Between Human and Machine

[Dave Monroe]

Between Human and Machine
Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics
David A. Mindell

PAPERBACK
9780801880575 HARDBACK
9780801868955
2004 456 pp., 46 halftones, 36 line drawings

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.

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

David A. Mindell PhD '96
October 10, 2002
Running Time: 01:18:41

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/20

Cf., e.g., ...

"For some reason the children of America conceived around this time a
simultaneous and psychopathic craving for simple gyroscopes, the kind
which are set in motion by a string wound around a rotating shaft,
something like a top.  Chiclitz, recognizing a market potential there,
decided to expand.  He was well on the way to cornering the toy
gyroscope market when along came a group of school kids on a tour to
point out that these toys worked on the same principle as a
gyrocompass.  'As wha,' said Chiclitz.  They explained gyrocompasses
to him, also rate and free gyros." (V., Ch. 8, Sec. iv, p. 227)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=53752
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=53753
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=54033
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70536
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0408&msg=9275
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0911&msg=144976