The Davis platform.
A 19th-century bird feeder already worked like a Skinner box, reminding us the core hardware is older than the science.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Zimmerman (1969) tells a short story about a bird feeder built in the 1840s.
The feeder gave seeds when birds pecked a small key.
No data were collected; the paper just shows the gadget looked like a tiny Skinner box.
What they found
The key-peck-plus-food setup existed 80 years before Skinner’s lab.
Birds already worked for food the same way pigeons later did in operant chambers.
How this fits with other research
Asano et al. (2012) dug up a 1952 cumulative recorder that bridged prototype and the Model C-1. Together the two papers show hardware ideas kept re-inventing before they became standard lab tools.
Meyer et al. (1987) built a modern pellet dispenser for bird feeding studies. Their paper extends the same line of thought: engineers keep refining automatic food delivery for birds.
Fournier et al. (2004) found the words “cumulative record” were used before Skinner. Pair that with W’s gadget and you see both the tools and the terms pre-date the famous lab.
Why it matters
Next time you set up an operant chamber, remember the idea is older than the field itself. Sharing this story with new RBTs can spark curiosity about why we still use key-peck and food-magazine designs that started in a backyard 180 years ago.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Bird watchers (the out-of-doors variety) operate hap- pily on a schedule of intermittent reinforcement. Of the various rewards available to them, probably the one with the greatest effect is that of happening upon the unexpected. Such was the case for the writer, who in reading a new work on the finch family, found a report of what may well have been the first rough Skinner box, complete with key and food magazine. While there is clearly no historical tie between this early device made by a naturalist interested in problem- solving in wild birds and B. F. Skinner's careful in- strumentation, still one is reminded of the observation that novel ideas often turn up in very different places at almost the same time.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1969 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1969.12-675