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William Grey Walter
Summary
William Grey Walter (February 19, 1910 – May 6, 1977) was an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician.
Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, on 19 February 1910, the only child of Minerva Lucrezia (Margaret) Hardy (1879–1953), an American journalist and Karl Wilhelm Walter (1880–1965), a British journalist who was working on the Kansas City Star at the time. His parents had met and married in Italy, and during the First World War the family moved from to Britain. Walter's ancestry was German/British on his father's side, and American/British on his mother's side. He was brought to England in 1915, and educated at Westminster School with an interest in classics and science, and entered King's College, Cambridge, in 1928. He achieved a third class in part one (1930) and a first class in physiology in part two of the natural sciences tripos (1931).
He failed to obtain a research fellowship in Cambridge and so turned to doing basic and applied neurophysiological research in hospitals, in London, from 1935 to 1939 and then at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, from 1939 to 1970. He also carried out research work in the United States, in the Soviet Union and in various other places in Europe. He married twice, had two sons from his first marriage, and one from the second. According to his eldest son, Nicolas Walter, "he was politically on the left, a communist fellow-traveller before the Second World War and an anarchist sympathiser after it. Throughout his life he was a pioneer in the field of cybernetics. In 1970, he suffered a brain injury in a motor scooter accident. He never fully recovered and died seven years later, on May 6, 1977.
As a young man, Walter was greatly influenced by the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. He visited the lab of Hans Berger, who invented the electroencephalograph, or EEG machine, for measuring electrical activity in the brain.
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