GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 56

In the second Grey Walter Memorial Lecture, the veteran EEG researcher
W. A. Cobb told a story of wartime shortages of equipment and of how he
eventually obtained a special timer from the wreckage of a crashed Spitfire
(Cobb 1981, 61). We can take this as iconic of the conditions under which
British cybernetics developed. Wiener worked on a well-funded military proj-
ect at the cutting edge of research at MIT, the very heart of the U.S. military-
academic complex; like Cobb, Walter and the other British cyberneticians
cobbled together their creations from the detritus of war and a couple of
centuries of industrialization. 24 The electronic components of machines like
the tortoise were availably cheaply as war surplus (Hayward 2001b, 300),
and, as Walter said, other parts were salvaged from old clocks and gas meters.
If Wiener's cybernetics grew directly out of a military project, Walter's was
instead improvised in a material culture left over from the war.
One last remark on the origins of British cybernetics. Inescapably associ-
ated with the notions of the amateur and the hobbyist are notions of sheer
pleasure and fun. Just as there is no reason to doubt that Walter intended the
tortoises as a serious contribution to brain science, there is no reason to doubt
that he had fun building them and watching them perform. This theme of hav-
ing fun is another that runs through the history of British cybernetics and again
presents a stark contrast with that of cybernetics in the United States, where
the only fun one senses in reading the proceedings of the Macy Conferences is
the familiar and rather grim academic pleasure of the cut and thrust of schol-
arly debate. The chairman of the meetings, Warren McCulloch (2004, 356), re-
called: “We were unable to behave in a familiar, friendly or even civil manner.
The first five meetings were intolerable. Some participants left in tears, never
to return. We tried some sessions with and some without recording, but noth-
ing was printable. The smoke, the noise, the smell of battle are not printable.”
Of the many conventional boundaries and dichotomies that British cybernet-
ics undermined, that between work and fun was not the least.
We can turn from the origins of British cybernetics to its propagation.
Walter made no secret of his hobby; quite the reverse: he publicized the
tortoises widely, engaging with at least three rather distinct audiences which
we can discuss in turn. The first audience was the general public. According
to Owen Holland (2003, 2090), “by late 1949, Grey Walter was demonstrating
Elmer and Elsie, the first two tortoises, to the press, with all the showmanship
that some held against him,” and the first major press report appeared in the
Daily Express on 13 December 1949, written by Chapman Pincher. The BBC
TV newsreel mentioned above followed in 1950, and so on. Outside the world
of journalism, Walter himself wrote for a popular readership. The principal