Although this circuit contains nothing that wasn’t invented in the nineteenth century, nobody in that century ever realized that Boolean expressions could be directly realized in electrical circuits. This equivalence wasn’t discovered until the 1930s, most notably by Claude Elwood Shannon (born 1916), whose famous 1938 M.I.T. master’s thesis was entitled “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.” (Ten years later, Shannon’s article “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” was the first publication that used the word bit to mean binary digit.)
