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the Templeborough Rolling Mills. This was a serious OR exercise, supported
by his company. The key ingredient, however, in moving from the simulation
to the cybernetic reality, was the U-machine, and, as Beer remarked in open-
ing his 1962 status report on biological computing, “everything that follows is
very much a spare time activity for me, although I am doing my best to keep
the work alive—for I have a conviction that it will ultimately pay off. Ideally,
an endowed project is required to finance my company's Cybernetic Research
Unit in this fundamental work” (1962b, 25). I quoted Beer above on tinkering
with tanks in the middle of the night, evidently at home, and Beer's daughter
Vanilla has, in fact, fond childhood memories of weekend walks with her fa-
ther to collect water from local ponds (conversation with the author, 22 June
2002). We are back once more on the terrain of amateurism, ten years after
Walter had worked at home on his tortoises and Ashby on his homeostat.
Again, then, a distinctive cybernetic initiative sprang up and flourished
for some years in a private space, outside any established social institution.
And, as usual, one can see why that was. Beer's work looked wrong. Tinkering
with tanks full of pond water looked neither like OR nor like any plausible
extension of OR. It was the kind of thing an academic biologist might do,
but biologists are not concerned with managing factories. The other side of
the protean quality of cybernetics meant that, in this instance, too, it had no
obvious home, and the ontological mismatch found its parallel in the social
world. I do not know whether Beer ever proposed to the higher management
of United Steel or to the sponsors of his consulting company, SIGMA, that
they should support his research on biological computing, but it is not sur-
prising that he should be thinking wistfully of an endowed project in 1962,
or that such was not forthcoming. We should, indeed, note that Beer failed to
construct a working U-machine, or even a convincing prototype. This is, no
doubt, part of the explanation for the collapse of Beer's (and Pask's) research
in this area after 1962. But it is only part of the explanation. The electronic
computer would not have got very far, either, if its development had been left
solely to a handful of hobbyists.
Of course, Beer did not carry on his cybernetics in total isolation. As men-
tioned above, having read Wiener's
Cybernetics
in 1950, he sought out and
got to know many of the leading cyberneticians in the United States as well
as Britain. In the process, he quickly became a highly respected member of
the cybernetics community which existed transversely to the conventional
institutions to which its members also belonged. It was Beer who first brought
Ashby and Pask together, by inviting both of them to a lecture he gave in the
