29 AUGUST 1952, Page 18

Cybernetics

Sm,—To answer Mr. Haigh's question I quote from the introduction to Professor Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (John Wiley & Sons. 1948): " We have decided to call the entire WA of control and communication theory, whether in the machine, or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek cybernetes ' or steers- man. . . . The term does not date further back than the summer of