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minimal human intervention. In December 1940, Wiener’s proposal to turn his theoretical idea into reality was given a paltry $2,325 budget and stamped ‘secret’ by the newly formed section D-2 of the NRDC. Section D-2, which funded eighty projects to the value of around $10m during the course of the war, organised research on ‘fire control’ – systems for controlling artillery fire. The section was run by the director of the Rockefeller Institute, Warren Weaver, who two years earlier had coined the term ‘molecular biology’. 4
    Existing anti-aircraft systems could involve up to fourteen men: some spotted the plane, some identified its trajectory, others rapidly calculated where the aircraft was predicted to be, while a final group cranked the gun to the appropriate orientation and elevation and then fired. But if the pilot took evasive action after the shell was fired, it would miss its target – the calculations assumed the plane was flying in a straight line. Wiener’s bold idea was to find a mathematical formula for predicting where the plane would be, whatever the pilot did.
    By the winter of 1941, Wiener had used his mathematical skills to predict near-random movement by a target, and then to calculate an intercept course to the most probable destination points. Julian Bigelow, a talented young ex-IBM engineer with a taste for messing about with old cars who also happened to be an amateur pilot, was assigned to work with Wiener. The pair constructed a device that simulated the movement of a target aeroplane and the response of an anti-aircraft gun crew, by projecting beams of light onto the ceiling of Room 2–244 on the MIT campus by the Charles River Basin. 5 Wiener and Bigelow also went into the field and studied how real-life gunners behaved. Here Wiener made his breakthrough, as he noticed that the soldiers would take actions designed to respond to a pattern of movement by the aircraft. The gunner used knowledge about where he expected the plane to be and attempted to compensate for that predicted movement when calculating where to fire his gun. Wiener set about trying to describe this effect in mathematical terms. The stress began to tell as Wiener gobbled amphetamines – quite legal at the time – in an attempt to meet deadlines. He became irritable and even more garrulous than usual – hardly advisable for someone working on a top-secret project – and eventually had to kick his speed habit. As he later explained: ‘I had to give it up and look for a more rational way of strengthening myself to bear the burdens of war work.’ 6
    Wiener realised that the way the gunner responded to the movement of the aircraft meant that he was acting as part of a feedback system – a phenomenon that was well known from acoustics and engineering. Wiener discussed this insight with a friend from his student days, a Harvard physiologist called Arturo Rosenblueth. They realised that feedback was a common feature of many systems, both technological and natural, and could be seen in the behaviour and physiology of animals. Excited by their theoretical breakthrough, the two men announced their vision at a small scientific meeting held in New York in 1942. The two-dozen strong audience was composed of an eclectic mixture of neurophysiologists and psychologists, along with the husband and wife anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Rosenblueth’s speech, which described what he called ‘circular causality’ or feedback loops, was written up as a paper with Wiener and Bigelow and published under the title ‘Behaviour, purpose and teleology’ in the journal
Philosophy of Science
. 7 The use of the word teleology was deliberately provocative, as this concept explains phenomena in terms of their purpose, and purpose had been banished from polite scientific discourse for centuries. According to Aristotle, the ultimate explanation of natural phenomena was their purpose or final cause. For example, a dropped