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By Root 1907 0

oscillation to detect pirate listeners, it was making pioneering use of what a generation of researchers in the 1930s-1940s came to recognize as a general class of physical phenomena. These phenomena occurred across a range of systems the outputs ofwhich "fed back" into the system itself: gun-control devices, engine governors, electronic circuits. All could in principle be treated as mathematically isomorphic. Tackling them as such, mathematicians and engineers like Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, and Norbert Wiener developed a theory of what they called information. Piracy and patenting took on new and central roles in that theory.34 Wiener in particular took the commitments to openness voiced in the AT&T furor and by proponents of liberalism like Plant and Polanyi, and articulated for them a place in the creation of an information age.

From his arrival at MIT, an institution closely allied to AT&T and Bell Labs, Wiener devoted himself to research in electronics and commu- nications.35 He developed a theoretical approach that he termed "generalized harmonic analysis" for resolving signal and "noise" in amplifiers and wave filters. He and a Chinese doctoral student, Yuk Wing Lee, used the approach to develop a filtering circuit that could be used in telephone systems, recording devices, and broadcasting (where it promised to eliminate interference). Its fate was to prove symptomatic. Wiener and Lee filed patent applications and licensed their device to a subsidiary of Warner Brothers called United Research Corporation. Lee took a job with URC to bring it to market, parrying increasingly angry demands from MIT, in the person ofVannevar Bush, that he conform to scientific norms by publishing his design.36 Warner was considering using the device in moviemaking; but Lee already talked more ambitiously of "wired radios." The latter was an AT&T project, akin to P. P. Eckersley's vision in Britain, to use carrier waves in coaxial cables for telephony or even television.37 It all proved premature. Warner was in poor health, the Depression was relentless, and URC went to the wall. Lee took to calling it "United Research Corpse." The pair looked to Europe, hoping that Siemens or Telefunken Klangfilm (an audio and movie company) might take up their invention. But the prospect of piracy and endless litigation deterred them. In the end, their circuit suffered the iconic fate of inventions in the contemporary patents conflict: Bell Labs bought up the rights as part of AT&T's strategy of sweeping up all relevant patents, and it was never heard of again.38 The experience made the conflict a matter of immediate experience for Wiener, and he never forgot it.

It was reinforced after Lee, now unemployed, returned to Shanghai. There he operated a radio service for the Ministry of Finance for a while, and then took a professorship at Tsing Hua University in Beijing. Wiener paid him a visit, and they designed a new, multipurpose wave filter circuit -one flexible enough to be mass produced and used throughout a telephone network, as well as in amplifiers, televisions, and phonographs. AT&T bought it, of course. But the giant paid only $5,ooo - hardly the fortune they had hoped for- and never put it to use. For Lee the sale still proved crucial. Stranded behind Japanese lines, he used his share to buy an antiques store and survived the war that way. But Wiener felt confirmed in his conviction that the corporation had bought their patent solely to suppress it.39

Back in America, Wiener embarked on the research in antiaircraft systems that famously led him to project a science of control and communication in general. He came to recognize that "oscillation" could throw many different kinds of mechanical or electronic systems into chaos. For example, a device to predict an aircraft's flight path might go into "violent oscillation" if the target changed course. He already knew all about oscillation in "howling" radios, and had heard that oscillation could have destructive effects in ships' gun turrets too. The neurophysiologist Arturo Rosenblueth later