Between Human And Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics

by Mindell, David A.

• ISBN13: 9780801880575
• ISBN10: 0801880572
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-09-01
• Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV PRESS

Summary

Today, we associate the relationship between feedback, control, and computing with Norbert Wiener's 1948 formulation of cybernetics. But the theoretical and practical foundations for cybernetics, control engineering, and digital computing were laid earlier, between the two world wars. In Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics, David A. Mindell shows how the modern sciences of systems emerged from disparate engineering cultures and their convergence during World War II. Mindell examines four different arenas of control systems research in the United States between the world wars: naval fire control, the Sperry Gyroscope Company, the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Vannevar Bush's laboratory at MIT. Each of these institutional sites had unique technical problems, organizational imperatives, and working environments, and each fostered a distinct engineering culture. Each also developed technologies to represent the world in a machine. At the beginning of World War II, President Roosevelt established the National Defense Research Committee, one division of which was devoted to control systems. Mindell shows how the NDRC brought together representatives from the four pre-war engineering cultures, and how its projects synthesized conceptions of control, communications, and computing. By the time Wiener articulated his vision, these ideas were already suffusing through engineering. They would profoundly influence the digital world. As a new way to conceptualize the history of computing, this book will be of great interest to historians of science, technology, and culture, as well as computer scientists and theorists. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics

Author Biography

David A. Mindell is the Frances and David Dibner Associate Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor, which was awarded the Society for the History of Technology's Sally Hacker Prize and is also available from Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: A History of Control Systems	1	(18)
Naval Control Systems: The Bureau of Ordnance and the Ford Instrument Company	19	(50)
Taming the Beasts of the Machine Age: The Sperry Company	69	(36)
Opening Black's Box: Bell Labs and the Transmission of Signals	105	(33)
Artificial Representation of Power Systems: Analog Computing at MIT	138	(37)
Dress Rehearsal for War: The Four Horsemen and Palomar	175	(10)
Organizing for War: The Fire Control Divisions of the NDRC	185	(22)
The Servomechanisms Laboratory and Fire Control for the Masses	207	(24)
Analog's Finest Hour	231	(29)
Radar and System Integration at the Radiation Laboratory	260	(16)
Cybernetics and Ideas of the Digital	276	(31)
Conclusion: Feedback and Information in 1945	307	(16)
Appendix A: Algorithm of the Ford Rangekeeper Mark 1	323	(4)
Appendix B: NDRC Section D-2 and Division 7 Contracts for Fire Control	327	(9)
Appendix C: Algorithm of Bell Labs' T-10 Director	336	(3)
Notes	339	(54)
Bibliography	393	(24)
Index	417