The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
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used to transmit a small set of messages: attack; retre...
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they could not conceive of ta...
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an agent for English slavers
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he noted that women danced briskly to their music, and sometimes that the drums were “beat on the approach of an enemy,”
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extraordinary occasions,”
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drums summon...
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On being taxed with inattention, he said, “You no hear my son speak?” As we had heard no voice, he was asked how he knew it. He said, “Drum speak me, tell me come up deck.”
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every village had this “facility of musical correspondence.”
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detailed messages of many sentences could be conveyed across miles.
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a technology much sought in Europe: long-distance communication
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faster than any traveler on foot or horseback.
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the thump of the drum could carry six o...
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Relayed from village to village, messages could rumble a hundred miles or more...
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A birth announcement in Bolenge, a village of the Belgian Congo, went like this: Batoko fala fala, tokema bolo bolo, boseka woliana imaki tonkilingonda, ale nda bobila wa fole fole, asokoka l’isika koke koke. The mats are rolled up, we feel strong, a woman came fro...
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fisherman’s funeral: La nkesa laa mpombolo, tofolange benteke biesala, tolanga bonteke bolokolo bole nda elinga l’enjale baenga, basaki l’okala bopele pele. Bojende bosalaki lifeta Bolenge wa kala kala, tekendake tonkilingonda, tekendake beningo la nkaka elinga l’enjale. Tolanga bonteke bolokolo bole nda elinga l’enjale, la nkesa la mpombolo. In the morning at dawn, we do not want gatherings for work, we want a meeting of play on the river. Men who live in Bolenge, do not go to the forest, do not go fishing. We want a meeting of play on the river, in the morning at dawn.
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almost anyone could understand the messages in the drumbeats.
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Set phrases would recur again and again,
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phrases of a traditional and highly poetic character,”
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Here was a messaging system that outpaced the best couriers,
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the fastest horses on good roads with way stations and relays.
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Earth-bound, foot-based messaging systems alwa...
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Caesar, for example, was “very often arriving before the messengers sent t...
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The Greeks used fire beacons at the time of the Trojan War,
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A bonfire on a mountaintop could be seen from watchtowers twenty miles distant, or in special cases even farther.
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The meaning of the message had, of course, to be prearranged,
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condensed into a single bit.
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something or ...
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one binary choice: by land or
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by sea.
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The discovery of magnetism held particular promise.
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It was the first crack in the hitherto solid assumption of simultaneity.
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no one in the world could communicate as much, as fast, as far as unlettered Africans with their drums.
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Captain Allen discovered the talking drums in 1841,
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Samuel F. B. Morse was struggling with his own percussive code, the electromagnetic drumbeat designed to ...
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“a system of signs for letters, to be indicated and marked by a quick succession of strokes or shocks of the
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galvanic current.”
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taxed his ingenuity more than any mechanical problem of the telegraph.
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It is fitting that history attached Morse’s name to his code, more than to his device.
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an electrical circuit closing and opening.
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Morse set about creating this dictionary himself, wasting many hours inscribing it on large folios.*
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Morse realized that it would be hopelessly cumbersome for operators to page through a dictionary for every word.
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a coded alphabet, using signs as surrogates for the letters and thus spelling out every word.
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They had to map the entire language onto a single dimension of pulses.
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Then, as they fiddled with the prototype keypad, they came up with a third sign: the line or dash,
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“when the circuit was closed a longer time than was necessary to make a dot.”
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the unmentioned space remained just as important;
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They would have to master the coding system and then perform a continuous act of double translation: language to signs; mind to fingers.
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The clerks who attend at the recording instrument become so expert in their curious hieroglyphics, that they do not need to look at the printed record to know what the message under reception is; the recording instrument has for them an intelligible articulate language. They understand its speech. They can close their eyes and listen to the strange clicking that is going on close to their ear whilst the printing is in progress, and at once say what it all means.
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Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters.
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Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases.