The “ First All - Union Conference on Automatic Control , ”

It is often claimed that classical control was a product almost entirely of the wartime laboratories of the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom. World War II, however, was not quite such a watershed as is often claimed. Even before the war, in a number of countries, process control was moving toward an understanding of three-term (proportional-integral-derivative) control. And there were various pockets of expertise where the “communications approach,” deriving from Nyquist and others, was being applied to control systems. For example, by the end of 1940 many of the fundamental building blocks of what came to be known as classical control theory were fairly widely known in the USSR. In particular, a conference held in Moscow in late 1940, but little known outside Russia, included papers on and discussion of: the Nyquist criterion; operator methods; transient response; the use of the operator exp(−Tp) to model a time delay of T seconds; and the | z | < 0 criterion for the stability of a sampled-data system. Conferences held during the early days of the development of a discipline are an important source for historians of technology. In the case of control engineering, the early conferences held in Western Europe and the United States are comparatively well documented. In most cases the published proceedings are still fairly easy to locate in libraries [1], and they often include detailed discussion of the papers presented (which in some cases is of greater historical interest than the papers themselves). The situation regarding the former Soviet Union is rather different, however. Published proceedings rarely included discussion, and the background of the conferences themselves was often intimately bound to the contemporary demands of the Communist Party, and the general scientific-political environment, in a way very different from the political context in the West [2]. The latter points were certainly an important aspect of the Moscow 1940 meeting.