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Heron's regulator, Drebbel's thermostat, and Watt's governor bestowed on their vessels a wisp of self-control, sensory awareness, and the awakening of anticipation. The governing system sensed its own attributes, noted if it had changed in a certain respect since it last looked, and if it had, it adjusted itself to conform to a goal. In the specific case of a thermostat, the tube of alcohol detected the system's temperature, and then took action or not to tweak the fire in order to align itself with the fixed goal of a certain temperature. It had, in a philosophical sense, a purpose.

Although it may strike us as obvious now, it took a long while for the world's best inventors to transpose even the simplest automatic circuit such as a feedback loop into the realm of electronics. The reason for the long delay was that from the moment of its discovery electricity was seen primarily as power and not as communication. The dawning distinction of the two-faced nature of the spark was acknowledged among leading German electrical engineers of the last century as the split between the techniques of strong current and the techniques of weak current. The amount of energy needed to send a signal is so astoundingly small that electricity had to be reimagined as something altogether different from power. In the camp of the wild-eyed German signalists, electricity was a sibling to the speaking mouth and the writing hand. The inventors (we would call them hackers now) of weak current technology brought forth perhaps the least precedented invention of all time -- the telegraph. With this device human communication rode on invisible particles of lightning. Our entire society was reimagined because of this wondrous miracle's descendants.

Telegraphers had the weak model of electricity firmly in mind, yet despite their clever innovations, it wasn't until August 1929, that telephone engineer H. S. Black, working at Bell Laboratories, tamed an electrical feedback loop. Black was hunting for a way to make durable amplifier relays for long-distance phone lines. Early amplifiers were made of crude materials that tended to disintegrate over use, causing the amp to "run away." Not only would an aging relay amplify the phone signal, it would mistakenly compound any tiny deviation from the range it expected until the mushrooming error filled and killed the system. What was needed was Heron's regula, a counter signal to rein in the chief signal, to dampen the effect of the perpetual recycling. Black came up with a negative feedback loop, which was designated negative in contrast to the snowballing positive loop of the amplifier. Conceptually, the electrical negative feedback loop is a toilet flusher or thermostat. This braking circuit keeps the amplifier honed in on a steady amplification in the same way a thermostat hones in on a steady temperature. But instead of metallic levers, a weak train of electrons talks to itself. Thus, in the byways of the telephone switching network, the first electrical self was born.

From World War I and after, the catapults that launched missiles had become so complicated, and their moving targets so sophisticated, that calculating ballistic trajectories taxed human talent. Between battles, human calculators, called computers, computed the settings for firing large guns under various wind, weather and altitude conditions. The results were sometimes printed in pocket-size tables for the gunmen on the front line, or if there was enough time and the missile-gun was common, the tables were mechanically encoded into an apparatus on the gun, known as the automaton. In the U.S., the firing calculations were compiled in a laboratory set up at the Navy's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where rooms full of human computers (almost exclusively women) employed hand-cranked adding machines to figure the tables.

By World War II, the German airplanes which the big guns boomed at were flying as fast as the missiles themselves. Speedier on-the-spot calculations were needed, ideally ones that could be triggered from measurements of planes in flight made by the newly invented radar scanner. Besides, Navy gunmen had a weighty problem: how to move and aim these monsters with the accuracy the new tables gave them. The solution was as close at hand as the stern of the ship: a large ship controlled its rudder by a special type of automatic feedback loop known as a servomechanism.

Servomechanisms were independently and simultaneously invented a continent apart by an American and a Frenchman around 1860. It was the Frenchman, engineer Leon Farcot, who tagged the device with a name that stuck: moteur asservi, or servo-motor. As boats had increased in size and speed over time, human power at the tiller was no longer sufficient to move the rudder against the force of water surging beneath. Marine technicians came up with various oil-hydraulic systems that amplified the power of the tiller so that gently swinging the miniature tiller at the captain's helm would move the mighty rudder, kind of. A repeated swing of the minitiller would translate into different amounts of steerage of the rudder depending on the speed of the boat, waterline, and other similar factors. Farcot invented a linkage system that connected the position of the heavy rudder underwater back to the position of the easy-to-swing tiller -- the automatic feedback loop! The tiller then indicated the actual location of the rudder, and by means of the loop, moving the indicator moved the reality. In the jingo of current computerese, What you see is what you get!

The heavy gun barrels of World War II were animated the same way. A hydraulic hose of compressed oil connected a small pivoting lever (the tiller) to the pistons steering the barrel. As the shipmate's hand moved the lever to the desired location, that tiny turn compressed a small piston which would open a valve releasing pressurized oil, which would nudge a large piston moving the heavy gun barrel. But as the barrel swung it would push a small piston that, in return, moved the hand lever. As he tried to turn the tiller, the sailor would feel a mild resistance, a force created by the feedback from the rudder he wanted to move.

Bill Powers was a teenage Electronic Technician's Mate who worked with the Navy's automated guns, and who later pursued control systems as explanation for living things. He describes the false impression one gets by reading about servomechanism loops:

The sheer mechanics of speaking or writing stretches out the action so it seems that there is a sequence of well-separated events, one following the other. If you were trying to describe how a gun-pointing servomechanism works, you might start out by saying, "Suppose I push down on the gun-barrel to create a position error. The error will cause the servo motors to exert a force against the push, the force getting larger as the push gets larger." That seems clear enough, but it is a lie. If you really did this demonstration, you would say "Suppose I push down on the gun-barrel to create an error...wait a minute. It's stuck."

No, it isn't stuck. It's simply a good control system. As you begin to push down, the little deviation in sensed position of the gun-barrel causes the motor to twist the barrel up against your push. The amount of deviation needed to make the counteractive force equal to the push is so small that you can neither see nor feel it. As a result, the gun-barrel feels as rigid as if it were cast in concrete. It creates the appearance of one of those old-fashioned machines that is immovable simply because it weighs 200 tons, but if someone turned off the power the gun-barrel would fall immediately to the deck.

Servomechanisms have such an uncanny ability to aid steering that they are still used (in updated technology) to pilot boats, to control the flaps in airplanes, and to wiggle the fingers in remotely operated arms handling toxic and nuclear waste.

More than the purely mechanical self-hood of the other regulators like Heron's valve, Watt's governor, and Drebbel's thermostat, the servomechanism of Farcot suggested the possibility of a man-machine symbiosis -- a joining of two worlds. The pilot merges into the servomechanism. He gets power, it gets existence. Together they steer. These two aspects of the servomechanisms -- steering and symbiosis -- inspired one of the more colorful figures of modern science to recognize the pattern that connected these control loops.