In 1957, Frank Rosenblatt invented the Perceptron—the first machine learning device to capture the world’s imagination and a foundation for modern AI. Yet the man behind this breakthrough has been largely forgotten. He died at 43, his deeply private life leaving almost no public record.
To recover his story, professor James Dobson and lecturer Rena Mosteirin leaned into their complementary strengths. Perceptron, the husband-and-wife duo’s new co-authored book, is one half experimental poetry, the other critical biography—a hybrid format designed to illuminate an intellectual whose public work spanned psychology, computer engineering, astronomy, and the arts, but whose personal life remains elusive.
Dobson, an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing who served last year as Dartmouth’s special advisor to the provost for AI, and Mosteirin, a lecturer in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, dove into Rosenblatt’s story during the pandemic. They built on research Dobson had collected for a prior book, interviewing people who knew Rosenblatt and poring over archived materials.
What emerged was a portrait of a singular mid-century academic whose intellectual pursuits were as deep as they were divergent. His Perceptron—a machine that could teach itself to recognize visual patterns—was so radical that one newspaper greeted its 1958 demonstration with the headline “Shades of Frankenstein!” Yet Rosenblatt’s legacy extends far beyond the machine that made him briefly famous.
In this Q&A, Dobson and Mosteirin explain how the book’s hybrid format captures an elusive life—and why Rosenblatt’s story still matters today.
Frank Rosenblatt
What was the inspiration for telling Frank Rosenblatt’s story now?
James Dobson: I first started thinking about him with my last academic book, The Birth of Computer Vision, and I wrote a whole chapter about the Perceptron in that book. I did a lot of archival research, and I found so many interesting things that were not relevant to an academic analysis of the Perceptron—they were too biographical, too personal. But I started speculating and wondering more about him. I realized I couldn’t write about many of these things that I wanted to, so we started chatting about Frank, and who this person was, and found him really compelling.
Rena Mosteirin: It was the pandemic, we were alone in our house writing and reading. For certain projects you want to talk to certain people about things, and we were talking about Frank so much. And as I was writing the poems, the person I was kind of writing them for was Jed, because he was the person who introduced me to Frank Rosenblatt, who knew who he was. It was inspiring me to do this experimental poetic thing—I was really playing around, and I wasn’t thinking this was going to be a book project. But as we were talking about these ideas, I was exploring them through poetry and it kind of, one day, was like we have a book’s worth of interesting material here.
What made you want to tell this story in this way, combining experimental poetry with a more traditional, biographical format?
RM: Nothing Frank did was traditional. He was a very broad thinker. He was interested in many different things, so to really represent his life correctly this could not be a normal intellectual history. We wanted to represent the broadness and the strangeness. He was an artist, he was looking at the stars, he was doing research with rats—he was doing so much and to represent him in a book that reads in a linear way would be to deform his legacy, which was so creative and so radical. He wasn’t a scientist who went to the lab every day.
JD: One of the only non-scientific publications of his that we have is a poem, and it’s an interesting text to begin with. It’s the one thing we have in his voice that isn’t written for the public. It’s his private voice.
RM: Because I do experimental poetry, and because he was erased from a lot of the history, a lot of what I’m doing here is erasure. Abbreviated lines, taking text that exists and cutting it up, blocking things out, because his life was shortened—he was only 43 when he died. How do you show that impact of what he could’ve done, what he could’ve been? We needed to chop it up. It couldn’t be a big tome like he lived 100 years.
JD: Without more material in his voice, we needed this speculative space and I think the poetry gave the book a way of giving voice to that.
What were some of the challenges to assembling this story in this way?
JD: One of the big ones was the lack of material in his voice. My training was in American literature, autobiography, and I’ve read lots of biographies, letters from major authors. And with Rosenblatt, we had the material that was sent to him. We had nothing that he had sent to other people, so we really had to assemble the life from the little patches that we had, make connections between different fragments and try to find a story to tell from all of that. He seemed like such a private person, too. We talked to people who lived with Frank who didn’t know he was Jewish—and his father had been this extremely important Jewish figure, he saved people’s lives, rescuing them from the pogroms.
RM: But how much did he feel like he needed to be private, and how much of that was what he wanted? Would he, as a gay Jewish person, if he was out, would he have been able to get funding from the Navy to do the research he wanted to do? We don’t have the full story because we can’t talk to him. Maybe he was fearless but just very shy. We just don’t know.
This isn’t your first time working together on a book project. How would you describe your collaborative process? How has it evolved?
RM: I teach poetry workshops and I love talking with a group of people about new work. All that is great and interesting, but I don’t think there’s anything quite as motivating as when you know someone is going to be reading your work with their whole heart, with the whole background information that Jed had about Frank Rosenblatt, having introduced me to him in the first place. I feel like that’s a huge gift as a writer. It’s so wonderful to have someone read your work who’s on the same page with you in that.
JD: In both of our projects that we’ve co-authored together there’s a way in which Rena’s erasures and other creative work with the material helps expose the meaningful things in the subject. She’s doing these close readings of the work and drawing attention to ideas and concepts. I think there’s a way in which our work is iterative and reading each other, going back, helps us fine-tune these ideas and helps me revise my account.
RM: I don’t think I would’ve put together a book of work responding to Frank Rosenblatt’s life and the Perceptron in this way just as a book of poetry. I don’t think it would work. I think it definitely needs some of the intellectual stuff. But also if it was just that intellectual history, it wouldn’t be Frank, right?
How well do you feel like you know Rosenblatt now?
JD: I’ve written a lot about him. I think about his work and about him quite a bit. I teach a class right now where we started the term reading one of Frank Rosenblatt’s first publications and then some of my work—I feel like it’s probably a bit of a joke that I’m always talking about Frank Rosenblatt. But I do feel a little protective of him.
RM: It’s really important to honor his spirit, for me. I feel like I kind of developed a crush on him as we were going through all of this. There is something he was doing that I want to do as a thinker. I want to be more like him. I want to have the ability to do a bunch of things and have some of them fail. That was part of his life. I find myself thinking about his life, not even in terms of what he achieved but what he failed at, and how it frees up all of this space to just dream and do weird things.
What is one thing about Rosenblatt you hope readers take away from this book?
JD: He tried so many different things and was a bit of an amateur in both senses of the term, right? One who loves and one who’s trying something out of their comfort zone. I think that’s really powerful, to go work in different fields. He was trained in psychology, yet he built a computer, built this very large machine and software that would simulate that machine—and did it twice. Then he moved to working on animals and astronomy. I think there’s an inspiration to try different things and experiment. And I’d like to recover some of that … I think the Silicon Valley narratives are pretty boring in comparison to Frank’s moment.
RM: Similar to the other book project we did together, Moonbit, I’d like for people to take in this project and maybe if they also see the world through the lens of poetry to be emboldened to create a poetic take on something that they are obsessed with, and not to back away from that. People might not understand it, and that’s OK. But just do it.