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History

In the 19th century the French physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, who studied thermodynamics, pioneered the development of the concept of a system in the natural sciences. In 1824 he studied the system which he called the working substance (typically a body of water vapor) in steam engines, in regard to the system's ability to do work when heat is applied to it. The working substance could be put in contact with either a boiler, a cold reservoir (a stream of cold water), or a piston (on which the working body could do work by pushing on it). In 1850, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius generalized this picture to include the concept of the surroundings and began to use the term working body when referring to the system.

The biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy became one of the pioneers of the general systems theory. In 1945 he introduced models, principles, and laws that apply to generalized systems or their subclasses, irrespective of their particular kind, the nature of their component elements, and the relation or 'forces' between them.

In the late 1940s and mid-50s, Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby pioneered the use of mathematics to study systems of control and communication, calling it cybernetics.

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan applied general systems theory in an approach that he called a field approach and figure/ground analysis, to the study of media theory.

In the 1980s John Henry Holland, Murray Gell-Mann and others coined the term complex adaptive system at the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute.