Seeing a voice: Rudolph Koenig's instruments for studying vowel sounds.

The human voice was one of the more elusive acoustical phenomena to study in the 19th century and therefore a crucial test of Hermann von Helmholtz's new theory of sound. This article describes the origins of instruments used to study vowel sounds: synthesizers for production, resonators for detection, and manometric flames for visual display. Instrument maker Rudolph Koenig played a leading role in transforming Helmholtz's ideas into apparatus.

Love-hate for man-machine metaphors in Soviet physiology: from Pavlov to "physiological cybernetics".

This article reinterprets the debate between orthodox followers of the Pavlovian reflex theory and Soviet "cybernetic physiologists" in the 1950s and 60s as a clash of opposing man-machine metaphors. While both sides accused each other of "mechanistic," reductionist methodology, they did not see anything "mechanistic" about their own central metaphors: the telephone switchboard metaphor for nervous activity (the Pavlovians), and the analogies between the human brain and a computer (the cyberneticians). I argue that the scientific utility of machine analogies was closely intertwined with their philosophical and political meanings and that new interpretations of these metaphors emerged as a result of political conflicts and a realignment of forces within the scientific community and in society at large.

(Physio)logical circuits: the intellectual origins of the McCulloch-Pitts neural networks.

This article examines the intellectual and institutional factors that contributed to the collaboration of neuropsychiatrist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts on the logic of neural networks, which culminated in their 1943 publication, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." Historians and scientists alike often refer to the McCulloch-Pitts paper as a landmark event in the history of cybernetics, and fundamental to the development of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. This article seeks to bring some historical context to the McCulloch-Pitts collaboration itself, namely, their intellectual and scientific orientations and backgrounds, the key concepts that contributed to their paper, and the institutional context in which their collaboration was made.

Locating rods and cones: microscopic investigations of the retina in mid-nineteenth century Berlin and Wurzburg.

This paper is concerned with the diversity of microscopic research in nineteenth-century life sciences. It examines how two researchers, Ernst Wilhelm Brucke and Heinrich Muller, investigated the structure and function of the retina. They did so in significantly different ways, thereby developing quite different accounts of this organ and its role in the process of vision.