Subsidiary of Raytheon | |
Founded | 1948 |
Founder | Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt |
Headquarters | Cambridge, Massachusetts, US |
Website | www |
BBN Technologies (originally Bolt, Beranek and Newman) is an American high-technology company which provides research and development services. BBN is based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. It is a military contractor, primarily for DARPA, and also known for its 1978 acoustical analysis for the House Select Committee on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. BBN of the 1950s and 1960s has been referred to by two of its alumni as the "third university" of Cambridge, after MIT and Harvard. In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brown Medal.
BBN became a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon in 2009. On February 1, 2013, BBN Technologies was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
Founded in 1948, by Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Bolt's former student Robert Newman. Bolt, Beranek and Newman started life as an acoustical consulting company. Their first contract was consultation for the design of the acoustics of the United Nations Assembly Hall in New York. Subsequent commissions included MIT's Kresge Auditorium (1954), Tanglewood's Koussevitzky Music Shed (1959), Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall (1962), the Cultural Center of the Philippines (1969) and Baltimore's Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall (1978). Experts at the company examined the Richard Nixon tape with the 18.5 minutes erased during the Watergate scandal and the Dictabelt evidence which was purportedly a recording of the JFK assassination.