Blackwell Reference Online

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Heron of Alexandria (first century ad ) was the first chronicler of a peculiar mechanism capable of holding the flame of oil lamps steady. Later, similar mechanisms were found in water clocks. In the eighteenth century, they reappeared in the regulator of Watt's steam engine, which drove industrial production. Since 1910, engineers have called them servomechanisms. Norbert Wiener (1948, 1950) , mathematician at MIT, realized that the theory underlying them had far wider applications, linked them to communication, and called the study of these phenomena “cybernetics … the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine” (→  Communication: History of the Idea ). He derived “cybernetics” from the Greek kybernetes or “steersman.” Before him, Ampere had used the word to designate a science of government, without, however, developing the idea. Cybernetics became established during a series of interdisciplinary meetings held between 1944 and 1953. It brought together some of the most important postwar intellectuals, including Wiener, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Alex Bavelas, and became known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics ( Heims 1991 ). Erving Goffman presented his early sociological ideas at these meetings as well. Cybernetics quickly expanded its conceptions to ... log in or subscribe to read full text