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

by Jimmy Soni

Of course, information existed before Shannon, just as objects had inertia before Newton. But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits. The sender no longer mattered, the intent no longer mattered, the medium no longer mattered, not even the meaning mattered: a phone conversation, a snatch of Morse telegraphy, a page from a detective story were all brought under a common code. Just as geometers subjected a circle in the sand and the disc of the sun to the same laws, and as physicists subjected the sway of a pendulum and the orbits of the planets to the same laws, Claude Shannon made our world possible by getting at the essence of information.

Circuits before Shannon might be drawn on a blackboard, but not represented as equations. Of course, it’s much more unwieldy to manipulate a diagram than an equation, and one couldn’t even begin to use mathematical rules on a drawing. Everything in Shannon’s thesis flowed from his realization that circuits were poorly symbolized.

Everything in Shannon’s thesis flowed from his realization that circuits were poorly symbolized.

But then the great insights don’t spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction—not the depressive kind of dissatisfaction (of which, he did not say, he had experienced his fair share), but rather a “constructive dissatisfaction,” or “a slight irritation when things don’t look quite right.” It was, at least, a refreshingly unsentimental picture of genius: a genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated. And finally: the genius must delight in finding solutions. It must have seemed to Shannon that though many around him were of equal intellect, not everyone derived equal joy from the application of intellect. For his part, “I get a big bang out of proving a theorem. If I’ve been trying to prove a mathematical theorem for a week or so and I finally get the solution, I get a big bang out of it. And I get a big kick out of seeing a clever way of doing some engineering problem, a clever design for a circuit which uses a very small amount of equipment and gets apparently a great deal of result out of it.” For Shannon, there was no substitute for the “pleasure in seeing net results.”

“Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another; and if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do.” Of course, simplification is an art form in itself: it requires a knack for excising everything from a problem except what makes it interesting, a nose for the distinction between accident and essence worthy of a scholastic philosopher.