A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

by Jimmy Soni

It was trivial, Shannon said. But it was the kind of discovery blessed to be trivial only after the fact.

“In these days, when there is a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or even Benjamin Franklin,” Bush said in a speech at MIT. “Men of our profession—we teachers—are bound to be impressed with the tendency of youths of strikingly capable minds to become interested in one small corner of science and uninterested in the rest of the world. . . . It is unfortunate when a brilliant and creative mind insists upon living in a modern monastic cell.”

One Bell employee of a later era summarized it like this: “When I first came there was the philosophy: look, what you’re doing might not be important for ten years or twenty years, but that’s fine, we’ll be there then.”

But in his insistence on this point, he ran up against a human habit much older than him: our tendency to reimagine the universe in the image of our tools. We made clocks, and found the world to be clockwork; steam engines, and found the world to be a machine processing heat; information networks—switching circuits and data transmission and half a million miles of submarine cable connecting the continents—and found the world in their image, too.

Do you find fame a burden? SHANNON: Not too much. I have people like you coming and wasting my afternoons, but that isn’t too much of a burden!

The confident, if occasionally scattershot, MIT lecturer had developed a crippling stage fright—driven less, it seems, by fear of the spotlight than by fear of having run out of interesting, intellectually rigorous subjects to talk about.