Research in the History of Control Systems

控制工程领域——致力于机械、车辆、系统、过程甚至人类机器操作员的控制的工程分支——在20世纪如何与更广泛的社会对技术作为一种自主或“失控”力量的担忧并行发展？本研究考察了1916年至1945年间控制的概念和体现，发展了海军军械局及其承包商的案例研究，这些承包商开发了“火控”技术，斯佩里公司及其“反馈工程”概念，贝尔实验室在远程信息传输的反馈放大器上的工作，以及在麻省理工学院电子工程系进行的模拟计算机和“伺服机制理论”的工作。它继续研究了国防研究委员会如何在第二次世界大战期间将这四条工作线结合在一起。该项目发展和扩展了PI的论文工作，利用了两个新的档案材料来源，一个是军械局关于火控的记录，1926-40年，现在才可以获得，另一个是NRDC第七部最近解密的记录（负责监督火控）。这项研究的最终成果将是一本书。

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.