John Francis (Frank) Reintjes was born in Troy, N.Y., on Feb. 19, 1912, the son of George and Katherine (Lynch) Reintjes. Reintjes was a graduate of LaSalle Institute in Troy, N.Y., and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
During his career as an electrical engineer, educator and researcher, his work touched many of the technological advances of the 20th century. He began his career as an engineer with General Motors in Lockport, N.Y., and subsequently taught electrical engineering at Manhattan College in New York City.
Reintjes playfully described himself in a 2006 interview for the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems as “the man who came to dinnerand never left.” The dinner was a gathering in Boston of the Institute for Radio Engineers at which he met and was later invited by W.L. Barrow to become involved in the new radar school at MIT–ultimately joining the Institute in 1943. He would remain in academia, earning a faculty appointment at MIT in 1947.
Over his 65-year association with MIT, Reintjes’ research interests expanded from the areas of radar and electronics, and early information storage and retrieval, to applications of computer-communications technologies. After five years working as a research staff member in the Research Lab of Electronics, Reintjes was appointed as the director of the Servo Lab, where he remained for 21 years.
As the Servo Lab grew under Reintjes’ leadership, the emphasis focused increasingly on computerization of numerical control. Using the Whirlwind I computer, Reintjes and colleague Douglas T. Ross MS ’54 developed an automatic programming system for numerical control in two dimensions, collectively known as Automatically Programmed Tools (APT).
Although he referred to the early Servo Lab as a kind of “military job shop,” Reintjes was well aware of the need to build its theoretical and academic side. With added faculty through the 1950s, the lab, renamed the Electronic Systems Laboratory (ESL) in 1959, became a haven for not only master’s but also for doctoral studies. Annual reports in the 1960s gave testament. Thesis research averaged 47 per year–not only in electrical engineering, but spilling into chemical and mechanical engineering, physics, mathematics, biology, nutrition and food science and aeronautical and astronautical engineering. ESL continued to prosper, ultimately taking on its current, independent lab status and from 1978 on became the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).
James K. Roberge, was a professor of electrical engineering and a member of the MIT faculty since 1967.
Born in Jersey City, N.J., in 1938, Roberge went to MIT in 1956, earning his SB, SM, and ScD degrees, all in electrical engineering. For nearly all of his professional career, Roberge worked for MIT — from postdoc to full professor, a position he attained in 1976. Starting in 1969, Roberge also performed research as a visiting scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.
At Lincoln Lab, Roberge’s research interests in the areas of electronic circuits and systems design led him to work in a division involved in space communications, instrumentation, and optical communications. His designs have flown on nine satellites.
Vincent Chan headed the division at Lincoln Lab in which Roberge worked. Chan says that Roberge’s most important contributions were in ultrahigh-efficiency power converters for spacecraft and high-precision optical tracking electronics for space-laser communications.
“[Roberge] brought together his knowledge of circuit designs, control system theory, and a large dose of ingenuity to design these systems,” Chan notes. Despite the fact that some of Roberge’s work was done in the 1980s and 1990s, Chan says, “it still represents the state of the art.”
