Research in the History of Control Systems

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How did the field of control engineering--that branch of engineering devoted to the control of machinery, vehicles, systems, processes and even human machine operators--develop during the twentieth century in parallel with broader social anxieties about technology as an autonomous or `out-of-control` force? This study examines the idea and embodiment of control from 1916 through 1945, developing case studies of the Navy Bureau of Ordnance and its contractors who developed technologies of `fire control,` the Sperry Company and its concept of `feedback engineering,` Bell Laboratories' work on feedback amplifiers for long-distance information transmission, and work on analog computers and the `theory of servomechanisms` undertaken in the Electrical Engineering department of MIT. It goes on to examine how the National Defense Research Committee drew together these four lines of work during World War II. The project develops and extends the PI's dissertation work, taking advantage of two new sources of archival material, the Bureau of Ordnance records on fire control, for the years 1926-40, which have only now become available, and the recently-declassified records of NRDC Division 7 (which oversaw fire control). The final product of this research will be a book.