Opening Black's Box: Rethinking Feedback's Myth of Origin

Abstract

Like any modern episteme worthy of the name, the theory of feedback has a myth of origin. On a sunny August morning in 1927, Harold Black, a twenty-nine-year-old systems engineer, rode the Lackawanna ferry to work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Many Bell engineers lived in New Jersey, and on the early morning ferry rides across the Hudson to the Manhattan laboratories they frequently gathered on the forward deck. This morning Black stood alone, staring at the Statue of Liberty, and had an epiphany: "I suddenly realized that if I fed the amplifier output back to the input, in reverse phase, and kept the device from oscillating (singing, as we called it then), I would have exactly what I wanted: a means of canceling out the distortion in the output." 1 As it happened, the New York Times that day contained [End Page 405] a blank page, and Black sketched his idea, "a simple canonical diagram of a negative feedback amplifier plus the equations for the amplification with feedback." He rushed into work, asked a technician to wire up a prototype, and gave birth to a foundational circuit of modern electronics. This story has become enshrined as one of the central "flashes of insight" in electrical engineering in this century, periodically retold as an inspiration for engineers. 2 A common textbook on control engineering reprints the story of Black's vision verbatim in the first chapter. 3

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