That time the Army tried to develop a missile guided by pigeons
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In 1943, the U.S. military had a problem. It didn’t suffer from a lack of bombs and missiles, but there was no reliable way to accurately guide them for a precision strike. A psychologist, though, had a solution: use pigeons to get the job done. Thus, Project Pigeon was born. B.F. Skinner was a professor at the University of Minnesota at the time and specialized in understanding the psychology of human behavior. Homing pigeons had, of course, long been used in military service, as they could be trained to fly from one place to another. In 1940, Skinner began experimenting with the birds, devising an experiment in which they could be used to guide another object.
The experiment was relatively simple. The pigeons were placed in a harness, and as they pecked away at a small grain dish, their head movements would steer a small cart towards a bullseye. The experiments progressed to having the pigeons guide their harnesses toward other targets, like small ship models. Soon enough, Skinner had his pigeons training to steer towards pictures moving across a screen.
At first, Skinner couldn’t get the military interested, but in June 1943, the Office of Scientific Research and Development gave General Mills Inc., which was funding Skinner at that point, a small contract to try and develop his proposed pigeon guidance system. Skinner later described the project as “a crackpot idea, born on the wrong side of the tracks intellectually speaking, but eventually vindicated in a sort of middle-class respectability.”
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