Charles M. Herzfeld

Charles M. Herzfeld (June 29, 1925 – February 23, 2017) was an American scientist and scientific manager, particularly for the US Government. He is best known for his time as Director of DARPA, during which, among other things, he personally took the decision to authorize the creation of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.

Herzfeld was born in Vienna, Austria; he is the nephew of Karl Ferdinand Herzfeld, the accomplished physical chemist (brother of his father, August). After the Nazi takeover of Austria, since they were Catholic Monarchists, he and his mother fled Austria, criss-crossing Europe and two years later emigrated to the United States; he became an American citizen in the late 1940s.

He received a BS degree in engineering from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (1945) and a PhD degree in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago (1951). While at Chicago, he attended a lecture by John von Neumann about von Neumann's early work on computers, a lecture which had a profound influence on him.

He first worked as a physicist; from 1951 to 1953 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland, and from 1953 to 1955 at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. He then spent several years with the National Bureau of Standards.

He moved to DARPA (or ARPA as it was called at that point) on September 29, 1961 to coordinate the Project Defender program, an early ballistic missile defense program.

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