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J ORDA N B AR U C H
1923–2011
Elected in 1974
“For contributions to technology transfer to industry,
noise control systems, and application of computer technology.”
BY LEO L. BERANEK
JORDAN JAY BARUCH was born August 21, 1923, in New
York City and grew up in Brooklyn. Both his father and
grandfather were in the wholesale fur business until the collapse
of that business in the 1940s. Jordan’s father then sought other
opportunities, becoming a stockbroker in a small Wall Street
firm. Jordan already knew how to read when he entered
Midwood Elementary School (PS 99) and graduated eighth
grade as an honor student in January 1936. At James Madison
High School he participated in the after-school activities of
the Microscope Club. One of his projects on hydroponics was
selected to be exhibited in the New York World’s Fair. A talk
of his, based on another high school project, “On the Action of
Ions on Cardiac Muscles—A Home Made Kymograph,” was
named “Best of the Session” by the Science Congress of the
American Institute. The kymograph was made up of parts that
Jordan bought from junk pushcarts. During these years, Jordan
was an enthusiastic Boy Scout, becoming an Eagle Scout. Later
in life he was a Boy Scout leader.
In 1940 he entered Brooklyn College. In his freshman physics
class, Jordan’s professor announced there would be gender-
segregated seating in alphabetical order. Jordan Baruch, the
first male, sat next to Rhoda Wasserman, the last female.
Jordan invited Rhoda to the BioMed Society Dance. Four years
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24 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
later, in June 1944, when he was a private first class in the U.S.
Army, they were married. Their marriage lasted 67 years.
In December 1942, at the age of 19, Jordan enlisted in the
U.S. Army, dropping out of Brooklyn College in his junior
year. He was offered a place in the Army Specialized Training
Program (ASTP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He enjoyed MIT until the program came to an end. Fortunately,
the participants were assured they would be welcomed back
at the end of the war. Jordan did reenter MIT in February 1946,
immediately after he was discharged from the Army.
When the ASTP came to an end, Jordan was assigned to
the Army Signal Corps. He served in both the European and
Pacific theaters of operation. When the war ended in Europe,
he was sent to Japan. He became very seasick on the long ocean
voyage. He wrote home to his young wife Rhoda that, when he
returned, he would have nothing in the house that moved—
neither a rocking chair nor a porch glider. It is surprising that
after his discharge in February 1946, he became an avid sailor,
first learning in a tech dinghy and later owning a sequence of
sailboats, each bigger than the previous. He taught many of
his friends to sail, as well as his children and grandchildren.
Favorite vacations involved charters in the Caribbean with
friends and “bumping into” old Cambridge friends on some
sparsely populated island.
Jordan’s prize war story was during the Battle of the Bulge.
One of the repeater amplifiers along the line failed. He drove
at top speed to the nearest Army supply depot to obtain a
replacement, only to learn that they did not have the part. A
Marine supply depot was not far away. Jordan went there,
learned they had the part, but they refused to give it to him
without a written request. He threatened and, by hook or by
crook, got the part. Communications were quickly restored to
General Patton’s headquarters to announce the end of the war
in Europe. Jordan received a medal. There were other brave
exploits, and Jordan ended his service with a box of medals
and the rank of technical sergeant. One of his most memorable
and nightmarish experiences in the war was to witness the
liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.
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J ORDA N B AR U C H 25
After the war, under the G.I. Bill, Jordan attended MIT as
an electrical engineering student, beginning in his junior year.
He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1948. For
his master’s thesis he designed a high-speed polariscope for
analysis of dynamic stresses, while a co-op student at General
Radio Company. When he took Professor Leo Beranek’s course,
“Acoustics 101,” in the electrical engineering department,
he became very interested in the subject and asked so many
questions during class that he had to be told to give the others
a chance.
With his master’s degree, his G.I. Bill money would run
out and he was prepared, reluctantly, to leave MIT. Jordan
was forever grateful for Beranek’s help. Professor Beranek
encouraged him to go for his doctorate and arranged for him
to get the Armstrong Cork fellowship and other assistance. He
received scholarships in the MIT Acoustics Laboratory during
the next two years. Jordan had already taken most of the
courses in the electrical engineering department, so he chose
to register jointly in three departments: electrical engineering,
mechanical engineering, and physics. He became Beranek’s
first doctoral student. His thesis work was in the Acoustics
Laboratory, where he set up a novel means for measuring the
sound isolation of building partitions. Defense of his thesis
exam involved a committee with members from all three
departments. One committee member said that Jordan was a
stellar candidate and answered questions in all three fields,
not responding incorrectly to any. Jordan was appointed an
assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT the next
year. During that year he invented what became known
as the Baruch-Lang loudspeaker, which he patented. It was
a corner loudspeaker, with 4-inch loudspeakers in a vented
half-a-cubic-foot box. It received much acclaim, and several
thousand were sold.
The firm Bolt and Beranek was formed in 1948 and was
subsequently renamed Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN).
The business grew rapidly, and in the summer of 1951 Jordan
became a full-time employee. He seemed to know everything
and was quick to offer help to anyone on an eclectic array
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26 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
of subjects, from health and gardening to automobiles and
electronics equipment. He assisted in carrying out a number
of consulting jobs. This led to his invention of a structure for
reducing noise in ventilating ducts, called SOUNDSTREAM.
This patented design was licensed to two manufacturers.
In 1952, Jordan and Sam Labate were admitted into the
partnership, although the firm’s name was not changed.
In December 1953, with 39 employees, the company was
incorporated. Bolt was named chairman, Beranek president,
Labate vice president, and Baruch treasurer. Government
contracts started to pour in from the U.S. Army, Navy, National
Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, and
U.S. Department of Defense. BBN grew quickly. The U.S.
government decided to make the BBN contracts uniform and
set up a contract conference at BBN. Government procurement
regulations involved a number of volumes that occupied a
3-foot shelf. Jordan, with his photographic memory, sat down
and read the entire set. When the contract negotiators arrived,
they found him to be better informed than they were. At the
end of the second day, the government people came out of
the meeting obviously overwhelmed by Jordan’s proficiency.
Soon BBN had more government contracts than any other firm
in New England.
In 1961 it became apparent that BBN needed cash for
expansion. As treasurer, Jordan worked with the auditors to
produce a prospectus. An investment banker had to be selected,
and Jordan and Beranek interviewed several candidates. On
June 27, BBN made its initial public offering with Hemphill
Noyes as the winner, taking BBN public at $12 a share.
While at BBN, Jordan was a consultant to NIH. In addition
to acoustical consulting for the new clinical center, he designed
a colorimeter for monitoring blood during cardiac surgery and
developed a novel lighting system used in neurosurgery. He
designed other instruments for the medical fields. His friend
at NIH and director of the clinical center, Dr. Jack Mazur,
persuaded him to work on a computer system for medical
records.
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Jordan took an interest in the new computer field that BBN
was pioneering and that was called “time sharing.” With time
sharing, many operators could use a single computer, sharing
data as needed. Baruch soon envisioned this as a means of
bringing computer technology to bear on medical practice.
In 1962, contracts were obtained from NIH and the American
Hospital Association to install a demonstration computer
system for the information processing needs of Massachusetts
General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. As Professor Octo Barnett,
director of computer science at MGH, has written: “BBN’s time-
sharing technology was at the cutting edge of computer science,
and its use at MGH was one of the first demonstrations of the
potential power of remote access to a real, online data base.”
With Baruch as parent, the system allowed nurses and doctors
to create and access patients’ records at a number of hospital
stations, all connected to a central station. When Jordan was
installed as a regent of the National Library of Medicine, he
was introduced as the father of medical informatics.
Hospital use of computers looked so promising that in 1966
General Electric set up a new department to merchandise
hospital computer systems, called MEDINET. G.E. hired Baruch
as department general manager, and he left BBN to go to the
new building in Watertown, Massachusetts. Unfortunately,
after a period of time, G.E. mandated that a Digital Equipment
Corporation computer could no longer be used (like the one in
use at MGH). Instead, Jordan was required to adapt a midrange
G.E. computer system for the project. This was a computer that
G.E. had been unable to sell. Jordan and the staff members he
had hired tried desperately to modify it in a reasonable length
of time but found it impossible. Baruch developed, specifically
for MEDINET, a computer programming language called
FILECOMP. In 1968, Jordan left General Electric.
From 1968 to 1970, Jordan was president of Educom, a
consortium of 100 colleges and universities. Educom’s goal
was to help institutions adopt networking, computation, and
storage in the four principal college and university application
areas: administrative systems, teaching and learning, research,
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28 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
and community services. Jordan was particularly interested
in a system for sharing library resources, using microfiche
technology. The universities were not ready to enter this
cooperative venture. In 1970 he resigned so that he could work
full time as an independent consultant.
From 1971 to 1974, Baruch was a lecturer in business
administration at the Harvard School of Business Administra-
tion, where he could develop his ideas about the management
of technological innovation. His success there led him to
Dartmouth College, where he held a joint professorship at the
Tuck School of Business and the Thayer School of Engineering
from 1974 to 1977.
In 1963, Jordan had joined a group of 30 leading citizens
from the Boston area who applied for a license to operate a
television station on Channel 5 in Boston. They were successful,
and the station went on the air in 1972. It was featured in a
two-page article in the New York Times as “probably the best
television station in the U.S.” In 1982 the station was sold to
MetroMedia, and Jordan’s share in the receipts made him
well off. Afterward, he joined with his longtime friends Isaac
Auerbach and William Poorvu, as well as Howard Stevenson
from the Harvard Business School, to form an investment
firm—The Baupost Group. Under the leadership of Seth
Klarman, it has been highly successful. Jordan remained a
partner until he died.
While Jordan was at Dartmouth, he was invited, along with
other experts from around the country, by Under Secretary
of Commerce Sidney Harman to participate in a seminar in
Washington, D.C., to discuss the federal government’s role in
fostering innovation. As Harman relates in his memoir, Mind
Your Own Business (Crown Business, 2003), Baruch stood out
above the others, and Harman invited him to join the Carter
administration as assistant secretary of commerce for science
and technology. He moved to D.C. in 1977.
In his new position, Baruch aimed to foster innovations
and competitiveness in the United States. He led efforts to
modernize the Patent and Trademark Office, to transfer and
expand the Bureau of Standards into the National Institute
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J ORDA N B AR U C H 29
for Standards and Technology, and to examine industrial
innovation. While at the Commerce Department, he worked
with eminent industry leaders to establish the Commerce
Technical Advisory Board, and they provided President Carter
with an “Innovation Study” useful for that and subsequent
administrations.
Early in the administration, Baruch went on an Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) mission to China to
visit business fairs and factories. When, shortly after that trip,
the United States and China were about to sign an agreement
about transfer of science and technology, Baruch voiced his
concern that without management reform there would be little
advancement in productivity and the standard of living of the
Chinese people. His concern was based on observations he
and his colleagues had made on the IEEE visit. The Chinese
were very responsive and followed Baruch’s recommendation
to establish a school of management jointly with the United
States. Baruch was authorized to help hire staff, including
American professors and case writers for the new school
in Dalien, China. It was the first example of management
education in the People’s Republic of China.
Professor Bill Dill, first dean of the faculty at the National
Center at Dalien University of Technology, as it came to be
called, wrote of how the programs had grown, “built solidly on
the conceptual foundation and guidelines for implementation
that Jordan provided” (letter to Rhoda Baruch, Nov. 29, 2011).
He recalled that Jordan had negotiated for a computer from
Control Data Corporation and for a Xerox copier to be provided
for the Dalien campus, the first such machines for that part of
the world. In writing about Baruch’s 1979 mission to China,
Bruce Merrifield, who followed Jordan in the same position at
the Commerce Department, referred to it as a “critical turning
point for the country” (letter to Rhoda Baruch, Nov. 18, 2011).
Merrifield wrote that “most of China’s leaders are graduates
of that school.”
Another major achievement of Baruch while at the
Commerce Department was the establishment of the
Binational Research and Development Foundation (BIRD-F)
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in Israel, which Merrifield stated “may have been of even
greater significance” than the Chinese management school. In
addition to being a primary engine for the remarkable Israeli
economy, BIRD-F became the model for similar programs in
India, Chile, Finland, Ireland, and Iceland. Much of this was
done under Merrifield, but the initial model was Baruch’s.
Merrifield wrote: “BIRD-F has now become the primary model
which incrementally will be assisting some 80% of the world’s
7 billion population, living in underdeveloped countries, to
develop their economies as well! What a legacy!”
After leaving Commerce, Jordan established a consulting
firm in Washington, D.C., called Jordan Baruch Associates.
The firm has served industry and government in the planning,
management, and integration of strategy and technology.
Jordan also served on the Board of Regents of the National
Library of Medicine. He was involved in efforts to develop
industry strategies and to increase innovation in India,
Indonesia, and Israel. Baruch told of a humorous incident: “I
was involved in starting another management school in the
country Jordan despite the fact that ‘Baruch’ is a Hebrew word
well known in the Arab world. At the end of the conference
program, Crown Prince Hassan asked me, ‘Dr. Baruch, this
has been wonderful. What can we do for you?’ I responded,
‘I’d like the school named for me.’ There was dead silence.
Before anyone’s heart could stop I said, ‘Yes, I would like it
called the Jordan Institute.’ Crown Prince Hassan just smiled
and said, ‘Done.’ And that is what it is called.”
Baruch was associated with many organizations. In 1956
he was awarded the Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer
Award from Eta Kappa Nu. He was a fellow of the Acoustical
Society of America, the IEEE, the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, and the New York Academy of Sciences. His greatest
interest was the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to
which he was elected in 1974 and served on 24 committees after
1982. Of these he chaired the following: General Engineering
Peer Committee, Subcommittee on Educational Systems, Board
on Telecommunications/Computer Applications, and Panel
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on Techniques for Affordable Housing. In 2007 he received
the NAE’s Arthur M. Bueche Award for “the promotion of
innovation and managing of science and technology nationally
and internationally, thereby enhancing the economy of the
U.S. and developing nations.”
Finally, Jordan worked in Africa, India, Indonesia, and
Jordan, and he was honored by China and Israel. He founded
the Transatlantic Institute of the American Jewish Committee
and was a member of the American boards of Ben-Gurion
University and the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological
Research Foundation. In 2005 he established at MIT the Jordan
J. Baruch Fund to support undergraduates conducting research
for the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program in the
School of Engineering and the School of Science. Recipients
of the fund are known as Baruch Undergraduate Researchers.
Jordan held 12 patents and authored many articles. He
coauthored the book The Innovation Explosion (Free Press,
1997) with James Brian Quinn and Karen A. Zien. He served as
president of his synagogue, Adas Israel, in Washington, D.C.,
and was appreciated as a member of his neighborhood book
club in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was also a member of the
Cosmos Club for many years.
Jordan was a loving husband and partner for 67 years
to Rhoda Wasserman Baruch; an active and caring father
to Roberta Baruch (Bethesda Maryland), Marjory Baruch
(Fayetteville, New York), and Lawrence Baruch (Parsippany,
New Jersey). He passed on to his grandchildren a joy for life,
a curiosity for understanding, a passion for tinkering, and an
appreciation of art, science, and nature, while endowing them
with a sense of responsibility for family and the world. His
grandchildren (Mina, Solomon, and Sabrina Hsiang; Rebecca,
Max, and Julia Ostrov; and Benjamin, Alexander, and Rachel
Baruch) treasured their relationship with Grandpa.
