MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

MIT's Building 20: The Magical Incubator Story, Anecdote, or Reminiscence

All Roads Lead Back to Building 20

Michael N. Geselowitz
m.geselowitz@ieee.org

I don't have any stories of historical importance about Building 20, or even stories that would be interesting to other people, yet that structure has woven itself in and out of my life in odd ways for over 30 years. I first encountered it in Fall of 1966, when I was in 4th grade. My father, David B. Geselowitz, a bioelectrical engineer, was at MIT on sabbatical from Penn and had his office in Building 20. He was working with Walter Rosenblith, who was later Provost, Bill Siebert, and some others. I remember visiting him, and I seem to recall that Jerry Lettvin for some reason had some octopi in a tank, which fascinated my brothers and I. The following summer, before returning to Philadelphia, my older brother Daniel and I were enrolled in the MIT Day Camp and used to play in the open space behind Building 20, hoping for glimpses of Dad.

All of this faded from memory until I enrolled as a freshman at MIT in Fall 1974, and majored in VI-1A (Co-op). By then Course VI was safely ensconced in the Building 36 complex, and I didn't give Building 20 another thought until I decided to have my required humanities concentration in Anthropology/Archaeology. The A/A Program, as it was then called, was headquartered in Building 20, and so I found myself now and then back in the old haunt. But then I graduated in 1978 to go work for my Co-op company, the NSWC in Silver Spring, MD. Surely, that was the end of my Building 20 experience...

But, no! While working as an engineer, I decided that what I really wanted to be was a social scientist who studied the social aspects of engineering and technology. So in Spring 1979 I returned to MIT to pursue a 2nd bachelor's degree in Course XXI, with an A/A major. My advisor, Arthur Steinberg, had his office in Building 20, the Program Office was there, many of my classes were there, and, as an advanced undergraduate I took one of the first graduate courses offered at Heather Lechtman's Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE). Building 20 became a home away from home.

Nor did I escape by completing my second S.B. in Spring 1980 and going to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology. CMRAE was part of a consortium, and I ended up taking two intensive full-year graduate laboratory courses there. I was in Building 20 more than ever! Then I complete my Ph.D. in Fall 1987 and went to work for Harvard's Peabody Museum, and that was that. Or was it?

In Spring of 1989 I returned to CMRAE as a Lecturer/Supervisor of the Graduate Laboratory. Now Building 20 (Office/Lab 20B-012, to be precise) almost was a home. I would meet for lunch with old classmates who had ended up at Draper or other Kendall Square locales. My wife would bring my two daughters by to visit, as I had visited my Dad -- and I would often pick them up from nursery school on my way home from Building 20 to near Inman Square where we lived. My son was born during my tenure at CMRAE. So in a sense, it seemed like closure when in Spring 1993, I left CMRAE and academia and Building 20 (I thought) for good.

HOWEVER (here's the punch line), last Spring, 1997, I joined IEEE as the Director of their History Center. The mission of the IEEE History Center is to preserve, research and promote the history of electrical engineering and computing. One of the important components of this program is designating IEEE Milestones in Electrical History, and one of the Milestones I inherited is the Rad Lab! (Fortunately, the commemorative plaque was placed in Building 4, not Building 20.) In fact, the Chair of the Trustees of the IEEE History Center, my fund-raising body within the IEEE Foundation, is Rad Lab alumnus Ted Saad who is on The Magical Incubator program!

If that's not enough, another of the important components of our program is collecting oral histories of distinguished engineers. The largest project in this vein to date was, again, a documentation of the work of the Rad Lab. An ongoing one is the documentation of the history of the IEEE Signal Processing Society on its 50th anniversary. This past summer, I was reading through some of the oral histories to bring myself up to speed on the project. There were many references to Building 20. In particular I read about how the geophysicists of GAG, who were a crucial link in the development of signal processing, were headquartered in Building 20 (they were left off the original Magical Incubator brochure, so I contacted Enders Robinson at Columbia, the main interviewee, and advised him of your program).

But then something really remarkable happened. When I had worked at CMRAE, we had an old anechoic chamber that we used just as a storage area. No one could tell me it's exact origins. Then, just a few weeks before I received the announcement of the Building 20 celebration, I was reading an oral history interview with Jim Flanagan, now of Rutgers. In it, he described helping to set up THAT anechoic chamber in the Acoustics Lab in the 1950s as a graduate student. Although I didn't know at the time that this would be THE final epitaph, I was able to write him and tell him what had become of his handiwork.

And now all we'll have is the pictures, and the oral histories, and the memories...