Missouri boys
Joseph Carl Robert Licklider made a strong impression on people. Even in his early years, before he got involved with computers, he had a way of making everything clear to people.
“Lick was perhaps the most intuitive genius I have ever known,” William McGill later declared in an interview that was recorded shortly after Licklider’s death in 1997. McGill explained in that interview that he first met Lick when he entered Harvard University as a psychology graduate in 1948: “Whenever I came to Lick with a proof of some mathematical relationship, I found that he already knew about these relationships x. But he didn't work them out in detail, he just…knew them. He could somehow represent the flow of information, and see various relationships that other people who only manipulated mathematical symbols could not see. It was so amazing that he became a real mystic for all of us: How the hell does Lik do it? How does he see these things?
"Talking to Lick about a problem," added McGill, who later served as president of Columbia University, "boosted my intelligence by about thirty IQ points."
(Thanks for the translation Stanislav Sukhanitsky, who wants to help with the translation - write in a personal or email [email protected])
Leek made a similarly deep impression on George A. Miller, who first began working with him at the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory during World War II. "Lick was a real 'American guy' - a tall, good-looking blond who was good at everything." Miller will write this many years later. “Incredibly smart and creative, and also hopelessly kind - when you made a mistake, Lik convinced everyone that you told the most witty joke. He loved jokes. A lot of my memories are of him telling some fascinating absurdity, usually from his own experience, while gesturing with a Coca-Cola bottle in one hand."
There was no such thing that he split people. At a time when Lik succinctly embodied the characteristic features of a resident of Missouri, no one could resist his one-sided smile, all interlocutors smiled back. He looked at the world sunny and friendly, perceived everyone he met as a good person. And it usually worked.
He was a Missouri guy, after all. The name itself originated generations ago in Alsack-Lorraine, a town that was on the French-German border, but his family on both sides had lived in Missouri since before the start of the Civil War. His father, Joseph Lixider, was a country boy from the middle of the state, living near the city of Sedalia. Joseph also seemed to be a gifted and energetic young man. In 1885, after his father died in a horse accident, twelve-year-old Joseph took over the responsibility for the family. Realizing that he, his mother, and his sister could not run the farm on their own, he moved them all to Saint Louis and began working at the local railroad station before sending his sister off to high school and college. After he did this, Joseph went to study at an advertising firm to learn writing and design. And as he mastered those skills, he switched to insurance, eventually becoming an award-winning salesman and head of the Saint Louis Chamber of Commerce.
At the same time, during a Baptist Revival Youth meeting, Joseph Licklider caught the eye of Miss Margaret Robnett. “I only looked at her once,” he later said, “and heard her sweet voice singing in the choir, and I knew that I had found the woman I love.” He immediately began taking the train to her parents' farm every weekend, intending to marry her. He has been successful. Their only child was born in Saint Louis on March 11, 1915. He was named Joseph after his father and Carl Robnett after his mother's older brother.
The sunny look of the child was understandable. Joseph and Margaret were old enough for the parents of the first child, then he was forty-two and she was thirty-four, and they were quite strict in matters of religion and good behavior. But they were also a warm, loving couple who adored their child and celebrated him constantly. So did the rest: young Robnett, as they called him at home, was not only the only son, but the only grandson on both sides of the family. When he grew up, his parents encouraged him to take piano lessons, tennis lessons, and whatever he took up, especially in the intellectual field. And Robnett did not upset them, maturing into a bright, energetic guy with a lively sense of humor, insatiable curiosity, and an unfailing love for technical things.
When he was twelve, for example, he, like every other boy in Saint Louis, developed a passion for building model airplanes. Perhaps this was due to the growing aircraft industry in his city. Perhaps because of Lindbergh, who only made a solo circumnavigation of the Atlantic Ocean in a plane called the Spirit of Saint Louis. Or perhaps because airplanes were the technological marvels of a generation. It doesn't matter—the Saint Louis boys were crazed model airplane makers. And no one could recreate them better than Robnett Licklider. With the permission of his parents, he turned his room into something reminiscent of logging cork trees. He bought photographs and plane plans, and drew detailed diagrams of the planes himself. He carved balsamic wood blanks with painful care. And he stayed up all night putting the particles together, covering the wings and body with cellophane, authentically painting the details, and no doubt overdoing it with model aircraft glue. He was so good at it that a modeling kit company paid him to go to an air show in Indianapolis, and he was able to show the fathers and sons there how the models were made.
And then, as the time approached the important sixteenth birthday, his interests switched to cars. It was not a desire to drive machines, he wanted to fully understand their design and functioning. So his parents let him buy an old wreck, on the condition that he wouldn't drive it further than their long, winding road.
The young Robnett happily took this dream machine apart and put it back together again, starting with the engine and adding a new part each time to see what happened: “Okay, this is how it really works.” Margaret Licklider, fascinated by this rising technological genius, stood by his side as he worked under the car and handed over the keys he needed. Her son received his driver's license on March 11, 1931, his sixteenth birthday. And in later years, he refused to pay more than fifty dollars for a car, no matter what shape it was, he could fix it and make it drive. (Faced with the fury of inflation, he was forced to raise that limit to $150.)
Sixteen-year-old Rob, as he was now known to his classmates, grew up to be tall, handsome, athletic and friendly, with sun-bleached hair and blue eyes, which gave him a significant resemblance to Lindbergh himself. He played competitive tennis avidly (and continued to play it until he was 20, when he suffered an injury that prevented him from playing). And, of course, he had impeccable southern manners. He was obliged to have them: he was constantly surrounded by impeccable women from the south. The old and large house, which was located in University City, a suburb of the University of Washington, was shared by the Lickliders with Joseph's mother, Margaret's sister who married her father, and with another unmarried sister, Margaret. Every evening, since the age of five, Robnett had had the duty and honor to offer his hand to his aunt, escort her to the dinner table, and hold her as a gentleman. Even as an adult, Leek was known as an incredibly suave and tactful man who rarely raised his voice in anger, who almost always wore a jacket and bow tie even at home, and who found it physically impossible to sit when a woman entered a room.
However, Rob Licklider also grew into a young man with a mind of his own. When he was a very young boy, according to the story he kept telling later, his father was a minister in their local Baptist church. When Joseph prayed, his son's job was to get under the keys of the organ and operate the keys, helping the old organist who couldn't do it on her own. One sleepy Saturday evening, just as Robnett was about to fall asleep under the organ, he heard his father's flock cry out, "Those of you who seek salvation, get up!" Instead of finding salvation, he saw the stars.
This experience, Leek said, gave him an instant insight into the scientific method: Always be as careful as possible in your work and in declaring your faith.
A third of a century after this incident, of course, it is impossible to find out whether the young Robnett really learned this lesson by hitting the keys. But if we evaluate his achievements during his later life, then we can say that he definitely learned this lesson somewhere. Behind his meticulous desire to do things and unbridled curiosity was a complete lack of patience for sloppy work, easy solutions, or florid answers. He refused to be content with the ordinary. The young man who would later speak of the "Intergalactic Computer System" and publish professional papers titled "System of Systems" and "Frameless, Wireless Rat Shocker" showed a mind that was constantly on the lookout for new things and in constant play.
He also had a small amount of mischievous anarchy. For example, when he confronted official stupidity, he never confronted it directly, the belief that a gentleman never makes a scene was in his blood. He liked to subvert her. When he joined the Sigma Chi fraternity in his freshman year at the University of Washington, he was instructed that every member of the fraternity should carry two kinds of cigarettes with him at all times, in case an older member of the fraternity asked for a cigarette at any time of the day or night. Not being a smoker, he quickly went out and bought the worst Egyptian cigarettes he could find in Saint Louis. No one asked him to smoke again after that.
Meanwhile, his eternal refusal to be satisfied with ordinary things led him to endless questions about the meaning of life. He also changed his personality. He was "Robnett" at home and "Rob" to his classmates, but now, apparently to emphasize his new status as a college student, he began to call himself by his middle name: "Call me Lick." From then on, only his oldest friends had any idea who "Rob Licklider" was.
Among all the things that could be done in college, the young man Leek chose to study - he was happy to grow as an expert in any field of study and whenever Leek heard someone get excited about a new field of study, he also wanted to try to study this area. In his first year of study, he became a specialist in art, and then switched to engineering. He then switched to physics and mathematics. And, most disconcertingly, he also became a real-world specialist: at the end of his sophomore year, thieves gutted his father's insurance company and so it closed, leaving Joseph out of a job and his son out of tuition fees. Leek was forced to drop out of school for a year and go to work as a waiter in a restaurant for motorists. It was one of the few works that could be found during the Great Depression. (Joseph Licklider went crazy just sitting at home surrounded by women from the south, and one day found a Baptist meeting in the countryside in need of a minister; he and Margaret ended up spending the rest of their days serving one church after another, feeling the happiest of their lives.) When Lick finally returned to teaching, bringing with him the inexhaustible enthusiasm necessary for higher education, one of his part-time jobs was to look after experimental animals in the department of psychology. And when he began to understand what types of research the professors were doing, he realized that his search was over.
What he encountered was "physiological" psychology - this field of knowledge was at that time in the midst of its growth. Today, this field of knowledge has acquired the general name of neuroscience: they are engaged in an accurate, detailed study of the brain and its functioning.
It was a discipline with roots going back to the 19th century, when scientists like Thomas Huxley, Darwin's most ardent advocate, began to argue that behavior, experience, thought, and even consciousness had a material basis that resided in the brain. This was a rather radical position in those days, because it affected not so much science as religion. Indeed, many scientists and philosophers in the early nineteenth century tried to argue that not only was the brain made of unusual matter, but that it was the seat of the mind and the seat of the soul, violating all the laws of physics. Observations, however, soon showed the opposite. Early in 1861, a systematic study of brain-damaged patients by the French physiologist Paul Broca created the first links between a particular function of the mind—language—with a specific region of the brain: the area of the left hemisphere of the brain is now known as Broca's area. By the early 20th century, it was known that the brain was an electrical organ, with impulses being transmitted through billions of thin, cable-like cells called neurons. By 1920, it was established that the regions of the brain responsible for motor skills and touch are located in two parallel strands of neuronal tissue located on the sides of the brain. It was also known that the centers responsible for vision are located behind the brain - ironically, this area is the most remote from the eyes - while the hearing centers are located where, logically, one would assume: in the temporal lobe, just behind the ears.
But even this work was relatively rough. From the moment that Leek encountered this area of expertise in the 1930s, researchers began to use the increasingly sophisticated electronic equipment used by radio and telephone companies. Using electroencephalography, or EEG, they could eavesdrop on the electrical activity of the brain, getting precise readings from detectors placed on their heads. Scientists could also get inside the skull and apply a very precisely labeled stimulus to the brain itself, and then evaluate how the neural response spreads to different parts of the nervous system. (By the 1950s, in fact, they could stimulate and read the activity of single neurons.) Through this process, scientists were able to identify the neural circuits of the brain with unprecedented precision. In short, physiologists have gone from the early 19th century vision that the brain was something mystical to a 20th century vision of the brain where the brain was something knowable. It was a system of incredible complexity, to be exact. Nevertheless, it was a system that was not too different from the increasingly complex electronic systems that physicists and engineers were building in their laboratories.
The face was in heaven. Physiological psychology had everything he loved: mathematics, electronics, and the challenge of deciphering the most complex device, the brain. He threw himself into the field, and in a process of learning that, of course, he couldn't have foreseen, he took his first giant step towards that office at the Pentagon. Given all that had happened before, Lick's early fascination with psychology might have seemed like an aberration, a sideline, a distraction for the twenty-five-year-old from his ultimate career choice in computer science. But in fact, his background in psychology was the backbone of his concept of using computers. In fact, all of the computer science pioneers of his generation began their careers in the 1940s and 1950s, with backgrounds in mathematics, physics, or electrical engineering, whose technological orientation led them to focus on building and improving gadgets—making machines bigger, faster, and more reliable. Leek was unique in that he brought to the field a deep respect for human abilities: the ability to perceive, adapt, make choices, and find entirely new ways to solve previously unsolvable problems. As an experimental psychologist, he found these abilities as subtle and respectable as the ability of computers to execute algorithms. And that's why for him the real test was to create a connection between computers and the people who used them, to use the power of both.
In any case, at this stage, the direction of Lik's growth was clear. In 1937, he graduated from the University of Washington with three degrees in physics, mathematics, and psychology. He stayed one more year to complete his master's degree in psychology. (The record of receiving a master's degree, which was awarded to "Robnett Licklider," was perhaps the last record of him to appear in print.) And in 1938 he entered the doctoral program at the University of Rochester in New York - one of the nation's leading centers for the study of the auditory region of the brain, the area that tells us how we should hear.
Lick's departure from Missouri affected more than just his change of address. For the first two decades of his life, Leek was an exemplary son to his parents, faithfully attending Baptist meetings and prayer meetings three or four times a week. However, after he left the house, his foot never crossed the threshold of the church again. He could not bring himself to tell this to his parents, realizing that they would receive an extremely strong blow when they learned that he had abandoned the faith they loved. But he found the limitations of Southern Baptist life incredibly oppressive. More importantly, he could not profess a faith that he did not feel. As he later noted, when asked about his feelings, which he acquired at prayer meetings, he answered "I did not feel anything."
If many things changed, at least one remained: Lick was a star in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington, and he was a star at Rochester. For his Ph.D. thesis, he made the first map of neuronal activity in the auditory zone. In particular, he identified regions whose presence was critical for distinguishing between different sound frequencies - the main ability that allows you to highlight the rhythm of music. And eventually he became such an expert in vacuum tube electronics - not to mention becoming a real wizard in setting up experiments - that even his professor came to consult him.
Leake also excelled at Swarthmore College, outside of Philadelphia, where he held a postdoctoral position after receiving his Ph. rearing up.
On the whole, 1942 was not a good year for a carefree life. Leek's career, like that of countless other researchers, was about to take a much more dramatic turn.
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Source: habr.com