Early History
The son of a grocer, Atwood was born May 25, 1924, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, 40 miles North of Boston. He lived on a small farm adjoining the ancestral home of the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Life on a small farm gave him a fascination with things mechanical and an appreciation for hard work. His parents' ambitions were to provide for him the opportunities they did not have. Following high school, Atwood was sent to Worcester Academy, a one-year college preparatory school. There he became very interested in things technical. Atwood attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with an interruption of service in Burma with the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1943 to 1946. When he returned to MIT, Atwood married Sue Harian, a graduate of Tufts University, and completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering. He served as a research associate in MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory from 1948 to 1952. The head of the instrumentation lab was Dr. C. Stark Draper, the father of inertial guidance and navigation. Under Draper, Atwood contributed numerous patents to the science and became an expert in navigation and guidance electronics and systems engineering.
Read more about this topic: Donald J. Atwood Jr.
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