Forgotten Cyberneticians: Louis Couffignal (1902-1966)

Cosmoscope

Louis Couffignal was an early promoter of Cybernetics in France. A mathematician with an interest in calculating machines and binary logic in the ’20s and ’30s, he met and befriended Norbert Wiener in 1946. In 1948 Norbert Wiener, professor at MIT, published Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, a widely circulated and influential book that applied theories of information and communication to both biological systems and machines. Computer-related words with the “cyber” prefix, including “cyberspace,” originate from Wiener’s book. Cybernetics was also the first conventionally published book to discuss electronic digital computing. Maybe because of these ties between Wiener and Couffignal, the first edition of the book was published in English in Paris at the press of Hermann et Cie. (The first American edition was printed offset from the French sheets and issued by John Wiley in New York, also in 1948.)

In his own book Les Machines à penser (Louis Couffignal, 1964) published shortly after, in 1952, later revised in 1964 and 1973, Couffignal starts with the general question “What is a machine?” and progressively builds up a definition of “thinking machines”, inspired, on the one hand, by his own research work on binary logic formalizations and his experience with calculating machines – he studied with Maurice d’Ocagne in the ’20s; and by his joint work with neurophysiologist Louis Lapicque, on the other.

Today’s Cosmoscope explores the terminology devised by Couffignal to help clarify the conceptual relations between the then budding Cybernetics, Information Theory and Linguistics. The choice of terms and relations shows the hesitating transition from a “mechanistic” view of a machine expressed in the mathematical formalism of physics (force, servos, energy) to the “cybernetic” and “information theoretic” view, with emphasis on information loops, memory, transmission and storage of information.

Before and after World War II, Louis Couffignal headed one of the labs at Institut Blaise Pascal, a public research center affiliated to CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), where he worked on building a “Machine à calculer universelle” (Universal Calculating Machine) based on his earlier research work on binary logic. The project, however, failed and the protoype, shown in 1951 at the Paris Conference “Les machines à calculer et la pensée humaine” (Calculating machines and human thought), was never industrialized into a commercial product. Couffignal left CNRS a few years later, amidst complex transatlantic relationships between scientific communities in the US and in France. As for the ideas defended by the magazine “La Pensée”, for instance, quite vehemently at the times, they showed Couffignal as the defender of European culture: “Refusal of cybernetics as a capitalist science: apart from machines, cybernetics is a vast enterprise of mystification; Couffignal showed that in the USA, machines suffer from gigantism and that we can manufacture machines of a more reasonable size and more efficient, we must therefore refuse the logicist movement to support analog calculation, which has a physical basis, and; oppose the cyberneticist attempt which aims to establish American domination over European culture.”

Later in life, Couffignal focused on educational applications of Cybernetics and published “La Cybernétique et les enseignants” (Cybernetics and educators) in 1965 (Louis Couffignal, 1965).