Leo Beranek

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Leo Leroy Beranek (born September 15, 1914) is an American acoustics expert, former MIT professor and a founder and former president of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies). A student of piano at an early age, Beranek, growing up in Mount Vernon, Iowa, went on to study at Cornell College while working as a radio and small appliance repairman. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and went on to study at Harvard University, where he received a doctorate in 1940. During World War II, he managed Harvard's electro-acoustics laboratory, which designed communications and noise reduction systems for World War II aircraft, while at the same time developing other military technologies. During this time, he built the first anechoic chamber, an extremely quiet room for studying noise effects which later would inspire John Cage's philosophy of silence. Beranek remained on staff at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of communications engineering from 1947 to 1958. In 1948, he helped found Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), serving as the company's president from 1952 to 1971. His 1954 (reprinted in 1986) book, Acoustics, is considered the classic textbook in this field.