Life
Bigelow studied electrical engineering and mathematics at MIT. In 1940 Wiener chose him as his engineering partner on a wartime project to predict the future position of an aircraft so that anti-aircraft fire could hit it. In 1946 John von Neumann hired him as chief engineer of the electronic computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he remained, as a permanent member of the institute, for the rest of his life.
Influences
Working beside Wiener, Bigelow brought the engineer’s practical knowledge of servomechanisms and noise to the mathematician’s theory. At Princeton von Neumann’s logical design set the problem; Bigelow’s job was to make it work with unreliable vacuum tubes.
Contributions
The anti-aircraft work forced Wiener and Bigelow to model the pilot and the gun system together, as a single feedback loop in which each adjusted to the other. That insight, generalised with Arturo Rosenblueth in “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (1943), became one of the founding ideas of cybernetics. Bigelow attended the Macy Conferences.
At the IAS he built the computer, completed in 1951, that turned von Neumann’s stored-program design into working hardware. Because the design was published freely, it was copied by many laboratories around the world and shaped the architecture of early computers.
Why it matters today
Bigelow sits at the point where cybernetics and computing separated: he helped found both. His work on the predictor is an early case of designing a system in which human and machine behaviour cannot be modelled apart, a central problem in human-AI interaction.
Further reading
- George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral (2012)
- Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy”, Critical Inquiry (1994)
Mentioned in
- Article A Brief History of Cybernetics
- Article The Philosophy Behind Cybernetics
- Concept Behavior, Purpose and Teleology
- Community Macy Conferences
- Person John von Neumann
- Person Arturo Rosenblueth
- Person Norbert Wiener