A serendipity of mavericks: the Ratio Club and the British experience of cybernetics from 1949 to 1959

Thesis

This archivally rich and methodologically innovative thesis presents a history of a crucial, yet little known, episode in post-war British history. On 22 October 1948, Norbert Wiener, a venerable yet idiosyncratic American mathematician, published Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Confounding all expectations, the book became an instant success, and it spawned an international intellectual and cultural movement that laid the epistemological and ontological foundations for the Information Age.

Yet, despite its significance, cybernetics has all but vanished from the historical gaze. And, although Britain was one of the first, and most important, venues for the staging of the early experience of cybernetics outside America, this also has previously been neglected by historians.

Here, I examine the initial manifestations of the cybernetics movement in post-war Britain in the period from the end of the Second World War to the staging of the Mechanisation of Thought Processes Symposium at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington in 1958. Hitherto, such historiography of British cybernetics as there is, has concentrated on the Ratio Club; an informal cybernetics discussion group convened in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Wiener’s book. However, whilst the Ratio Club was the most visible manifestation of British cybernetics, and whilst it contained known characters such as Alan Turing, it was neither the totality of British cybernetics nor its most significant dimension.

I set the Ratio Club in the context of the wider British cybernetics experience, and locate this experience as whole in the yet wider post-war British context. I evaluate the historical significance of British cybernetics, domestically and internationally, with regard to its intersections with early computing, information theory, the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. I conclude that this exposition of the importance of British cybernetics changes our understanding of post-war British history.

Authors: Williams, C

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-e9zqdbpy4
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Alan Turing; history of AI; Norbert Wiener; Cartesian duality; Ratio Club; history of cybernetics; Ross Ashby; Gilbert Ryle; W G Walter; histiory of computing; mind body problem
• Subjects: Modern history; Science and civilization; Information technology--history; Technology--Great Britain--history; Technology--history