Norbert Wiener

FIRST EDITION, LIMITED, no. 81 of 300 copies.

“The following paper represents certain methods and techniques in the theory of time series and communication engineering. It is written up as a textbook for those different branches of government service which may find the contained ideas useful in connection with the prosecution of the war” (p v.). Wiener here broadens the definition of communication engineering to encompass even “the records of current and voltage kept on the instruments of an automatic sub-station are as truly messages as a telephone conversation” and considers all the data for a time series and filters it based on his statistical approach – later referred to as the Wiener filter. This certainly would have been of interest to the intelligence community and was understandably restricted. Claude Shannon would praise Wiener and this work in his landmark paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”: “Communication theory is heavily indebted to Wiener for much of its basic philosophy and theory. His classic NRDC report The Interpolation, Extrapolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series contains the first clear-cut formulation of communication theory as a statistical problem, the study of operations on time series. This work, although chiefly concerned with the linear prediction and filtering problem, is an important collateral reference in connection with the present paper” (Shannon p.34). We can find no copies of this edition having appeared on the auction market. Hook & Norman. Origins of Cyberspace. 990; Shannon, Claude. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Offprint from The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp.379-423, 623-656, July, October, 1948.