Frank Rosenblatt drowned on his 43rd birthday

Frank Rosenblatt, who built the perceptron and demonstrated that a machine could learn to classify patterns from examples, died young and abruptly. According to the Cornell Chronicle, “in 1971, he drowned while sailing a sloop called the Shearwater in Chesapeake Bay on his 43rd birthday.” He was then directing the Cognitive Systems Research Program at Cornell. His perceptron work, dismissed and underfunded in his lifetime, turned out to be roughly sixty years ahead of the hardware and data that would finally make trainable neural networks dominate AI.