In the early 20 century
Contemporary cybernetics began in the 1940's as an interdisciplinary research that connects the area of control systems, theory of electrical circuits, engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology, neuroscience. Electronic control systems date back to the work of the engineer Bell Telephone Laboratories Harold S. Black in 1927 on the use of negative feedback to control amplifiers. The ideas are also relevant to the biological work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the general systems theory.
Early application of negative feedback in electronic circuits include control of artillery units and a radar antenna during the Second World War. Jay Forrester, graduate student in Laboratory Servomechanisms the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked during World War II with the Gordon S. Brown, on the improvement of electronic controls for the U.S. Navy, and later used these ideas to public entities such as corporations and the city as the original organizer of the Industrial School of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Forrester is known as the founder of system dynamics. W. Edwards Deming, the guru of integrated quality management, for which Japan has appointed its chief post-war industrial prize, was a young specialist at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1927 and may have been influenced by the network theory (in Russian - Network Analysis). Deming made a "understand Systems" one of the four pillars of what he described as "deep knowledge" in his book "New Economy".
Numerous studies led by the connection in this area. In 1935 Russian physiologist Peter Kuzmich Anokhin published a book in which it was studied the concept of feedback ( "reverse afferentatsiya"). Investigation and mathematical modeling of regulatory processes were lengthy research effort, and two key articles were published in 1943. These works were "Behavior, purpose and teleology" Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow; work "logical calculus of ideas, Standing in the excited Activities" Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.
Cybernetics as a discipline has been firmly established Wiener, McCulloch and others, such as W. Ross Ashby and W. Grey Walter.
Walter was one of the first to build autonomous robots to assist in the study of animal behavior. Together with the United States and Britain, an important geographical location of early cybernetics was France.
In spring 1947, Wiener was invited to the congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy, France. The event was organized by Bourbaki, the French scientific community, and the mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899-1983), uncle of the world-famous mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.
During this stay in France Wiener received the offer to write an essay on the theme of this part of applied mathematics, which is found in the study of Brownian motion and in telecommunication engineering. The next summer, is already in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce neologism cybernetics into his scientific theory. Name Cybernetics was coined to denote the study "targeted the mechanisms" and was popular through his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication study of animal and machine. (Hermann & Cie, Paris, 1948). In Britain, it became the center for the Ratio Club.
At the beginning of the 1940th John von Neumann, a well-known for his work in mathematics and computer science, has made a unique and unusual addition to the world of cybernetics: Von Neumann cellular automata and their logical extension of von Neumann Universal Constructor. The result of these deceptively simple mental experiment is the notion of self, which is adopted as the basic cybernetic concept. The notion that the same properties of the genetic reproduction of a social mimu, living cells, and even computer viruses, is a further proof of the universality of some amazing cybernetic research.
Wiener promote social values of cybernetics, following the analogy between automated systems (such as an adjustable steam engine), and human institutions in his best-seller The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).
At the time, but little research organizations focused on cybernetics, Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, under the direction of Heinz von Foerster, was the main center of cybernetic research for nearly 20 years, beginning in 1958.