The Human Being as a Fundamental Link in Automatic Control Systems

Abstract

Introduction by David Mindell Norbert Wiener’s popular 1948 book, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, is often cited as originating the analogy between people and machines, and between feedback control and human behavior. Wiener always presented it as the work of his lone genius, but there were important precedents to Cybernetics, as well as other currents of a similar nature, already flowing in engineering. Consider, for example, Harold Hazen’s 1941 memo, “The Human Being as a Fundamental Link in Automatic Control Systems,” (see Figure 1) duplicated in its entirety starting on page 34. The memo shows an earlier synthesis of such notions, already pervasive among a group of researchers working on wartime technology—researchers who were approaching problems of humans and machines with engineering techniques. In 1941, Harold Locke Hazen was professor and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT. In the 1930s, while a graduate student and then a young professor in the department, he worked closely with his advisor, Vannevar Bush, on the development of a computer called the “Differential Analyzer”—what we would today call an analog, mechanical computer. While addressing some of the practical difficulties of that machine, Hazen had written a seminal paper on “Theory of Servomechanisms,” which showed how the phenomena of regulating systems—what would later be called “feedback mechanisms”—were common across numerous types of machinery, from governors on steam engines to voltage regulators in electric power systems. In a well-known move that laid the groundwork for much of the U.S. science and technology efforts in World War II, Bush moved to Washington, D.C. in 1939 to become head of the Carnegie Institution. The following year, he received Franklin Roosevelt’s personal approval to set up an innovative research and development agency, the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Among other accomplishments, the NDRC established a “uranium committee” that would morph into the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. A key early component of the NDRC Document