Jacob Rabinow

Biography

Jacob Rabinow was born in Kharkov, Russian Empire, modern day Ukraine, in 1910. After what he calls a too eventful life as a child in Russia and Siberia during the revolution, his family moved to China in 1919, and came to the United States in 1921. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1933 with a BS in Engineering, and with a graduate degree in Electrical Engineering in 1934.

Jacob Rabinow spent the depression years at various jobs and was appointed a Mechanical Engineer at the National Bureau of Standards in 1938. There he worked on ordnance devices during the war and became Chief of the Electro-Mechanical Ordnance Division.

In 1954, he left the Government to form his own engineering company. In 1964, his company joined Control Data Corporation and until 1972 he was Vice President of that company and Head of the Rabinow Advanced Development Laboratory.

In 1972, he rejoined NBS, serving as Director, Programmatic Center for Consumer Product Safety; Chief, Office of Invention and Innovation; and Chief Research Engineer, Institute for Applied Technology.

In 1975, Mr. Rabinow retired from full-time service and was a retired annuitant at the NBS. His duties included the evaluation of energy related inventions and the review. of rcpons related to consumer product technology.

Jacob Rabinow held 209 patents. Among these are the automatic. regulation of clocks used in American automobile, the automatic letter-sorting machine used by the U.S. Post Office, many safety mechanisms for ordnance devices, and phonograph record-playing equipment.

For his scientific work, he held the following honors: The Exceptional Service Award of the Department of Commerce (1949); the President's Certificate of Merit (1948); the War Department Certificate of Appreciation (1949); the Naval Ordnance Development Award (1945); a Certificate Commendation from the NDRC (1945); the Edward Longstreth Medal from the Franklin Institute (1959); the CCNY Engineering School's 5th Anniversary Medal (1969); the Jefferson Medal Award from the New Jersey Patent Law Association (1973); and a Certificate from the American Law Association (1973).

He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Philosophical Society of Washington, Sigma XI, and a Fellow of the IEEE.

Mr. and Mrs. Rabinow resided in Bethesda, Maryland. They had two daughters, one of whom was an attorney in New York City and the other a computer programmer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mr. Rabinow's hobbies were tennis, photography, inventing and building gadgets for himself and his friends, and building and listening to Hi Fi equipment.