.
O’LEARY: What did artificial intelligence entail in 1960? What kind of projects were you involved with there?
BERANEK: Well, they were even doing games of one kind of another. We were looking at chess. And then there’s a game that I don’t know the name of where they sort of move stones along in pits. I forget the name of that game. And we showed that you could get the machine to do certain things just about as well as people. And this was one of the areas of what we called artificial intelligence.
venture capital and arpanet come into play
O’LEARY: Do you have any recollections of General Doriot?
BERANEK: Well, General Doriot was of course with the big venture capital firm, American Research and Development. He was very famous and very powerful because he was financing all these companies of which Digital Equipment is his most successful. One of his employees was named Walter Juda, who was a chemist, and he had made Ionics be a successful company under General Doriot and American Research and Development. But he was getting fed up somehow with what was going on. He wanted to leave Ionics, and would we have a job for him? He heard that we only took people who did advanced work. We said, gee, one area that really ought to be looked at is fuel cells. He knew this kind of chemistry well and he thought that he therefore would be able, working with us to develop fuel cells. So we hired him. Well, this enraged Doriot because we took him away from Ionics, and Doriot threatened to sue us. So he called and asked me to come down. They threatened us in various ways. And we just got up and walked out. Walter Juda worked for us and there was never any suit.
O’LEARY: And so where did you take the fuel cell concept?
BERANEK: Well, we would have gotten quite far on that except that we couldn’t figure out how to make this important element in there that takes palladium. Palladium is expensive, and we could not get the cost of the fuel cell down to where it was practical. Of course that still remains a big factor today.
O’LEARY: So by the early 1960s, BBN was referred to in your book as Cambridge’s third university. Which is quite an accolade and probably reflects the incredible culture and the brilliant people there. In 1968, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, conceived of a packet switch network that would enable universities and government to access computers. How did BBN become one of the cornerstones of ARPAnet, which of course today is known as the Internet?
BERANEK: Dick Bolt had taken primary responsibility, had hired Frank Hart to come with us. When he left Lincoln Lab he took a group of other people with him who were experts on computers. They came over and we got this request for proposals from the government, and they sent it out to about 150 places, asking each one of us to bid on setting up a network that would connect together 19 big computers, each of them sort of a million and a half dollar computers then. The idea of connecting them together was that smaller universities could just have a tube and a keyboard, and they could hook into that network and use those big computers when they weren’t in full use by the local university or government lab.
They had figured that it ought to be packet switching which had been tried already in England. They had the idea that maybe there ought to be a separate little component in each place and that a local computer would hook into that component, and they called that an interface message processor or an IMP.
They had those ideas but they had no idea how to make it work. They didn’t know what program it would take. They didn’t know how, or if you could even make packet switching work. In fact, the ARPA people had gone to AT&T and Bell Labs, and they all said, forget it; these packets will run around forever; they’ll never be able to manage them. It’s just a haywire idea. And, you already could hook this whole thing up to the regular telephone system if you wanted to, and we have the best telephone system in the world. So we don’t need this.
We, along with 15 or 20 others then sent in proposals saying how we would build the network, and it turned out that our ideas of how to build a network and Raytheon’s were the two best. We were quite pleased and the nation was surprised when a little company took this contract away from big Raytheon to build this first time ARPA network. Not only that but Frank Hart was so good with his group that we not only met our deadline, we said we would have it built in a year, in fact less than a year, nine months. But he also said how much it would cost, and he came through on time within budget.
O’LEARY: Did you have any idea what the utility of the ARPA net could be when you were building it?
BERANEK: Not at first. We were just hooking them together so other people could hook into it. But our people then developed e-mail, and it was discovered that what was really being used on the network was e-mail. Actually using each other’s computers was a small part of the operation. Twenty-five percent was, we figured, people using computers, and 75 percent was sending e-mail around. I had no idea that it would be in every home because that idea couldn’t be developed until the PC came out. The big development in the 1990s was the www, where you could send out a request and get answers. Whereas before it was just e-mail, you could mail out and somebody would answer the e-mail. Now you could send a request out and get all kinds of answers.
O’LEARY: It strikes me too that the original mission of the ARPAnet was essentially to create cloud computing. To access remote computers and to share the processing of those computers. Is that a fair analogy?
BERANEK: I think that was an idea that came up. But I think the idea was simply making these multiple big computers available to universities without them owning a computer. You’d just hook into them.
O’LEARY: What surprised you most about the Internet and what it’s become today?
BERANEK: Right now I’m surprised at the enormous traffic that can take place on it, and even streaming. Of course this has come about because of the expansion of the networks. And this is where Al Gore gets his credit. He got the Congress to put up the money to put the big backbone networks across the country, so that you could run up the capacity, bigger capacity on them. The big thing that’s been surprising is that we’ve kept ahead of the demand. Almost every year I read the paper that says that the whole thing is going to break down because there’s too much demand on it and it can’t satisfy the demand. But by God the thing keeps going, so somebody is continually building more networks as they’re needed.
onward into tv and concert halls
O’LEARY: In addition to your work at Harvard, MIT, BBN and so forth, you launched a television station, WCVB, Channel 5. You also were involved in acoustical design of concert halls. Of all of these endeavors what are you most proud of in your career?
BERANEK: Of course I’m most proud of the fact that we made Channel 5. At the time everybody was watching us. Nowadays you’ve got cable, there’s competition. But we made it one of the best stations in the United States. We, we had better programs, we had more interesting things going on. We spent more time on local programming than anybody else ever thought of. And I was very happy that we were able to do that. Now that came about again because I hired people who were smarter than me. Bob Bennett was my general manager, and he turned out to be a genius. And, we had programming people with good ideas. The result was that we had a good station.
I decided after, after we sold that station and I was now unemployed, that I would go back into my original field that I had worked on at BBN some years before, concert hall design. So I spent three years reading the literature. I attended concerts in some 25 concert halls around the world, and even wrote a paper for the Journal Acoustical Society on concert hall acoustics. Then I got the chance through the Japanese government to work on a concert hall and opera house, a drama theater and an experimental theater on a 12 acre site in the middle of Tokyo. They put a billion dollars into that project and I got to be the acoustical consultant for it. And we built halls which then the New York Times wrote up as being some of the best in the world. So again it was a success.
O’LEARY: So designing concert halls seems like a tremendous blend of science as well as art. And there’s lots of conflict with architects and designers. Can you talk a little bit about that?
BERANEK: I often say that acousticians don’t design concert halls, architects do. The reason for that is they don’t copy. If you’re going to build a good violin you copy a Stradivarius. If you’re going to build a good concert hall an architect won’t copy a good concert hall. Each thing he does he wants to be a statement of his abilities, his genius. So you’re constantly dealing with a different product— he’ll hire you as a consultant to try and make the acoustics good. You try to convince him to do things in his design, his concept that will make it work as well as possible. That means that some of them are going to work better than others because some of them are closer to the great halls. You can point out which the great halls are, but they won’t copy them.
breaking out of the recession via innovation
O’LEARY: I’d like to just turn to the whole theme of innovation, an important theme as we think about the economic condition and the prospective recovery from the events of the last few years. It’s probably not a coincidence that so many great things have happened in Massachusetts in terms of innovation. What is your view?
BERANEK: I talked with the president of MIT, and we sort of reviewed this and I said the important thing is that at the schools you try to instill in people the idea that anything they’re going to develop may lead to some kind of a product, or some good for the public. If you can then encourage them to get out and put it into practice and put it into use in this country, not going to some other country, this would be a big thing. Of course in the end, it also takes money and we’ve got to have MIT continue and try to make contacts with the venture capitalists to convince them that they’re putting their money more safely in the MIT graduates than into others.
O’LEARY: Do you think we have sufficient capital addressing the entrepreneurial needs of the MIT community and the university community generally in Massachusetts?
BERANEK: We don’t have enough venture capital money now. They’ve cut it down drastically after this financial collapse we’ve had. So I think there’s insufficient money.
O’LEARY: What advice would you offer to aspiring entrepreneurs today, given the remarkable experience that you’ve had and innovation in entrepreneurship?
BERANEK: If they have a choice go to schools that have a history of developing companies, of course you’ll find them from places like MIT. Harvard now is getting closer to doing it, and Stanford has been famous for this. Oher universities in the country now are doing more things. I think you look for a school that has a record of producing successful companies.
Well thank you for all those thoughts. Just one last question for you before we wrap up. You’ve had a remarkable business career and yet you’ve also managed to maintain a remarkable work/life balance. Could you comment on that and how you’ve been able to achieve the balance in your life?
BERANEK: I’ve always tried to think in terms of setting a certain amount of time aside each week for private things. We always figured that we had to go out at least once a week to have dinner at a good restaurant. That was back in the days when people didn’t go to restaurants so much. We tried to go on vacation. So I took one month off every year to go skiing in Switzerland with my family. And I tried to build up some kind of family connection even though I was very busy. I have two sons, and they seem to think that they had a pretty good life, that we didn’t neglect them.
MASS HIGH TECH: Is there anything that this conversation has conjured up?
BERANEK: Well, the only other thing that we didn’t talk about was my wartime experience. The second laboratory that was set up by the government under this Office of Scientific Research and Development and President Roosevelt was mine. The first one was the radiation lab at MIT. Mine was at first just called anonymous research under Leo Browning and then it got changed to electro-acoustic laboratory as we grew. The idea there was to improve communication at high altitudes in airplanes where it became impossible above 30,000 feet, because the equipment didn’t perform well and the voice gets weaker and the planes keep getting noisy. So the noise got so big compared to the signal that you couldn’t communicate-– they had oxygen masks then. There were no pressurized planes. So they talked into the oxygen mask from one person to another so they all had to use microphones. Then if you wanted to radio to the ground or to another airplane, the same problem.
We had to figure out how to make communication possible, 30,000 feet and above, and that required new earphones. Then we also improved the oxygen mask and we built into the amplifiers anemometer voice control gain, so as the voice got weaker with altitude the amplitude of the amplifier, the strength of the amplifier would go up. This was an important thing.
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