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David A. Mindell
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Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) Illustrated Edition

by David A. Mindell (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 15 ratings
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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.

As a new way to conceptualize the history of computing, this book will be of great interest to historians of science, technology, and culture, as well as computer scientists and theorists. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics

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  1. ISBN-10
    0801868955
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0801868955
  3. Edition
    Illustrated
  4. Publisher
    Johns Hopkins University Press
  5. Publication date
    October 11, 2002
  6. Part of series
    Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology
  7. Language
    English
  8. Dimensions
    7 x 1.37 x 10 inches
  9. Print length
    456 pages
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

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

Review

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

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press; Illustrated edition (October 11, 2002)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 456 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0801868955
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0801868955
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.45 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.37 x 10 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 15 ratings

About the author

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David A. Mindell

David A. Mindell

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Electrical engineer, historian, and entrepreneur. Co-Founder and partner at Unless, a new investment firm focused on supporting companies at the forefront of industrial transformation.

Founder and Executive Chairman at Humatics with a mission to revolutionize how people and machines locate, navigate and collaborate.

A Professor of Aerospace Engineering at MIT, David is an expert on robotic navigation and human interactions with autonomous systems in air, sea, and space. As Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, David is a leading authority on generations of inventors, engineers, entrepreneurs, and workers within the great arcs of technological change. He has led or participated in more than 25 oceanographic expeditions, written six books, and is an inventor on 34 patents in RF navigation, autonomous systems, and AI-assisted piloting. He also spent five years as a Department Head at MIT. David co- Chaired MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future. David has undergraduate degrees from Yale and a Ph.D. from MIT.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
15 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

F. R Anscombe
5.0 out of 5 stars Very valuable contribution to the history of computing
Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2004
Verified Purchase
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.
14 people found this helpful
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Santiago Carassale
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, a great work in humanities and technoscience
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2022
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Is a very demanding work, the author really knows the history of engineering and at the same time the historical conditions of the genesis of "abstract thinking", the practical problems of control, feed back, information and noise, but the genesis of the cybernetic style of thinking, the first steps of digital computing. I think that one of the topics more important in the work is the relation between analog and digital computing. As Thomas P. Huges says: "A rare historian who insightfully understand both the creators of technology and the technology they create, David Mindell engagingly tells a story of technological change in an organizational context"
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Subtitle missing
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2008
Verified Purchase
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.
9 people found this helpful
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Gustav Derkits
5.0 out of 5 stars An important book on the early history of information theory, computation, and control.
Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2016
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The author has done a service to the history of technology by thoroughly researching original work that is now almost forgotten in today's fully digital world. This book is especially useful in discussing the role of information and computing as elements of feedback control, with careful attention to the human element and analog signals and computation. The importance of military necessity as a driving force for technical advances through the world wars and intervening time is made clear. An excellent piece of research and good writing about difficult topics. The only missing part is recognition of Shewhart's statistical quality control as a relegated field in the same time frame.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars This book fills a large gap in technical history, ...
Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2016
Verified Purchase
This book fills a large gap in technical history, showing how communications and control systems theory complemented each other and gave birth to the first digital computing machines. ENIAC after all did not just fall out of the sky!
One person found this helpful
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Greg
5.0 out of 5 stars An absolutely amazing read.
Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2015
This is how fire control computers used in WW2 work and where/how their theory of operation was developed. An absolutely amazing read.
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Top reviews from other countries

Lucacr
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 27, 2014
Verified Purchase
Fascinating but possibly limited account of what "control" meant before digital. You get a peek of the "stone age" of data communications and human/machine interface.
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