Textbooks and subtexts. A sideways look at the post-war control engineering textbooks which appeared half a century ago

Abstract

Textbooks have to be rewritten in whole or in part in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. This process can be observed in the new textbooks issuing from the "quiet revolution" that marked the emergence of control engineering as a discipline. By the end of the 1940s, such texts had already begun to present a unified and coherent view of control, free from the debate and even controversy that had often accompanied the early post-war technical presentations at engineering meetings. To gain a better understanding of the origin of these coherent textbook presentations, we need to look behind the engineering and beyond the texts themselves. This article will therefore consider both the technical content of the early control classics in English, German, and Russian, and the wider environment within which they were written and published.

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