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Technology and Culture 44.4 (2003) 843-844



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Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics. By David A. Mindell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv+439. $46.

This is a good and surprising book. It is good in its articulate survey of dynamic man-machine systems in the period from 1916 to 1948; it is surprising in its convincing revision of our picture of the origins of the computer and cybernetics. Much has been written about both, and little, it sometimes seems, is left to say. Yet David Mindell qualifies in important ways themes that are largely accepted by those of us who write about these developments: first, that cybernetics emerged from the genius of Norbert Wiener with the publication in 1948 of his book of that name; second, that the computer was largely the creation of the fertile imaginations of physicists and mathematicians, its parents those wonderful logic machines of Alan Turing and Johnny von Neumann; and, thus, that analog approaches are early and primitive while digital ones are modern and capable. Mindell argues not that such claims are wrong but that, in being taken for granted, they have impoverished a rich early history. In fact, seen aright, postwar and prewar concerns are all of a piece, exposing new dimensions of and displaying unfamiliar influences on the emergence of those cybernetic technologies that define our modern age.

Mindell grounds his argument in detailed portraits of the organizational cultures that defined four powerful institutions: the navy's Bureau of Ordnance, the Sperry Gyroscope Company, AT&T's Bell Labs, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Bureau of Ordnance and Hannibal Ford, in the years around World War I, worked to mechanize naval gunfire. Elmer Sperry and the Sperry Gyroscope Company joined the struggle to develop automated fire-control systems that combined in cybernetic fashion, Mindell argues, range finders, mechanical computers, gun directors, and human operators. During the interwar years, Sperry and his company developed automated control systems that enabled pilots and their machines to stay on course and defend themselves from aerial attackers. At AT&T, the effort to create a nationwide telephone system created both an institution, Bell Labs, and new theories as telephone engineers struggled to understand concepts of feedback, control, and the interconversion of speech and electrical signals in complex networks. At MIT, Vannevar Bush, Harold Hazen, and Gordon Brown developed the practical and theoretical expertise with analog computers and servomechanisms that enabled the electrical industry to model the behavior of power transmission systems.

Separated, however, by walls of institutional, intellectual, and heuristic difference, workers in each of these local cultures barely recognized the cybernetic concerns they shared. Then the walls collapsed under wartime [End Page 843] pressures. Under the organizational umbrella of Bush's NDRC and OSRD, Warren Weaver assembled in D-2—and then Division 7—experts from all of the prewar sites and made fire control and the "anti-aircraft problem" his special concern. By the war's end, Weaver and his colleagues had integrated local knowledge and practice, engineering both a new generation of automated, radar-guided gun directors and a new appreciation for the generalized problems of computation, feedback, prediction, and control in man-machine systems. When Wiener claimed a new worldview and discipline in 1948 with the publication of Cybernetics, he created for it an intellectual heritage that entirely erased the efforts of earlier decades and ignored, in fact, his own wartime contributions—a posture, Mindell suggests, that was a psychological consequence of Wiener's profound personal rejection of military research.

A more accurate reflection of cyborgian and cybernetic ideas rooted in earlier engineering practices might be, Mindell further suggests, George Philbrick's "supersimulator." Described in one of the 1946 volumes contributed to NDRC's summary technical report, Philbrick's device generalized wartime control systems: "As war became increasingly mechanical and automated, Philbrick wrote, the supersimulator would be capable of modeling entire battles: 'Warfare among [guided] missiles could thus be staged and observed entirely in the laboratory, possibly with statistical machinery in attendance...

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