Abstract: In Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State, Katherine C. Epstein follows the technological and legal history of computerized systems for aiming the big guns of battleships in the first half of the 20th century. The pioneering such system was invented by two British civilians named Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood in the decade before 1914.  At its heart was indisputably the most sophisticated analog computer of the day, decades ahead of its time, and one that contemporaries regarded as a form of artificial intelligence. Rather than pay for their invention, however, first the British navy and then the US navy pirated it. When the inventors sued for patent infringement, first the British and then the American governments invoked legal privileges to withhold evidence from plaintiffs on the grounds of national-security secrecy. In the United States, moreover, their lawsuits became entangled with high-level Anglo-American diplomacy during World War II and with the Manhattan Project. The arguments developed by the government in their case, which built on precedents stretching back to 19th-century Britain, helped lay groundwork for the nuclear-secrecy regime.

Bio: Katherine C. Epstein is associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden. She is the author of: Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Harvard University Press, 2014). Her research, supported by an ACLS Burkhardt fellowship and membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines the intersection of government secrecy, defense contracting, and intellectual property in the United States and Great Britain in the first half of the 20th century, and the transition from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana.