Customer Reviews

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Professor Mindell has rendered a great service to the history of computing through painstaking original research that supports this well-written book. He examines how civilian mathematicians, engineers, and scientists worked on the practical problem of improving the effectiveness of anti-air-craft fire during World War II. AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and U.S. Navy contractors like Sperry Gyroscope and Ford Instruments collaborated in this interdisciplinary endeavor. Fire control entailed obtaining data on incoming planes or missiles, projecting their course, and computing an intercepting solution. Analog computers were proven and suited for this circumstance.
Mindell's book sheds valuable light on the contributions of many brilliant technologists, among them Thornton Fry, Harold Black, Harry Nyquist, George Stibitz, Hendrik Bode, and Claude Shannon from Bell Labs, and Harold Hazen, Gordon Brown, Norbert Wiener, and Samuel Caldwell of MIT. His book also adds further evidence of the extraordinary legacies of Vannevar Bush and Warren Weaver. During World War II, Bush headed the National Defense Research Committee that provided an avenue for civilian scientists to contribute toward military technologies. Bush chose his friend mathematician Weaver from the Rockefeller Foundation to steer the important project of fire control. Going beyond Mindell's book, Princeton mathematicians were involved in fire control, since the university was then the epicenter of U.S. mathematics, including Sam Wilks, Merrell Flood, John W. Tukey, Brockway McMillan, among others. Later in the war, Weaver shifted out of managing fire control into leading other NDRC applications of mathematics to problems of WWII. This story has not been told.

Quite interesting book, but should have a subtitle: "US Army and US industry perspective". Book concentrates almost exclusively on military applications, mostly gyroscopes, autopilots and fire controllers, designed and made in the USA for US Army. It looks like nothing was happening in the area of automatic control and computing in other places of the world.

It would be good to inform the author that "Shannon Theorem" is elsewhere known as "Kotelnikov-Shannon Theorem", and it would be good to recommed him a book like "Theory of Oscillations" by Andronov, Vitt and Khaiking published by Dover in 1966. This book is reprit of a book published in Soviet Union in 1937. Book is in large part about feedback in nonlinear control systems and describes methods of analysis that are currently used.

Although interesting, this book addresses only small slice of history of automatic control before the era of electronic computers.