Classic Papers in
Information & Communication Technology
This page links to a number of translations of seminal papers
in the development of the ICTs. The translator is Chris Bissell, a
member of the ICT Group with a long-standing interest in the history of
the subject.
These translations are offered as a resource for individuals.
Files may not be redistributed in electronic form or hardcopy. Please
send any comments or corrections to Chris
Bissell.
- Kotelnikov, V A (1933), On the capacity
of the 'ether' and cables in electrical communication. In: Procs.
of the first All-Union Conference on the technological reconstruction
of the communications sector and low-current engineering,
Moscow.
In 1933 the young Russian communications engineer Vladimir
Aleksandrovich Kotelnikov published a paper in which he formulated, for
the first time in an engineering context, the sampling theorem for
lowpass and bandpass signals. He also considered the bandwidth
requirements of discrete signal transmission for telegraphy and images.
Although Kotelnikov's name later became known in the West as a result
of his subsequent work, particularly that on optimal detection, his
pioneering 1933 results received little attention at the time outside
Russian-speaking areas.
- K Küpfmüller, On the dynamics
of automatic gain controllers, Elektrische
Nachrichtentechnik, Vol. 5, No. 11, pp. 459-467.
Karl Küpfmüller was a German engineer who worked for eight years during
the 1920s at Siemens & Halske in Berlin. During that time he
carried out fundamental work on telegraphy and telephony, network
theory, and the systems theory of electrical signal transmission. Like
his contemporary in the US, Harry Nyquist, he derived fundamental
results in information transmission and closed-loop modelling. Both
derived stability criteria for feedback systems. In contrast to
Nyquist, however, little has appeared in English about Küpfmüller or
his work, although his pioneering results in systems theory informed
later American work, particularly through the contributions of Ernst
Guillemin, a prolific writer of highly influential student texts - and
a great engineering educator at MIT.
- Wischnegradsky, J [Vyshnegradskii,
I. A.] (1876), On
the General
Theory of Governors, Comptes Rendus de l'Académie
des Sciences de Paris, Vol. 83, p.318
In modelling a steam engine with a centrifugal governor, Vyshnegradskii
neglected Coulomb friction and linearised the system about an operating
point. Unaware of the work of Maxwell and Routh from 1868 onwards, he
investigated the conditions for the onset of 'hunting' (instability).
Treating the engine as an integrator, and the governor as a
second-order system, he made an ingenious change of variables in order
to transform the resulting third-order characteristic equation into the
form
φ3 +
xφ2 + yφ + 1 = 0
the nature of whose roots determines the general form of the system
transient response.
The parameters x and y, which depend on such system characteristics as
governor restoring-force constant, moment of inertia, and so on, became
known in the Russian and German literature as the Vyshnegradskii
parameters. The transformed equation lent itself perfectly to a
graphical technique of stability analysis, which the Zürich-based
engineer A. B. Stodola later used in his work on hydraulic turbine
control; as a result he prompted Adolf Hurwitz to develop his
celebrated version of a general stability criterion.
- Andronov, A. A, Poincaré limit
cycles and the theory of self-sustaining oscillations, Comptes
Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences de Paris, Vol. 189, 1929,
559-561
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Andronov (1901-1952) was a key figure in the
development of control engineering in the former Soviet Union during
this period, yet his name, and his contributions to control theory and
nonlinear dynamics, are much less well known in the West than they
deserve. (For further information about his work, see the full list of
Chris Bissell's publications via http://oro.open.ac.uk.) One of
Andronov's key achievements was
to apply the work of Poincaré and Lyapunov to a range of non-linear
dynamic systems, including closed-loop systems. The Comptes
Rendus article translated here is his first publication in
the West in this field, deriving from an earlier conference
presentation in the Soviet Union, a brief summary of which is also provided here. Andronov's work was long thought to be the first to generalize Poincaré's limit cycles in this way, but it has
recently been discovered that Poincaré himself appreciated such
applications in 1908. An interesting paper on this finding is here.