James Watt
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The engineer who in 1788 put a spinning-weight governor on a steam engine, creating the mechanical ancestor of every control loop in computing.
The attribution deserves care: Huygens had built centrifugal governors in the seventeenth century for windmills, and Watt adapted one rather than inventing it - though the adaptation mattered enough that he is often credited anyway. What the device is, precisely, is a closed loop with no human in it: the engine's speed raises the weights, the weights close the throttle, the throttle slows the engine. James Clerk Maxwell turned it into mathematics in 1868, and everything from congestion control to autoscaling to a datacentre's cooling is a descendant of that paper rather than of the hardware.
Also known as: watt, centrifugal governor, flyball governor
Sources
- The centrifugal governor was invented by Christiaan Huygens in the seventeenth century for regulating windmills and water wheels; in 1788 James Watt adapted one to control his steam engine, regulating the admission of steam into the cylinders, and the development proved important enough that Watt is sometimes called the inventor
- Watt designed his centrifugal governor in 1788 to regulate the angular velocity of the steam engine; the first mathematical paper on feedback was published by James Clerk Maxwell in 1868, and Minorsky's later work on the derivative of the error supported the emergence of proportional-integral-derivative control