The emergence and application of automatic devices was in the 18th century. The formation period of automation technology was from the end of the 18th century to the 1930s. In 1788, British mechanic J. Watt invented centrifugal governor (also known as flying ball governor) and connected it with the valve of steam engine to form a closed-loop automatic control system of steam engine speed. Watt's invention created a new era in the application of modern automatic regulating devices, and had an important impact on the first industrial revolution and the later development of control theory. People began to use automatic regulating devices to deal with the control problems raised in industrial production. These regulators are devices that track the given value to keep some physical quantities near the given value. The application of automatic regulator marks that automation technology has entered a new historical period. After entering the 20th century, various automatic regulating devices are widely used in industrial production, which promotes the research work of analysis and synthesis of regulating system. Although the structure of feedback control has been widely used in automatic regulators in this period, the theoretical research on the principle of feedback control began in the 1920s. In 1833, the British mathematician C. Babbage first proposed the principle of program control when designing the analysis machine. In 1939, the first batch of professional research institutions of system and control in the world were established, which made theoretical and organizational preparations for the formation of classical control theory and the development of local automation in the 1940s.