Karl Küpfmüller, 1928: an early time-domain, closed-loop, stability criterion

Karl Küpfmüller was a German engineer who worked for eight years during the 1920s at Siemens & Halske in Berlin. During that time he carried out fundamental work on telegraphy and telephony, network theory, and the systems theory of electrical signal transmission. Like his contemporary in the US, Harry Nyquist, he derived fundamental results in information transmission and closed-loop modelling. In contrast to Nyquist, though, his name is not well-known in the English-speaking world. Indeed, little has appeared in English about him or his work – although his pioneering results in systems theory informed later American work, particularly through the contributions of Ernst Guillemin, a prolific writer of highly influential student texts and a great engineering educator at MIT, who was well-acquainted with the ideas of Küpfmüller (and other German electrical engineers)

A great disappearing act: the electronic analogue computer

One historian of technology has called the analogue computer 'one of the great disappearing acts of the Twentieth Century'. This paper will look briefly at the origins, development and decline of the electronic analogue computer .

ICT support at the British Open University for student projects at a distance

In recent years the British Open University has been providing increasing ICT support to distance learners carrying out projects within the Faculty of Technology and elsewhere in the University. This paper reports briefly on three generic research tools ..

The 'First All-Union Conference on Automatic Control', Moscow, December 1940

It is often claimed that classical control was a product almost entirely of the wartime laboratories of the USA and, to a lesser extent, the UK. This paper demonstrates, however, that by the end of 1940 the majority of the fundamental building blocks of this body of theory were also fairly widely known in the USSR. In particular, a conference held in Moscow in late 1940, but little known outside Russia, included papers on, and discussion of: the Nyquist criterion; operator methods; transient response; the use of the operator exp(-Tp) to model a time delay of T seconds; and the | z | < 0 criterion for the stability of a sampled-data system

Control engineering in WW2: reflections on the wartime infrastructure in the UK, USA, USSR, and Germany

WW2 saw the emergence of what control engineers now refer to as 'classical control'. This subject area grew out of electronics and telecommunications applications from the 1920s onwards. But WW2 was an enormous stimulus to both practical and theoretical control - especially for the development of servo-systems for anti-aircraft gunnery, and for flight and torpedo control systems. Of particular importance was the emergence of systems ideas that led to a common body of theory applicable to a wide variety of technical implementations. There was considerable commonality in the development of control engineering in the major Western warring countries: UK, USA, USSR and Germany. Yet the wartime infrastructure for research and development differed greatly from country to country. The US provided the best environment, under the umbrella of the National Defence Research Committee. The UK government, too, offered centralised support, with the Servo-Panel playing an important specialised role. Things were rather different in the USSR and Germany. One of the key centres of control engineering in the Soviet Union, the Institute of Automation and Remote Control, was evacuated when Moscow came under threat from the German invasion, and at least some key personalities were diverted to other activities. German control engineering flourished in a small number of centres, but there was no overall direction, apart from some work on standardisation by the engineering professional body Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (VDI). The paper will give a comparative review of wartime developments in control engineering in the above-mentioned countries, concentrating on the R&D infrastructure. Consequences for the discipline in the immediate aftermath of the war will also be briefly considered

Classic Papers in Information & Communication Technology

This page links to a number of translations of seminal papers in the development of the ICTs. The translator is Chris Bissell, a member of the ICT Department with a long-standing interest in the history of the subject. These translations are offered as a resource for individuals. Files may not be redistributed in electronic form or hardcopy. Please send any comments or corrections to the translator

The flow of scientific information between Russia and the West 1890 – 1960: the case of control theory

The theory of automatic control, in which Russia and the Soviet Union have played a major rôle for over 100 years, offers a fascinating case study of the two-way flow of scientific and technical information. The paper will concentrate on three periods: the late 19th and early 20th century (when Russian scientists and engineers tended to publish in both Russian and western European languages, normally French and German); the mid 20th century (when contacts were often frowned upon in the Soviet Union, and could even be dangerous); and the Cold War (when Russia and the West jockeyed for scientific superiority)

Mathematical 'meta-tools' in 20th Century information engineering

An examination of the professional practice of engineers in many disciplines reveals a history of engineers developing highly sophisticated tools to eliminate the need to ‘do mathematics’ in the conventional sense. This paper considers aspects of the history of a number of what I shall call mathematical ‘meta-tools’ in the fields of electronics, telecommunications and control engineering. I argue that, for most engineers, ‘doing mathematics’ has become something categorically different from the mathematics of physical scientists or mathematicians. The paper reviews the origins and changing fortunes of a number of classic information engineering meta-tools that appeared in the period just before or after the Second World War: the Nyquist and Bode plots (early 1930s); the Smith Chart (1939); the Nichols Chart (1947); and the root-locus technique (1948). The 1950s and 1960s saw an increasing mathematicization of engineering education, linked to the rise of the notion of ‘engineering science’ that was driven to a large extent by the legacy of WW2 research and development and the post-war funding environment in the USA and elsewhere. Such changes, and the arrival of digital computers, meant that the utility of the earlier diagrammatic tools was often played down or questioned. In recent years, however, such tools have been incorporated into powerful engineering software, where their function now is not to avoid computation, but to mediate between the user and the machine carrying out the computation