Frank Rosenblatt Dies at 43

Some people are programmed to think differently, the people whose ideas change the paradigm. The field of AI lost one of those and one of its best too soon in 1971 when Frank Rosenblatt died in a boating accident in Chesapeake Bay.

It was the afternoon of July 11, 1971, his 43rd birthday. The story goes that Rosenblatt had taken some students who were inexperienced sailors out on his sailboat. When Rosenblatt accidentally fell in the water, he was unable to be rescued.

As readers of this timeline know, the man is a bit of a hero, certainly a legend. He was the cybernetic lone wolf who was right all along, the unjustly accused.

He was the inventor of the first working neural network. In 1958, at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, he described the Perceptron, an electronic device built on biological principles that could learn. He extended the approach in Principles of Neurodynamics.

The man certainly had ideas. He was experimental and from 1966, in Cornell’s Section of Neurobiology and Behavior. There he tested whether learned behavior could pass from trained rats to untrained ones through injections of brain extract. Umm.

He is so revered to this day, as the IEEE established an award named after him in 2004, the Frank Rosenblatt Award. It is awarded annually for "computational intelligence" and has since gone to another generation of legends, like Teuvo Kohonen, John Hopfield, Geoffrey Hinton and Paul Werbos.