Robots and cyborgs have become familiar concepts and images through science fiction and modern blockbuster movies. Ian Simmons reminisces on older tales of linking up the technological with the biological.

Cyborg Origins

The idea of the cyborg has been with us for decades, but it is only in recent years that the science fiction has started to become reality. The artist Stelarc implanted electrodes in his muscles to allow his limbs to be operated over the Internet, and researcher Kevin Warwick has given himself an implant to open doors in his lab, but the Six Million Dollar man they are not.

In reality, the claim to being the first cyborg probably belongs to a lab rat. In May 2002 researcher Sanjiv Talwar of the State University of New York revealed “RoboRat” – a rat whose every action could be controlled by a computer up to 500 metres (1,600ft) away. 1 Talwar and his colleagues implanted an electrode in the part of the brain that senses reward and two more in the areas stimulated by the left and right whiskers, then connected them to a radio receiver in a backpack via a port in the rat’s skull. They then zapped the whisker areas to stimulate turning left and right, and the reward area when the animal reacted correctly. The animal swiftly became entirely under human control and could be made to do things it would never normally do, like walking into brightly lit areas and jumping off ledges, and could be steered around an assault course.

Talwar sees his breakthrough simply as a route to discovering more about brain activity, and possibly having applications in search and rescue operations in places like collapsed buildings. Others, though, have viewed his work with considerable unease – Gill Langley of the Dr Hadwen Trust which funds alternatives to animal-based research said, “it’s an appalling example of how the human species instrumentalises other species.”

As biotech and IT collide, the press has been full of stories like this, and it does seem that the boundaries between life and technology are becoming irrevocably blurred. As well as RoboRat, we have also seen Virtual Rat. 2 Created at CalTech, Pasadena, it is a bundle of rat nerve cells used to move a virtual rat on a computer screen in order to discover more about how neurons sense and remember the world around them, while, elsewhere, brainstems of fish have been used to control robots; flying microrobots 1mm square use a small part of the antennæ of a real male silk moth to follow pheromone tracks 3 and wasps are being used as highly sensitive chemical weapons detectors. 4

In truth, though, this blurring of animals and technology has a long history. The instrumentalising of other species goes back at least to the 17th century. In 1687, the most pressing scientific problem was how to find longitude at sea. Scientific societies debated the idea, huge prizes were offered and many ingenious solutions were suggested. To determine one’s longitude, one has to compare the time at a reference location with the time at one’s current location, and from that the longitude can be calculated. Clocks had been around for a long time, but none was able to remain sufficiently accurate aboard a tossing ship. More esoteric solutions beckoned. The most imaginative involved dogs and a material known as the powder of sympathy. This alchemical substance, acquired in the south of France by noted adventurer Sir Kenelm Digby, could reputedly heal at a distance. You took an article from the wounded person – an item of clothing or whatever – applied the powder, and voilà, healing, no matter how far away the person was. It was however, not painless, and patients were reputed to scream when the substance was applied. To use powder of sympathy to determine longitude you first stabbed a dog and bandaged the wound. You would then set sail accompanied by said wounded dog while a compatriot remained at home with the bandage. At midday every day, the bandage at home would be treated with powder of sympathy and simultaneously, on the ship, perhaps thousands of miles away, the dog would yelp with pain. The captain would note the time of the yelp and knowing this meant “midday at home” could calculate the longitude. It is not known whether any practical trials of this method ever took place but, suffice to say, it was not adopted by the Navy. The longitude problem was eventually solved by John Harrison with his famous chronometers, now in the National Maritime Museum, and generations of dogs were spared untold misery. 5

Prognostication

But this was not the end of using animals to solve maritime difficulties. Sixty years later, a new problem vexed naval authorities: weather forecasting. As British trade and colonial power expanded, the need for a way to predict storms became more pressing, and, again, various energetic minds turned to finding a solution. One such was the appropriately-named George Merryweather, a doctor in Whitby with a lively and questing mind. Alerted by a couplet in a poem by Edward Jenner 6 – “The Leech, disturbed, is newly risen; Quite to the summit of its prison” – and by the behaviour of leeches in his own surgery as thunderstorms approached, he built a bizarre device which he described as ”an atmospheric electromagnetic telegraph conducted by animal instinct” and which became known as the Tempest Prognosticator.

In the form the Tempest Prognosticator took when Merryweather unveiled it to the Whitby Philosophical society in February 1851, it was about a metre (3.3ft) high and resembled an Indian temple. The device consisted of a ring of 12 glass jars, each with its leech and a small quantity of water. At the top of each jar was a narrow brass tube attached to a hammer of whalebone, linked by a chain to a central bell. When a storm approached, it caused the leeches to wriggle up their jars and into the tubes, releasing the hammer and ringing the bell. The more leeches climbed into their tubes, the more often the bell rang and the more likely a storm. The leeches each had separate tubes, rather than sharing a common vessel, because when they are kept together they develop a hierarchy which results in only one leech being allowed to the top. When kept separately, they can all rise. Mindful of his charges’ well-being, though, Merryweather arranged the tubes in a circle so the leeches “might see one another and not endure the affliction of solitary confinement.” This was the grandest of six designs he proposed; less extravagant ones could be created to suit all pockets and practical needs.

As an aid to sailors, the leech prognosticator had a clear edge over stabbed dogs: it did actually work. After spending 1850 testing the prognosticator’s reliability, Merryweather went public in a big way – he entered his device for the Great Exhibition of 1851. There, it met with considerable success, the Weekly Dispatch wrote approvingly of it and Lloyds of London carried out tests which confirmed Merryweather’s claims of accuracy. Buoyed up by this success, Merryweather set off round Britain on a lecture tour extolling the virtues of his Tempest Prognosticator and exhorting the government to install one at every port. 7 At the same time, however, a rival method was being championed by Robert Fitzroy, First Meteorological Officer at the Board of Trade, who preferred combinations of mercury barometers and storm glasses – containers of chemicals which clouded under the pressure changes heralding storms. Given his position of influence, his method inevitably triumphed. As well as having a powerful champion, it was also far less tricky to maintain.

With the Tempest Prognosticator, one had the problem of keeping the leeches alive. As is clear from the device’s origins, these were medicinal leeches, and so would have required a meal of blood every few months. Having once maintained a colony of medicinal leeches I can vouch for the fact that while feeding them is not painful, it is messy and time consuming (they are slow feeders and there is only so much you can do with a leech on the back of your hand). Most people, I am sure, would rather calibrate a column of mercury every so often.

While Fitzroy’s method became the standard, Merryweather’s Prognosticator slipped into obscurity. The original was lost, but a replica was built for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and is now in Whitby Museum, 8 and another, fully working, replica has been made for the Barometer Museum in Oakhampton. 9

Telepathic Snails

While Dr Merryweather was perfecting his Tempest Prognosticator in Whitby, over the Channel a far more dubious enterprise was taking shape. Charismatic but poor, Jacques Benoit was a man steeped in occult doctrine, and one with an eye for a chance. Observing the difficulties the pioneers of the electric telegraph were having with underwater cables, he came up with a revolutionary idea that would allow world-wide communication without the need for anything so cumbersome: telepathic snails. Harking back to the spooky action-at-a-distance of the stabbed dogs, Benoit asserted that two snails, when placed together, formed a sympathetic bond, and if separated, one would always respond when the other was stimulated, no matter how far apart they were, due to an instantaneous exchange of animal magnetism.

To make his idea a reality, Benoit persuaded a Paris gymnasium owner named Triat to invest in his idea, assuring him that the construction would only require “two or three bits of wood” to create. Once Triat had set him up with an apartment and an allowance so he could work on his invention, Benoit seemed to lose interest in it. After a year of subsidising Benoit, a somewhat aggrieved Triat demanded results and was promised a demonstration of what Benoit was now calling the “pasilalinic-sympathetic compass”. When the day came for the demo, Triat (accompanied by Monsieur Allix, a journalist from La Presse) entered Benoit’s room, to be confronted with two identical constructions of impressive size. Both consisted of massive wooden frames with a disc suspended horizontally under them. In each disc were set 24 zinc dishes lined with cloth soaked in copper sulphate, held in place by a copper blade. Glued into each dish was a live snail, beside which was written a letter. To communicate, all one had to do was prod the snail by the required letter on one machine and read reactions off the other. Benoit set Triat to whacking snails in order to send a message across the room to the machine where he sat, but the latter and Allix felt unhappy that the machines were in full view of each other, and wanted them separated by at least a curtain. Benoit shrugged them off, saying that this was not technically possible and insisted that they begin. Despite his doubts, Triat began prodding snails, but was constantly interrupted by Benoit, who kept finding pretexts to cross the room to the other machine. This was the last straw – Triat was now convinced that Benoit was a fraud and demanded a further trial with strict controls. Allix, surprisingly, was convinced, and his report in La Presse on 27 October 1850 glowed with poetic excitement: “…snails which have once been put in contact, are always in sympathetic communication. When separated, there disengages itself from them a species of fluid of which the Earth is the conductor, which develops and unrolls, so to speak, like the almost invisible thread of the spider, [but] the thread of the escargotic fluid is invisible as completely and the pulsation along it as rapid as the electric fluid,” he wrote. Benoit, however, knew when the game was up. When the day arrived for the strict trial, he and his apparatus were nowhere to be seen, although he was eventually found wandering the streets of Paris in a disturbed state, dying insane two years later. 10

The mid-19th century was a heyday for attempts to instrumentalise organisms, and while Merryweather and Benoit went for invertebrates, conductor and composer Hector Berlioz was far more ambitious: he built people into his mechanisms. Starting in the late 1840s, Berlioz staged enormous performances involving so many orchestra members that it was impossible for him to keep eye contact with them while performing. To get round this he combined the then-new technologies of the metronome and electric telegraph to produce what became known as his “Electric Baton”. This device debuted in 1855 when Berlioz was commissioned to conduct a performance for the Paris Exhibition. To keep control of the immense orchestra, he stood directly in front of the central portion of the orchestra and conducted them as normal with his right hand. With his left hand he tapped the same rhythm out on a master metronome connected via a telegraph system to a set of subsidiary metronomes, each linked to a human “sous-chef” overseeing one of the other sections of the orchestra. They received direct signals from Berlioz via this method and so could conduct their section of the orchestra in exact step with Berlioz in the centre, acting as his avatars to the sections of the orchestra he could not command directly. 11 This method seems to have been far more successful than any of the others we have seen so far, but with little call for orchestras the size of those wielded by Berlioz, it did not catch on.

Project Pigeon

After the mid-19th century craze for instrumentalising living creatures, the idea seems to have gone out of favour until mid-way through the 20th century, when the work of the behaviourist psychologist B F Skinner (right) once again raised the possibility of using animals in a technologised way. Best known for inventing the Skinner Box, an experimental device for examining rat behaviour in terms of purely external stimuli, and for the inaccurate story that he also built such a device for his daughter, Skinner also turned his skills to assisting the war effort in World War II. The behaviour control methods which Skinner perfected worked by systematically persuading an organism to carry out a particular action in order to receive a reward – the methodology that eventually produced RoboRat – and Skinner found that certain animals could become very adept at tasks at which one would not normally expect them to excel.

Skinner found that pigeons were particularly rewarding subjects for his type of behaviour modification, and in 1944 he saw a way that this might help the war effort. At this point, aircraft and bombs were reaching a fair degree of sophistication and work on rocket missiles was beginning to bear fruit, but no one had cracked the guidance problem. Skinner, however, felt pigeons would make excellent missile guidance systems. He sought funding from the US National Defence Research Committee and was granted ,000 for Project Pigeon, intended to guide a weapon to within six metres (20 feet) of its target. To do this, Skinner put three pigeons into a jacket made of sacking and harnessed them in front of a screen inside the missile guidance system. A lens array projected the target image onto each pigeon’s screen and crosshairs of light were superimposed on it. Each pigeon was trained to peck at its screen to keep the crosshairs on target. The screens were wired into the missile controls and by this method would keep the weapon on target. Three pigeons were needed for enhanced accuracy – for the missile to respond, at least two pigeons’ inputs had to agree. To train the pigeons for a mission, they had to peck at ærial photographs of the target and were rewarded with grain deposited in a tray in front of them if they kept the crosshairs in place. They could do this even when surrounded by the din of war, but Skinner found this ability was considerably enhanced if they were fed hemp seeds rather than grain. Skinner’s system worked, but when he demonstrated it to military officials they greeted it with amusement rather than defence contracts, and went on to favour another secret project, radar, for the purpose.

Pigeon technology did not, however, totally die out. For a while, the US Coast Guard used Skinner’s method to train pigeons as video sensors in rescue helicopters. They were trained to peck at switches whenever they saw an orange dot. Put a trained pigeon in a plexidome aimed at the ocean, and when a tiny distant orange life jacket comes into view, the pigeon sensors start pecking. With sharper vision than humans, they could see life jackets that human searchers might have missed. And, harking back to a tale I remember from childhood about budgies being used to pick winning Premium Bonds, for 1 April 2002 Internet search engine Google posted a web page explaining how pigeons were used to enhance the accuracy of their searches. According to Google:

“When a search query is submitted… it is routed to a data coop where monitors flash result pages at blazing speeds. When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most pecks are returned at the top of the user’s results page with the other results displayed in pecking order.”

I always wondered how those search engines worked.

With thanks to Martin Glancy, William Beatty and members of the BIG-Chat and Webhead-L mailing lists.