rom the flyball governor to the logical neuron and the homeostat: how "control and communication in the animal and the machine" became a science for about twenty years, and then dissolved into several others. Dates are of publication unless noted.

in the tour: the room called "Governors and feedback" has a placard called "The Macy conferences" ···

1868	Maxwell, "On governors": the first mathematical analysis of feedback stability. Archive page.
1876	Vyshnegradskii gives engineers a usable stability condition for governed steam engines.
1877	Routh wins the Adams Prize with a general stability criterion; Hurwitz reaches an equivalent result independently in 1895.
1938	Shannon shows that relay and switching circuits can be analysed with Boolean algebra.
1940	Ashby argues that adaptive behaviour is a form of stability (Ashby, 1940).
1943	Rosenblueth, Wiener & Bigelow define purposeful behaviour through negative feedback (archive page); McCulloch & Pitts publish the logical neuron.
1946	The first of ten Macy Foundation conferences on what was soon called cybernetics meets in New York, with McCulloch in the chair; the series runs to 1953 (Heims, 1991).
1948	Wiener, Cybernetics (Wiener, 1948); Shannon, "A mathematical theory of communication" (Shannon, 1948). Ashby builds the homeostat.
1950	Grey Walter's electromechanical tortoises, built from 1948, reach a popular audience; his own account is in his 1953 book. Taylor attacks the 1943 account of purpose, and Rosenblueth & Wiener reply. Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings (Wiener, 1950); Turing's imitation game (Turing, 1950).
1952	Ashby, Design for a Brain (Ashby, 1952): ultrastability.
1953	Walter, The Living Brain (Walter, 1953), with a chapter on the tortoises.
1956	Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (Ashby, 1956): the law of requisite variety.
1958	Rosenblatt's perceptron (Rosenblatt, 1958): a trainable descendant of the logical neuron. Archive page.
1959	Lettvin, Maturana, McCulloch & Pitts, "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain".
1960	Wiener warns about machines that learn and act faster than their users can correct them; Licklider proposes "man-computer symbiosis".
1969	Minsky & Papert, Perceptrons: the limits of single-layer networks.
1970	Conant & Ashby: the good regulator theorem. Mayr traces feedback devices back to antiquity.
1991	Heims, The Cybernetics Group: the first full history of the Macy conferences.
1994	Galison, "The ontology of the enemy".
2000	Dupuy calls cybernetics the forgotten origin of cognitive science.
2004	Piccinini reassesses the 1943 neuron as the first computational theory of mind.
2010	Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: the British cyberneticians as builders of performative machines.
2015	Kline, The Cybernetics Moment.

what is contested

Where cybernetics came from. Galison (1994) traces Wiener's wartime work on anti-aircraft prediction, in which the enemy pilot was modelled as a feedback mechanism, and argues that this picture of the opponent shaped the whole field [paraphrase, not a quotation]. Kline (2015) places it instead among many wartime and post-war sciences of information and control, and shows how much its later reputation was made in popular writing [paraphrase, not a quotation]. Both differ from the participants' own story of a unified new science.

Whether it failed or won. Cybernetics as a named field faded in the United States in the 1960s, but its ideas went into control engineering, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and systems biology. Dupuy (2000) argues that cognitive science inherited its central idea, the mind as mechanism, and forgot where it came from [paraphrase, not a quotation]; Pickering (2010) argues that the British strand offered something AI did not take up: adaptive devices that act in the world rather than represent it [paraphrase, not a quotation].

Purpose. Whether the 1943 definition of purposeful behaviour explained teleology or redescribed it. See the archive page for Taylor's objections and the reply.

methodological critiques

Much of the early history relied on interviews with participants and on their memoirs, which tend to tell a story of a single founding moment; even Heims, the most thorough, is built largely on such sources. Bowker (1993) reads the field's claim to universality as a rhetorical strategy that let it enter many disciplines at once [paraphrase, not a quotation]. And a timeline like this one invites a straight line from governor to neural network; Mayr and Bissell show that the engineering lineage ran largely separately from the biological one.

later reception

Grey Walter's surviving tortoises have been restored, replicated and re-examined (Holland, 2003), and are often credited as ancestors of behaviour-based robotics. Ashby's variety and the good regulator theorem are still invoked in management and control theory, not always accurately. The worry Wiener raised in 1960, about systems that pursue a stated goal faster than people can intervene, is now argued over under the name of specification gaming.

Sources

1. Maxwell (1868). On governors. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. doi:10.1098/rspl.1867.0055
2. Vyshnegradskii (1876). Sur la théorie générale des régulateurs. Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences (Paris). English translation in Bissell (1989).
3. Routh (1877). A Treatise on the Stability of a Given State of Motion, Particularly Steady Motion. London: Macmillan. Scanned at the Internet Archive. archive.org/details/treatiseonstabil00routuoft
4. Hurwitz (1895). Ueber die Bedingungen, unter welchen eine Gleichung nur Wurzeln mit negativen reellen Theilen besitzt. Mathematische Annalen. doi:10.1007/BF01446812
5. Shannon (1938). A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits. Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. doi:10.1109/t-aiee.1938.5057767
6. Ashby (1940). Adaptiveness and Equilibrium. Journal of Mental Science. doi:10.1192/bjp.86.362.478
7. Rosenblueth, Wiener & Bigelow (1943). Behavior, Purpose and Teleology. Philosophy of Science. doi:10.1086/286788
8. McCulloch & Pitts (1943). A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. doi:10.1007/BF02478259
9. Heims (1991). The Cybernetics Group. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
10. Wiener (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Paris: Hermann; Cambridge, MA: Technology Press; New York: Wiley.
11. Shannon (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x
12. Taylor (1950). Comments on a Mechanistic Conception of Purposefulness. Philosophy of Science. doi:10.1086/287106
13. Rosenblueth & Wiener (1950). Purposeful and Non-Purposeful Behavior. Philosophy of Science. doi:10.1086/287107
14. Wiener (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
15. Turing (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind. doi:10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433
16. Ashby (1952). Design for a Brain. London: Chapman & Hall. The 1954 Wiley printing is scanned at the Internet Archive. archive.org/details/designforbrain00ashb
17. Walter (1953). The Living Brain. London: Duckworth.
18. Ashby (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall; New York: Wiley. Scanned at the Internet Archive. archive.org/details/introductiontocy00ashb
19. Rosenblatt (1958). The perceptron: A probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain. Psychological Review. doi:10.1037/h0042519
20. Lettvin et al. (1959). What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain. Proceedings of the IRE. doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1959.287207
21. Wiener (1960). Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation. Science. doi:10.1126/science.131.3410.1355
22. Licklider (1960). Man-Computer Symbiosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics. doi:10.1109/THFE2.1960.4503259
23. Minsky & Papert (1969). Perceptrons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
24. Conant & Ashby (1970). Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system. International Journal of Systems Science. doi:10.1080/00207727008920220
25. Mayr (1970). The Origins of Feedback Control. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
26. Galison (1994). The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision. Critical Inquiry. doi:10.1086/448747
27. Dupuy (2000). The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
28. Piccinini (2004). The First Computational Theory of Mind and Brain: A Close Look at Mcculloch and Pitts's “Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”. Synthese. doi:10.1023/B:SYNT.0000043018.52445.3e
29. Pickering (2010). The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
30. Kline (2015). The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
31. Bowker (1993). How to be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-70. Social Studies of Science. doi:10.1177/030631293023001004
32. Bissell (1989). Stodola, Hurwitz and the genesis of the stability criterion. International Journal of Control. doi:10.1080/00207178908953500
33. Holland (2003). Exploration and high adventure: the legacy of Grey Walter. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. doi:10.1098/rsta.2003.1260

see also