Feature: In his 1926 life-size poster “Der Mensch als Industriepalast” (Man as Industrial Palace), physician and infographics pioneer Fritz Kahn draws on the state of art, science, and technology of the second industrial revolution to depict core processes of the human organism as if it were a factory: tubes filled with chemicals, a metabolic division of labour in assembly lines, a mechanical pump for the heart, a camera for the eye, and a telephone switchboard for the central nervous system. The higher brain compartments, however, are still Gutenberg Galaxies of books and humans, devoid of any industrial technology. At the time, computers were clearly wetware.
At the turn of the next industrial revolution, George Spencer Brown was one of these human computers in a brain compartment of a British radio transmission equipment manufacturer, Mullard Equipment Limited, whose Technical Publications Department features as sponsor and potential publisher of his typescript Design with the NOR. This 1961 typescript shows that Spencer Brown’s 1969 book Laws of Form adds a veritable piece of hardware to the libraries of industrial man, whose updated wetware can now think like a transistor.

The preprint is available for download here. Please see here for the final version of this article.

Suggested citation: Roth S. (2021), NOR: Truth table, true distinction. In: Roth S., Heidingsfelder M., Clausen L., and Laursen K. (eds.), George Spencer Brown’s “Design with the NOR”. With related essays, Bingley: Emerald, pp. 33-39.

Photo credit: Markus Heidingsfelder.