Girish Gokul

There are very few books that do justice to the various ways in which control theory matured and developed as a subject. The book brings out as to how the requirements of the industries and the age led to the engineering that was often ahead of the scientific understanding of the processes to be controlled. As feedback was recognised to be a universal phenomenon, so did the terminology for dealing with control variable manipulation develop, and in doing so, the universal language of control theory as found in the reference books like Nise and Ogata developed. The main contribution of this book lies in the coverage of the work of the engineers that pushed the early practitioners of control to develop the common vocabulary of controls even though applications were varied as gun mount alignment, noise filtering in telecommunication networks, servomechanisms etc.