Frank Rosenblatt

Who was Frank Rosenblatt?

Frank Rosenblatt was born on July 11, 1928, in New Rochelle, New York as son of Dr. Frank and Katherine Rosenblatt. After graduating from The Bronx High School of Science in 1946, he attended Cornell University, where he obtained his A.B. in 1950 and his Ph.D. in 1956.

He then went to Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York, where he was successively research psychologist, senior psychologist, and head of the cognitive systems section. This is also where he conducted the early work on perceptrons, which culminated in the development and hardware construction of the Mark I Perceptron in 1960. This was essentially the first computer that could learn new skills by trial and error, using a type of neural network that simulates human thought processes.

Dr. Rosenblatt’s research interests were exceptionally broad. In 1959 he went to Cornell’s Ithaca campus as director of the Cognitive Systems Research Program and also as a lecturer in the Psychology Department. In 1966 he joined the Section of Neurobiology and Behavior within the newly formed Division of Biological Sciences, as associate professor. Also in 1966, he became fascinated with the transfer of learned behavior from trained to naive rats by the injection of brain extracts, a subject on which he would publish extensively in later years.