Schwarzgerat ...

[Dave Monroe]

... don't know if anyone's responded yet to your question, Hank, but,
for better (I think) or worse (you be the judge), you're in.  Just keep
posting (pynchon-l at waste.org) is all that's left.  In the meantime, a
little something from Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical
Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
Finding all sorts of things in my
archaeological/speleological/Orphic/Dante-esque descent into my personal
Merton College Library here ...

A final remark is perhaps needed on the black box metaphor employed
repeatedly in this book.  I use it in two closely related ways.  The
first is to refer to a guidance or navigation system that does not
require input from the outside world to operate.  This, for example, is
the sense in which the term was used in the first extant paper on the
topic by inertial guidance pioneer Charles Stark draper: "For the
greatest practical effectiveness [a] navigational system must be able to
function as a self-contained unit without dependence on information
obtained by the exchange of natural or artificial radiation with the
Earth or other aircraft.  The ideal arrangement is a 'black box.'"  In
the other meaning, a black box is opaque in a slightly different sense.
It is a technical artifact--or, more loosely, any process or
program--that is regarded as just performing its function, without any
need for, or perhaps any possibility of, awareness of its internal
workings on the part of users. (26)

... Mackenzie is citing here Charles Stark Draper and "Group B,"
Fundamental Possibilities and Limitations of Navigation by Means of
Internal Space References (February 1947), p. 29.  Chapter 2 of
Inventing Accuracy discusses this document at length, as well as, hey
hey hey, "Guiding the V-2" (see pp. 50-60, inc. diagrams and photos of
actual "schwarzgeraten").  But I've long wondered (and little worked
out) if there is not some "signal bleed" betwixt the "black boxes" of
ballistic guidance systems and the "black-body radiation" so critical to
Max Planck's development of quantum physics.  See, e.g., Thomas Kuhn,
Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 ...