Talk:Arthur Pollen
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| Systems rating: | Start Class | Mid importance | Field: Control theory | ||
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This article has seemed like a book report taken from a single source, and that book not one of a biographical nature. It would be nice to see more biographical sources added. Additionally, the partisan views taken from the book written by Pollen's own son are not a consensus but merely illustrative of a continuing controversy of these equipment and tactical issues. I've added a few sources expressing opposing views. Others which would champion the view expressed in the rest of the article might well be selected from the works of Prof. Jon Sumida (whose "In Defence of Naval Supremacy" would supply many good biographical footnotes on Pollen).
One factual change I made was to remove allusions to the failure of the Dreyer system at the Battle of the Falklands, as there were no Dreyer systems yet fitted to the ships in that 1914 battle. Additionally, the Dreyer tables emphatically were, themselves, "clocks" in the sense of the word in this discussion, where it means "range computing computer". Lastly, the earliest Dreyer tables did have automatic range and bearing plotters, but the range plotting assembly was replaced by a manual keyboard soon thereafter. It's not clear whether the automatic system was unreliable, but one of the primary virtues of the Dreyer was that by use of a manual system, several to many rangefinders could have their data plotted at once. DulcetTone (talk) 18:32, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
Many thanks for the correction. My interest is not fire control as such but the history of the development of computing. Pollen seems to be responsible from taking the mechanical analogue computer from a scientific instrument into a production system, and as such this is an important step in the development of computers. In doing so he pioneered real time control systems as well. Pollen provides the links back to the Thomson brothers. However it did seem strange to have entries by Pollen's critics on Wiki and none by those who recognise the importance of his work. So you are quite correct the article is based on a single book and offers plenty of opportunities for improvement. Mathew Rammer (talk) 13:21, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
