How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

During World War II, the legendary mathematician Alan Turing and Bell Labs’ A. B. Clark collaborated on a secure communications line, code-named SIGSALY, that converted the sound waves of human speech into mathematical expressions. SIGSALY recorded the sound wave twenty thousand times a second, capturing the amplitude and frequency of the wave at that moment. But that recording was not done by converting the wave into an electrical signal or a groove in a wax cylinder. Instead, it turned the information into numbers, encoded it in the binary language of zeroes and ones. “Recording,” in fact, was the wrong word for it. Using a term that would become common parlance among hip-hop and electronic musicians fifty years later, they called this process “sampling.”