W. Ross Ashby Builds the Homeostat

From the history of automatons to early robots, but especially around this time post WWII, people started dreaming of "Thinking Machines." Not just "mindless" instruction followers but machines capable of their own thought like the human brain. That includes adaptability. The homeostat was one of the first devices capable of adaptation by mimicking supposed brain functions by reaching equilibrium with pivoting magnets.

At Barnwood House, a psychiatric hospital in Gloucester, England, W. Ross Ashby and his laboratory assistant Denis Bannister completed the homeostat in March 1948 from four ex-RAF bomb control units. Again we see technology and war's close ties. Ashby himself was a central figure of the post-war British cyberneticists.

Each unit carried a pivoted magnet and fed its output to the other three. When a magnet swung too far, a stepping switch gave its unit new circuit values, drawn from a table of random numbers, until all four magnets settled at the center again. Ashby called this ultrastability. In January 1949 Time called the machine “the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man.” Ashby set out the theory in Design for a Brain (1952).

While the homeostat's complicated and esoteric functioning no longer persists mechanically, the ideas that the machine pointed to would become some of the most relevant and important in the decades to today.