---
title: "Some Movements of Models"
description: "Nicholas de Monchaux, an architect and historian at MIT, follows a single technical lineage, the self-synchronizing electric motor and the control systems built around it, from the Panama Canal lock controls of 1914 to the camera rig that shot the space battles of Star Wars in 1977."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Nicholas de Monchaux"
published: "2026-04-09"
original_url: "https://movementsofmodels.antikythera.org/"
doi: "10.1162/ANTI.5KP2"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/movementsofmodels"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/journal/movementsofmodels"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Some Movements of Models

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Nicholas de Monchaux
- **Published:** 2026-04-09
- **Kind:** Journal · Journal article
- **DOI:** https://doi.org/10.1162/ANTI.5KP2
- **Original:** https://movementsofmodels.antikythera.org/
- **Length:** 12k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/movementsofmodels
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

[Nicholas de Monchaux](https://antikythera.wiki/people/nicholas-de-monchaux), an architect and historian at MIT, follows a single technical lineage, the self-synchronizing electric motor and the control systems built around it, from the Panama Canal lock controls of 1914 to the camera rig that shot the space battles of Star Wars in 1977. Along the way the same parts, people, and ideas pass through anti-aircraft radar, Kevin Lynch's study of how pedestrians read Boston, the special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the SAGE air-defence computer, the Apollo simulators and the CBS broadcast of the moon landing, and a Berkeley urban-design laboratory that filmed drives through a scale model of Marin County. His thesis is that models changed their nature over this century: they stopped being analogues that offered insight into the things they represented and became active agents shaping those things. And as they grew better at sensing and shaping reality, they withdrew physically from it, from sunlit control rooms into bunkers, windowless interiors, film frames, and finally the sealed algorithms of a phone. The essay ends on what de Monchaux calls the paradox of simulation: the more powerful a model is in shaping reality, the more closed to view it becomes.

## The argument

The essay is a history told as a chain of transmissions, and its claims are carried by the chain rather than stated up front. The opening sentence gives the shape: if one follows models across the last century, one sees them "pull away from the world, even as they take an ever-more central part in shaping it."

The first link is the Selsyn motor, a pair of electrical machines wired so that any angular movement of one is reproduced instantly by the other. General Electric developed it so that the Panama Canal's locks could be operated from a scale model whose every part moved in step with the real gates and valves. From 1918 the Navy adapted it to aim battleship guns through analogue fire-control computers, and by 1944 its descendant, the SCR-584 radar and M-9 gun director, was shooting down V1 flying bombs. De Monchaux's reading is that "an idea was present from the outset": electromechanical controls enabled "a model of reality that directly shaped, in turn, the reality they modeled." He adds the architectural observation that becomes the essay's spine. The canal model stood beside the locks in view of them; the targeting computers of the 1940s were sealed inside bulkheads and bunkers.

Theory followed practice. Following the historian David Mindell, de Monchaux argues that cybernetics and information theory did not predict control systems but emerged in feedback with them, and that their ambition was to separate the signal from its physical circumstance. Once abstracted, the ideas travelled: at MIT in the 1950s Kevin Lynch and György Kepes reconceived the pedestrian as a radar operator reading signals from the city. The parts travelled too. Douglas Trumbull built the effects for 2001 from surplus air-defence motors, and the motors' limitations dictated the film's slow linear trajectories.

Apollo fused two simulation lineages. Edwin Link's pneumatic flight trainers, which the Navy called "synthetic training," generated a 1944 demand for an electronic trainer switchable between aircraft, and Jay Forrester's pursuit of that demand produced Whirlwind, the first real-time digital computer, and then SAGE, the air-defence system whose operators could not tell simulated nuclear attacks from real ones. Apollo's simulators combined Link's trainers with SAGE's digital interiors, and because NASA had starved the television signal of bandwidth, CBS filled its moon-landing broadcast with commissioned simulations, from which the suspicion that the landing was staged has never recovered. The last link runs through Berkeley, where Donald Appleyard, Lynch's student, built a laboratory to film drives through a model of Marin County and hired John Dykstra, who built its minicomputer-driven camera control and then turned it into the Dykstraflex that made Star Wars.

The conclusion draws the lesson. "Black box" began as Rad Lab slang for the deed box that carried the cavity magnetron, became Norbert Wiener's name for a device known only by its inputs and outputs, and then a systems-engineering term for a subsystem defined by its relationships rather than its workings. De Monchaux argues that the second sense has swallowed the third: a box that is hard to enter becomes impossible to understand. The eighteenth-century automata that opened the modern history of simulation were built to give insight into life; today's models shape reality while concealing themselves, which contravenes the model's original purpose.

## Section by section

### 1 Synchronized Rotation and the SCR-584

The essay opens on an English cliff in July 1944, with a V1 approaching and two synchronized motors feeding the radar reflection of the missile into the aim of an artillery gun. De Monchaux stresses that the assembly had no single creator; it was produced by the Rad Lab at MIT with Sperry, Chrysler, Bell Labs, and the feuding branches of the military, and it still needed a human operator to "pip match" real targets against noise. He then traces the arrangement back to the Panama Canal, where Edward Hewlett's Selsyn motors let an operator run the locks from a marble-and-brass miniature the size of a bowling lane whose interlocked switches made an improper sequence of operations impossible, and forward to the Navy's 1918 adoption of the system for gun control. The section establishes two things the rest of the essay depends on: that the model and the modelled were wired together from the beginning, and that as control systems grew more capable they were enclosed and hidden. A short passage on "hunting," the shivering oscillation of a large mechanism seeking equilibrium through over-complicated feedback, introduces the point that cybernetics and information theory emerged from managing such behaviour, not in advance of it.

### 2 Pedestrian Motion

From 1953 Lynch and Kepes studied Copley Square with photographic sequences at fifty-foot intervals and interviews with pedestrians, treating the walker as a receiver of environmental signals. The Image of the City (1960) dropped Kepes's film techniques, which progress reports called "inconclusive," in favour of Lynch's map-drawing exercises, but the cybernetic framing stayed, and Kepes credited Wiener with an "inner revolution" in his thinking. De Monchaux uses the biographies to argue that the project was continuous with the war: Kepes dated his Language of Vision to a flight over Chicago to inspect camouflage, and Lynch, after five years building airfields in the Pacific, returned to an MIT that was "in essential ways indistinguishable" from an Army encampment. The irony he draws out is that Lynch chose Boston, the least optimized city in North America, in contrast to Wiener's 1950 Life magazine proposal to disperse cities into ring-shaped "life belts" against nuclear attack. A second irony is that MIT's temporary wartime buildings, with their surplus motors and relays, became the seedbed of hacker culture.

### 3 Synchronized Star Fields

At MGM's Borehamwood studios in 1966–67, Trumbull built the camera rigs for 2001 from the surplus control equipment that had flowed out of the wartime radar effort, a skill learned in the workshop of his father, who had moved from The Wizard of Oz into aviation hydraulics. The fifty-five-foot Discovery model sat on concrete pilings while a Selsyn-driven camera inched along a straight track, because analogue motor control loses accuracy with complex motion. The long exposures forbade speed, since crisp frames without motion blur broke the illusion of movement; in Trumbull's words the "speed limit" of the film was set. The "sausage machine" and the slit-scan "stargate" rig extended the same principle, assembling images that existed only on the film strip. De Monchaux closes on Herb Lightman's 1968 review in American Cinematographer, which called the results "an accurate forecast of things to come," already treating a film as a simulation.

### 4 Apollo's Interior

This is the essay's longest part and its turning point from analogue to digital. De Monchaux first notes the personnel loop between Kubrick's film and NASA (the Discovery's designers came from von Braun's staff) and between NASA and television, with CBS's president advising Johnson that a moon landing had "great propaganda value." The simulators descend from Link's pipe-organ trainers. Luis de Florez's 1943 request for an electronic trainer that could imitate aircraft not yet built went to Forrester, who abandoned analogue control in 1946, scrapped the B-24 cockpit in 1948, and by 1950 had re-funded the machine as the core of SAGE. The SAGE description is the essay's darkest passage. The AN/FSQ-7 weighed almost 300 tons and held 50,000 vacuum tubes; operators selected targets with light guns on screens that showed not radar returns but an abstraction computed from many installations; the system was obsolete as soon as the Soviet R-7 ballistic missile flew in 1956 yet ran until the 1980s; and the graffiti on surviving consoles reads "Don't you feel useless?" De Monchaux names the vertigo of being unable to distinguish a simulated Armageddon from a real one as the inverse of the discomfort Trumbull later spent his theme-park career avoiding. Apollo's simulators, built by the Link company, combined gimbals, hydraulics, closed-circuit television, and by 1966 one of the first three-dimensional digital displays, and were wired into Mission Control, which was two stacked identical rooms, one simulating the next mission while the other flew the current one. "Better than the simulator," Aldrin said minutes before landing. The 500 kHz allotted to television in 1961, a tenth of an earthbound signal, forced CBS to commission simulated visuals from NASA's own contractors and to broadcast actors on a slag-covered Grumman set under the caption "CBS NEWS SIMULATION." The legacy is twofold: CNN, founded by the director of that broadcast, and Capricorn One, written by its assistant producer; a 2022 poll found more than a quarter of Americans doubting or unsure that the landing occurred.

### 5 Marin Meandering

The scene shifts to 1974 and a twenty-six-foot gantry in a windowless room under the stairs of Berkeley's Wurster Hall, carrying a lens a tenth of an inch above a model of two square miles of Marin County. Appleyard, Lynch's student and author of A View from the Road (1964), wanted to film journeys through unbuilt environments for the same reason de Florez had wanted to simulate unbuilt aircraft: to evaluate designs before construction. His 1973 NSF grant proposed both the apparatus and its validation, driving subjects through the real Marin route and the simulated one and comparing what they recalled. De Monchaux reads Appleyard as the one figure in the essay who imagined simulation as a tool of democratic participation, a "communications model of the planning process" connected by two-way cable television, at the moment military simulation had come to mean a lack of agency. Appleyard approached Trumbull, who, unemployed after Silent Running's failure, sent Dykstra instead. With Jerry Jeffress and Alvah Miller from the FAA's landing simulator at Richmond, Dykstra rejected a Selsyn design and built the control system around a DEC PDP-11, a minicomputer whose lineage de Monchaux traces to the SAGE consoles. The operator recorded a "rail" along a model road using a "bombsight" graphic, then separately set the camera's gaze so that the view swivelled to anticipate turns. Appleyard died in a traffic accident in 1982 without publishing the validation study.

### 6 Digital Dogfight

George Lucas had cut every televised dogfight he could tape into an eight-minute reel that no effects artist would attempt until Dykstra, just back from Berkeley, said he could do it "only because I knew it could be done." In a Van Nuys warehouse, Dykstra, Miller, and Jeffress rebuilt the BESL control system around an articulated arm carrying a VistaVision camera pivoting on the same lens "pupil." The decisive innovation was motion blur, produced by leaving the shutter open during part of each move, which allowed the twisting shots 2001's rig could not. De Monchaux insists the realism came equally from Appleyard's insight: the camera follows the gaze, not just the spacecraft. The rig, named the Dykstraflex as a joke, produced over 350 effects shots and won a technical Oscar. The coda records that the Millennium Falcon's sound was a recording of the Dykstraflex's own motors, and the lightsaber's a pair of old synchronizing motors in a USC projection room.

### 7 Conclusion: Inside and Outside

De Monchaux returns to those two motors, in another confined interior, to state the architectural movement as a whole: "ever-inward, often ever-more claustrophobic," but still inhabitable until recently. He then gives the history of the black box in three senses, the deed box carrying cavity magnetron E1189 across the Atlantic in August 1940, Wiener's 1945 contrast between black and white boxes, and the systems-engineering usage from SAGE and missile defence in which a black box is any component defined by its inputs and outputs so that its interior can be swapped. The last sense, he argues, redefined technology as "a series of defined relationships between mutable things," and it slides back into the first: a mechanism that cannot be entered becomes one that cannot be understood. On Boston Common no one now navigates by church spires as Lynch's subjects did; they read signals from a box they cannot open. HAL, the one element of 2001 that Lightman found unbelievable, now reads as its most credible prediction, except that HAL's brain could be physically dismantled and today's algorithms cannot. The final section sets this against Vaucanson's flute player and Kempelen's speaking machine, automata presented to academies as insights into breath and speech. That tradition ran the opposite way: the model was an analogue meant to yield understanding. Since the 1930s the model has become an agent, the line between simulation and experience has collapsed "from SAGE to soundstage," and the paradox is that the more ubiquitous and successful a model, the more it defeats the purpose of making the whole comprehensible.

## Key concepts

- **[Recursive modeling](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/recursive-modeling)** — The journal's name for the essay's core claim: a model ceases to represent its subject and becomes an agent shaping it, in feedback with its own growing complexity, and retreats inward as it does so.
- **Self-synchronizing motor (Selsyn, synchro)** — A pair of electrical machines whose rotors share an angular position, so that a model and a mechanism, or a radar dish and a gun, move together. The physical thread that carries the whole history.
- **[Synthetic training](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/synthetic-training)** — The Navy's wartime term for simulator-based training; the demand for a trainer that could imitate unbuilt aircraft is what produced real-time digital computing.
- **[Black box](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/black-box)** — A literal container, then Wiener's epistemic term for a device known only by its inputs and outputs, then a systems-engineering term for a swappable subsystem. De Monchaux's argument is that the third sense collapses into the second.
- **[Paradox of simulation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/paradox-of-simulation)** — "The more powerful a model in shaping our reality, the more closed to view it, and its movements, seems to become."

## Connections

- [Infinity Mirror](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/infinitymirror) covers overlapping ground, Link trainers, Apollo's simulators, and the military origins of simulation, but reads the history as the construction of a planetary instrument. It treats the [digital twin](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/digital-twin) and the Apollo 13 replicas as the prototype of a beneficial feedback between model and world, where de Monchaux treats the same feedback as a loss of access. Shared evidence, opposed valuation.
- [For a General Theory of Simulations](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/theoryofsim) is the affirmative counterpart. Bratton's distinction between [reflexive and recursive simulation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/reflexive-vs-recursive-simulation), and his MacKenzie-derived claim that simulations are "an engine not a camera," describe exactly the model-world feedback de Monchaux documents; the journal's own glossary entry for this essay is titled recursive modeling. Bratton's [sim-to-real gap](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/sim-to-real-gap) asks the reader to dwell in the entanglement rather than mourn it. Agreement on the mechanism, tension on what follows.
- [Latent Spacecraft](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/latentspacecraft) argues directly against the black-box reading of model interiors, proposing that latent spaces be treated as architectures that can be probed and partially mapped. This is the clearest disagreement in the corpus with de Monchaux's conclusion.
- [AUTO](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/auto) shares the essay's method of historical lineage, following the automobile rather than the motor, and its section on automation "from simulation to stimulation" describes the arcade and the simulator shaping the driving they once imitated. Agreement.
- [Planetary Sapience Symposium](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience) frames simulation as a condition of planetary self-knowledge, the outlook de Monchaux's ending resists: for him the closed model is an obstacle to understanding, not its vehicle. Tension.
- [The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-stack) treats the User as a figure positioned by interfaces it cannot see into, close to the phone-holder on Boston Common in the essay's conclusion. Agreement.


## Terms used

- [Black Box](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/black-box)
- [Model Epistemology](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/model-epistemology)
- [Paradox of Simulation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/paradox-of-simulation)
- [Recursive Modeling](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/recursive-modeling)
- [Synthetic Training](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/synthetic-training)

## Related works

- [Infinity Mirror](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/infinitymirror)
- [AUTO–](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/auto)
- [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks)
- [For a General Theory of Simulations](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/theoryofsim)
- [Planetary Sapience Symposium](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience)