HERMANN SCHMIDT AND GERMAN ‘PROTO-CYBERNETICS’

Abstract

Histories of cybernetics, at least those in the English language, concentrate almost exclusively on its origins in the United States and UK, associated primarily with Norbert Wiener and colleagues, and in particular with the series of Macy conferences from 1946 onwards. Independent work was, however, carried out elsewhere. In Germany, Hermann Schmidt introduced the notion of Allgemeine Regelungskunde [general control theory] in the early 1940s, which bore many similarities to the almost exactly contemporary work of Wiener and colleagues. Schmidt's work was subsequently largely neglected during the rapid post-war dissemination of cybernetics ideas until it was, to a certain extent, rediscovered in Germany in the 1960s. There Schmidt is often credited, alongside Wiener, as one of the two ‘fathers’ of cybernetics. This article presents the nature and background of Schmidt's contributions and assesses their significance.

Keywords:

• communication studies
• ICTs
• politics
• cybernetics
• Hermann Schmidt
• history

Notes

All translations from German are by the author.

Even after the war, engineers from different branches of the profession found great difficulty in learning the new common language of control engineering, as discussed in Bissell (1994).

Gehlen was one of the speakers at the 1953 Tübingen conference mentioned above. For an introduction to his philosophical thought see Man: his Nature and Place in the World (Gehlen 1940, thoroughly revised in 1950). Gehlen was following an earlier German tradition dating back at least to Kapp (1877) of viewing technologies as ‘projections’ of human organs, and his approach influenced later German philosophers including Habermas (1969).