Project Whirlwind

concepts which others had created, translating these concepts into hardware (and, in the case of the computer, into software, too, as it turned out), designing hardware which would operate reliably, and developing hardware until it was ready for production. The record shows that diverse activities within Project Whirlwind moved back and forth along the R & D spectrum, in and out of the invention phase, the phase, and the innovations, or production-technology, phase. The record further indicates their unorthodox R & D talent by these events: when the federal defense establishment and Lincoln Laboratory made it clear that they wanted the Whirlwind group to spend more and more of its time at the and innovations end of the R & D spectrum, first Forrester left to engage in personal as a professor of industrial management at M.I.T., and then Everett left, taking a large contingent with him, and started the MITRE Corporation to engage in electronic systems activities for the Air Force at the concept and and design end of the computer R & D spectrum. Perhaps we should consider seriously the possibility that Project Whirlwind confronts us with falsifying evidence that disconfirms the validity of our theoretical model of the R & D process as consisting of three distinctive phases: creative, developmental, and innovational. On the other hand, we may save this model simply by noting that Project Whirlwind covered more of the R & D spectrum than our first expectations led us to believe. In either case, the model fails to predict many problems that arose, their order and rate of solution, or the overall rate of progress of the enterprise. It appears to be a strictly static, historical-hindsight kind of model capable of rationalizing and sorting into descriptive cubbyholes the events known to have occurred but incapable of penetrating to any analytical level of generalization that accounts for the dynamics of the R & D process. The Schumpeter-Galbraith-Phillips family of economic models, in attempting to explain how and R & D interact with market conditions, gives a larger role than it enjoyed in the case of Project Whirlwind. Obviously, there is scientific knowledge produced of R & D, the fruits of which R & D makes use of, but the idea that provides a reservoir of knowledge essential to the continuing vitality of the R & D process may be a romantic notion of our time that is considerably overrated and that the Whirlwind experience severely qualifies. Thus, the more immediate scientific origins of automatic digital computation are to be found, in fact, not only among the activities of such mathematicians and physicists involved personally in R & D at the time as Babbage, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 06:05:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms An Unorthodox Development Project 463 Mauchly, and von Neumann, but also among the mathematical engineering activities of such men as Caldwell, Bush, Crawford, Forrester, and Everett.36 Exogenous was here less influential than knowledge that had already become science. Indeed, the rapidity with which events moved in the pioneering days of the computer suggests that the exogeneity of fundamental scientific and understanding may be less significant in the 20th century than thefusion of with technology that has come to be known as the R & D process. This observation in no way denigrates the special contributions and creativity of any of the heroic pioneers in computer history, but it may help to place them more usefully in the context of the distinctively social enterprise called R & D that caused the digital computer to evolve so swiftly. An explanation of R & D progress which invokes the concept of does not explain the block diagram contribution of Everett and the magnetic-core storage contribution of Forrester. These were grounded in and made possible by the logicalmathematical techniques and the understanding of phenomena which the men possessed as professionally educated engineers; originally knowledge in mathematics and electronic theory had already passed into the engineering curricula and became in this instance, as Perry Crawford's master's thesis of 1942 makes abundantly clear.37 Finally, with respect to the practical judgments which administrators have to make, any policy view of the relationship of scientific understanding (so-called pure research) to engineering application which sets up a distinction between outside and inside as regarded from an R & D or an economics perspective, is likely to do mischief. It uncritically encourages the notion that exogenous science may be some kind of polar opposite to indigenous science, that there is an essential difference in the kind of inquiry involved, in the same sense that basic research is commonly regarded as standing opposed to applied research, and that development funds (second phase) are not supposed to be spent for either advanced research (first phase) or innovations-technology (third phase) activity. Such distinctions encourage policymakers and 3Babbage's failure to develop a working machine a century earlier than the others is explained not by viewing him as a hero ahead of his time but by recognizing that he was not adept at reducing his abstract conceptions to practice. He was, unfortunately, an R & D dunderhead. 37P. O. Crawford, Jr., Automatic Control by Arithmetical Operations (submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1942). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 06:05:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Aeronautics · Political science · Whirlwind · Economic Growth and Productivity · Engineering · Mechanical Engineering

• The mechanical monster and discourses of fear and fascination in the early history of the computer

  Open Access•Hannah Grenham•Humanities and Social Sciences…•2020

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