Selenium

At the beginning of the 20th century, inventors and military authorities of different countries developed prototypes of remote-controlled military equipment. In 1910, work on a radio-controlled destroyer began 22-year-old American businessman John Hammond (Jr.) - the son of a millionaire miner ^[1] . Hammond was prompted by the business partner of his father, Nikola Tesla ; from direct participation in the project of Hammond Tesla refused ^[2] . In 1911, Hammond invited Benjamin Missner, a student at Harvard University, to a project that at the age of 21 earned a reputation as a talented radio engineer ^[2] . During the year, Hammond and Missner debugged the radio receiving circuits and actuators of a radio-controlled boat, and then Hammond got the idea of ​​a fully automatic, homing weapon on target ^[2] .

The fleets of that time did not have either radio or sonar . The only way to detect the enemy was through visual contact, and to detect the enemy at night was possible only by highlighting him with powerful spotlights ^[3] . The ideal way of a night attack on the enemy fleet, Hammond decided, would be an automatic destroyer ("surface torpedo "), homing into the light of a searchlight ^[3] . In public statements in 1911, Hammond claimed that he could make the destroyer insensitive to blinding the enemy, which supposedly meant actively illuminating the target with its own emitter of modulated light ^[3] . In practice, Hammond limited himself to passive guidance on an enemy spotlight ^[3] .

The actuators and photocells necessary for the construction of the Hammond destroyer already existed, it was necessary “only” to create an optical homing head ^[3] . Hammond's patented stereoscopic head contained two selenium photocells oriented in the same direction and separated by an opaque or opaque partition ^[4] . The difference in the photocurrents of the left and right photocells was amplified by an electromagnetic relay that closed the rudder electric drive in the “full right” or “full left” position ^[3] . in such a system was impossible, but the much worse drawback of the Hammond project was the unsatisfactory sensitivity of the relay circuit ( electronic amplifiers did not exist yet) and the low angular resolution of the stereo pair at long and medium battle distances ^[5] . However, as the torpedo approached the target - if the launch direction was chosen correctly - the resolution and guidance accuracy were constantly growing ^[4] .

During 1912, Hammond and Missner built and debugged a demo model of a homing machine - a ground-based self-propelled cart with a stereoscopic homing head, called "Selena" ^[6] . In November 1912, the inventors broke up due to a dispute over the right to patents ^[6] . Both Hammond and Missner considered invention as a business, as an investment in future conditions, and not one of them was ready for a compromise ^[6] . Hammond ^[4] remained the legal priority for the invention, but Missner, being a prolific author of scientific and popular literature, introduced his own version of events into the public mind. According to Missner, it was he who built the first "electric dog" with the participation of Hammond; according to Tesla’s biographer , the opposite was true: Missner only helped Hammond debug his invention ^[6] .

The first Seleno sample was never shown to the general public. In 1915, Missner independently built a copy of it, published detailed diagrams of his device, and repeatedly demonstrated it during his own advertising campaign. Missner's “Electric Dog” was a simple, rectangular cart with three wheels. Two front wheels were driving; the rear, steered wheel was mounted on a swivel fork of a bicycle type . The steering machine consisted of a pair of solenoids , turning the fork left and right, and a pair of springs, returning the fork to the neutral position. The solenoids and the traction motor of the front axle were powered by a common battery , two dry batteries supplied high voltage to the left and right photocells.

Selenium photocells were placed inside the trolley case, behind the primitive single-lens capacitors , and were separated from each other by a translucent screen. The photocurrent of each photocell was closed through the winding of a low power relay; the current through the contacts of these relays was closed through the windings of the high power relay. When both photocells were exposed to light, the “dog” moved directly, when one photocell was exposed to light, to the right or to the left. Relay control practically excluded the “dog” from following natural light sources: its “reflexes” appeared only when the human operator (usually in this role was Missner himself) intentionally directed a flashlight beam into one of two photocells ^[7] . Missner didn’t try to hide it: the real “dog” was not a full-fledged homing machine, it only reacted to signals given by a person ^[7] . According to the assumptions of Everett and Toscano, the “dog” could independently follow a sufficiently powerful source of light, but would do it in zigzags, regularly overshooting the target ^[7] . More or less accurate homing is impossible without proportional control ^[7] .

Despite the primitive, imperfect device and toy appearance, the Missner assault rifle attracted the attention of contemporaries for a long time ^[8] . The attention of the press was due to the military purpose of the “dog”: the First World War was in Europe, the public of the non-combatants of the United States was keenly interested in promising weapons ^[9] . Missner regularly reminded readers that his submachine gun is a ground-based prototype of Hammond's mysterious automatic torpedo ^[9] : “in the near future, an electric dog, now harmless, will become a real dog of war: fearless, heartless, devoid of human feelings and immune to deception ...” ^[10] .

In the academic environment, Missner found an influential patron in the person of Jacques Loeb . Missner from the very beginning exploited the name of a popular physiologist in his articles, comparing the principle of action of his automaton with animal reflexes in the presentation of Loeb ^[11] . Loeb, who had been studying the tropism of simple organisms for thirty years, regarded them as simple machines, as “chemical machines capable of independent development, self-preservation and reproduction” ^[12] . Loeb's “chemical machines” were fundamentally different from man-made mechanical machines : the latter, unlike living organisms, could not exchange information with the environment. The machines of Hammond and Missner, wrote Loeb, filled the gap in his theory and finally proved it ^[13] . In the understanding of Loeb, the creation of a machine that acted on the principles that the scientist attributed to living organisms was such proof ^[13] .

Thanks to Loeb, who described the “electric dog” in his 1918 monograph ( Forced movements, tropisms, and animal conduct ), the invention attracted the attention of biologists and philosophers ^[14] . wrote that the appearance of the Missner “dog” and the Hammond torpedo - a kind of “ model organism ” - can simplify the understanding of not only elementary reflexes, but also more complex phenomena of animal life ^[14] . Julian Huxley considered the “dog” one of the arguments against the anthropomorphization of animals ^[14] . Missner himself, most likely, did not understand and did not share Loeb's theory, and could not abandon the usual, everyday humanization of animals: in the description of Missner, even a nocturnal butterfly flying to a light source experiences pain ^[14] .

• Cordeschi R. 2. Loeb and the orientation mechanisms of Hammond: 'natural' and 'artificial' machines // The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics. - Springer, 2013 .-- ISBN 9789401598705 . (page numbers are given by electronic publication).
• Everett HR, Toscano M. Unmanned Systems of World Wars I and II. - MIT Press, 2015. - (Intelligent robotics and autonomous agents). - ISBN 9780262029223 .