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relating to the aiming errors of air gunners. Goal-seeking missiles were literally
much in the air in those days; so, in our minds, were scanning mechanisms. . . .
The two ideas, goal-seeking and scanning, . . . combined as the essential me-
chanical conception of a working model that would behave like a very simple
animal.” Craik was a young experimental psychologist and protocybernetican,
who died at the age of thirty-one in a bicycle accident in Cambridge on 18 May
1945, the last day of World War II in Europe. He was very much the British
Wiener, even more heavily involved in military research into gun aiming and
the like during the war, and there are clear echoes of Wiener's wartime work
on autonomous weapons systems in this quotation from Walter.
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And though
there is no evidence that Walter ever sought to develop the tortoise for such
purposes, if one wanted to find a
use
for it, an obvious thing to do would be to fix
a gun next to the guiding photocell or fill its body with explosives detonated by
the contact switch. And Walter was certainly well aware of such possibilities. At
the end of his technical description of tortoise construction, he stated that “the
model may be made into a better 'self-directing missile' by using two photocells
in the usual way” (1953, 291-92).
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Walter's contribution to brain science was thus also a contribution to the
history of engineering and robotics (on which more below). And beyond the
technical realms of brain science and robotics, the tortoises also found a place
in popular culture. They were not simply technical devices. Walter showed
them off and people liked them. He demonstrated the first two tortoises,
Elmer and Elsie, in public in 1949, though “they were rather unreliable and
required frequent attention.” Three of the tortoises built by Bunny Warren
were exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951; others were demonstrated
in public regularly throughout the 1950s. They appeared on BBC television
(Holland 2003, 2090-91, gives an account and analysis of a 1950 BBC news-
reel on the tortoises). Walter set them loose at a meeting of the British Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science, where they displayed a lively interest
in women's legs (presumably attracted to the light-reflecting qualities of nylon
stockings: Hayward, 2001b).
This popular appeal, in turn, manifested itself in at least two lines of sub-
sequent development. One was an embryonic eruption into the toy market: a
tortoise was sent to the United States after the Festival of Britain as the proto-
type for a line of transistorized children's toys—which never went into pro-
duction, alas (Holland 1996, n.d.; Hayward 2001b). One can now, however,
buy construction kits for devices which are clearly versions of the tortoise.
Along another axis, the tortoise entered the world of science fiction and popu-
lar entertainment. In the BBC's long-running
Doctor Who
TV series, I find it
