Cybernetics had many founders. It came out of a small, argumentative and rather wonderful network of people who rarely shared a field. Norbert Wiener has his own article in this series. Here are the others who shaped the first decade.
Arturo Rosenblueth (1900–1970)
A Mexican physiologist who worked with Walter Cannon at Harvard, the scientist who named homeostasis. Rosenblueth ran an interdisciplinary seminar in the 1930s where Wiener first met physiologists. He co-wrote the 1943 paper on purpose and feedback, then returned to Mexico City to build the Instituto Nacional de Cardiología, where Wiener spent long working visits. Wiener dedicated Cybernetics to him.
Julian Bigelow (1913–2003)
An engineer who worked with Wiener on the anti-aircraft predictor. Bigelow brought the practical knowledge of servomechanisms and the experience of watching how pilots behaved under fire. He was the third author on the 1943 paper and later became chief engineer of John von Neumann’s computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Warren McCulloch (1898–1969)
A neurophysiologist and psychiatrist with the manner of a poet and preacher. With Walter Pitts he wrote “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (1943), the paper that launched neural network theory. McCulloch chaired the Macy Conferences and drew in the people who made them work. He spent his later career at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. His life’s question was “What is a number, that a man may know it, and a man, that he may know a number?”
Walter Pitts (1923–1969)
The most tragic figure in the story, and one it is hard to write about without a lump in the throat. Pitts ran away from a violent home in Detroit as a teenager. At about twelve he spent three days in a library reading Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica and wrote to Russell pointing out errors. He later turned up in Chicago, homeless, attending lectures, and was effectively adopted by McCulloch’s family. He never earned a degree. After a break with Wiener in the early 1950s he withdrew, burned much of his work, and died in 1969, a few months before McCulloch.
John von Neumann (1903–1957)
The Hungarian-American mathematician behind game theory and the stored-program computer architecture. Von Neumann attended the early Macy meetings and treated the brain and the computer as two kinds of automata. His late work on self-reproducing automata asked how a machine could build a copy of itself, a question that fed into artificial life.
Margaret Mead (1901–1978) and Gregory Bateson (1904–1980)
The anthropologists of the group, and married from 1936 to 1950. They pushed the Macy Conferences to include social systems. Bateson went on to apply cybernetics to schizophrenia (the “double bind,” 1956), ecology, learning, and communication. His collection Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) is still one of the most widely read books in the field. Mead later gave the 1967 talk “Cybernetics of Cybernetics” to the American Society for Cybernetics, asking the field to apply its ideas to itself. That talk is often cited as the start of second-order cybernetics.
W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972)
A British psychiatrist who built the homeostat in 1948: four linked units that could find a stable state again after being disturbed, by changing their own wiring. Ashby wrote Design for a Brain (1952) and An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), the clearest textbook the field produced, and formulated the Law of Requisite Variety. He spent 1961–1970 at von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory in Illinois.
W. Grey Walter (1910–1977)
A neurophysiologist in Bristol who built small robotic “tortoises” (Elmer and Elsie, 1948–49) that wandered toward light and returned to their hutch to recharge. They showed that complex-looking behaviour could come from very simple circuits. His book The Living Brain (1953) brought cybernetics to a general audience.
Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002)
An Austrian physicist who arrived in the US in 1949, was put to work editing the Macy Conference transactions, and suggested naming the meetings after Wiener’s book. He founded the Biological Computer Laboratory (1958) and became the main figure of second-order cybernetics. He has a fuller portrait in the article on second-order protagonists.
What they shared
Few of them had conventional careers. Most crossed at least two fields. They argued constantly, and several friendships broke. What held them together was a question: how can a system made of matter behave with purpose, learn, and know?