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

by David A. Mindell (Author) "In 1934, at the height of the machine age, Lewis Mumford laid out his vision for technology and human development..." (more)
Key Phrases: pip matching, naval control systems, cinema integraph, Bell Labs, Sperry Gyroscope, Ford Instrument (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"This is a terrific book, well written and distinguished for its solid scholarship, technical expertise, and historical sophistication." -- —Michael S. Mahoney, Princeton University --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"[Mindell's] account of this complex story of engineering, people, and organizations -- academic, industrial and govenment -- is well researched and well told." -- Stuart Bennett, International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing

"While one might think a history of servomechanisms, feedback loops, and fire control systems would be of interest only to a narrow audience, one of David A. Mindell's great achievements in this rich and multilayered book is to show the centrality of control systems -- the machines (and humans) that control machines -- to the history of computing, the history of technology, and indeed to American history in the twentieth century." -- Ross Bassett, American Historical Review

"In contextualizing the theory of cybernetics, Mindell gives engineering back forgotten parts of its history, and shows how important historical circumstances are to technological change... Mindell is scrupulous about providing this historical context; providing biographical insight into the major players in the history; and giving the reader a good sense of what it was like to be a Bell Labs scientist, or an engineer for Sperry." -- Michele Tepper, Networker

"The book is an eye-opener in understanding who our engineering ancestors were and what they did." -- David L. Elliott, IEEE Control Systems Magazine

"In an exceptionally insightful and lucid account, Mindell shows how engineering cultures emerging in specific institutional contexts profoundly shaped the design of human--machine systems and defined the human operator as part of a larger technological system." -- Slava Gerovitch, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

"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." -- Larry Owens, Technology and Culture

"The reader who makes the effort to follow Mindell's argument will be rewarded with a fresh insight into the emergence of the digital computer and all that its invention implies." -- Paul E. Ceruzzi, Journal of American History

"This book is the first major study by a professional historian and as such should help to draw the attention of historians to the embeddedness of feedback control in 20th century technological systems." -- Stuart Bennett, International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing

"A joy for both engineers and historians... Mindell's major contribution is to explore in abundant and fascinating detail the intellectual and physical roots of cybernetics in fields as distinct as communications engineering, military fire control, and analog computing." -- Karl D. Stephan, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

"A rare historian who insightfully understands both the creators of technology and the technology they create, David Mindell engagingly tells a story of technological change in an organizational context. In Between Human and Machine, he provides a revealing account of a search for controls in a twentieth-century world of complex systems." -- Thomas P. Hughes, author of Rescuing Prometheus and American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970

"This is a terrific book, well written and distinguished for its solid scholarship, technical expertise, and historical sophistication." -- Michael S. Mahoney, Princeton University

"David Mindell's Between Human and Machine successfully takes on the daunting task of exploring the machines behind the cybernetic decades of mid-century. It is a book of range and depth, moving from the sophisticated new weapons systems of World War II to the technologies, including the computer, that so marked the postwar era. By digging deep into the machines themselves, into the problems of feedback and stability -- but also into management and political context -- Mindell brings us a real sense of this transformative moment in the history of technical culture. The implications of this alteration in the concept of a machine will be with us for a long time to come, and this book is a first-rate place to understand its origins." -- Peter L. Galison, Harvard University

"Mindell's authoritative mastery of the disparate technologies he traces will secure this book an influential place in the historiography of science and technology in World War II." -- Alex Roland, Duke University

"Masterful! Between Human and Machine is an insightful and highly readable account of the people and the ideas that paved the way for modern computing." -- M. Mitchell Waldrop, author of Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal

"Engineering education, research and practice of the past half century was deeply influenced by the systems built during World War Il. In this perceptive book, David Mindell shows that systems built during the decades before the war and the concepts underlying them played a key role in the success of the war effort." -- Joel Moses, Institute Professor and Professor of Engineering Systems and Computer Science, MIT

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Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (September 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801880572
• ISBN-13: 978-0801880575
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #454,430 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very valuable contribution to the history of computing, November 2, 2004

By	F. R Anscombe (Indiana, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

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.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Subtitle missing, December 12, 2008

By	lew "lwndw123" (Connecticut, USA) - See all my reviews

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.