Forgotten Cyberneticians: Louis Couffignal (1902-1966)

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.)