A (Cybernetic) Musing: In Praise of Buffers

Not long ago, a colleague of many years asked me a question. He told me of the behaviour of the old lime and horse-hair plaster placed over timber laths that was used until quite recently all over northern Europe as a wall finish. This material has an interesting property: it absorbs and emits moisture, thus helping keep the humidity inside a building within reasonable limits: in other words, it acts as a buffer. What he wanted to know was whether buffers were a topic that had been seriously studied. He assumed they would be part of cybernetics, and, when I heard his question, I immediately replied in the affirmative. I was certain that buffers were part of the area of study of early cybernetics and was sure I had read about them in Ross Ashby’s Introduction to Cybernetics, for me the subject’s essential basic text.