Ears and eyes were to be understood as message channels, so why not test and measure them like microphones and cameras? “New concepts of the nature and measure of information,” wrote Homer Jacobson, a chemist at Hunter College in New York, “have made it possible to specify quantitatively the informational capacity of the human ear,” and he proceeded to do so. Then he did the same for the eye, arriving at an estimate four hundred times greater, in bits per second.
