In the late 1940s and 1950s the emerging field of cybernetics raised the possibility that machines might match humans in their cognitive abilities. Especially in Britain, where cybernetics enjoyed a close institutional relationship with neurology, figures like William Grey Walter constructed machines in order to mimic the functioning of the brain. In his robots, which he constructed out of discarded war electronics, Walter sought to recreate the structure and function of “brain waves,” the study of which had made his name as a neurophysiologist. By exploring how Walter’s robots played simultaneously with biological/mechanical and human/animal differences, I show how they allowed him to reassert a hierarchy of creation that confirmed man’s exalted position in the animal kingdom while simultaneously developing a radically new vision of what it meant to be human.
