1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Control

CONTROL (Fr. contrôle, older form contre rolle, from Med. Lat. contra-rotulus, a counter roll or copy of a document used to check the original; there is no instance in English of the use of “control” in this, its literal, meaning), a substantive (whence the verb) for that which checks or regulates anything, and so especially command of body or mind by the will, and generally the power of regulation. In England the “Board of Control,” abolished in 1858, was the body which supervised the East India Company in the administration of India. In the case of “controller,” a general term for a public official who checks expenditure, the more usual form “comptroller” is a wrong spelling due to a false connexion with “accompt” or “account.” A “control” or “control-experiment,” in science, is an experiment used, by an application of the method of difference, to check the inferences drawn from another experiment.