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

by Jimmy Soni

When the Depression hit, they nearly lost their home. A New Deal homeowners’ program saved the family from foreclosure, a moment that Betty never forgot. By her daughter’s account, “My mother was eternally grateful to FDR and to the New Deal and the protections FDR put in place. They managed to keep the house and survive.”

As she recalled, “at that point they were very much looking for math majors, particularly women, because the men were all in the service.” Bell Labs was among those companies on the search for any and all talented graduates in the field.

She started work in the mathematics department, focusing on microwave research, and then moved to the fast-growing radar group. “Just working there was fascinating,” she recalled. And, “considering that the world was in a mess, we were very lucky.” She moved back home with her parents and continued to contribute to the household; Betty would support her parents in some way for the rest of their lives.

Claude’s work was very much his own, but there’s no denying Betty’s help in bringing it to fruition; she became one of his closest advisers on mathematical matters. She looked up references, took down his thoughts, and, importantly, edited his written work.

“He had a weird insight. He could see through things. He would say, ‘Something like this should be true’ . . . and he was usually right. . . . You can’t develop an entire field out of whole cloth if you don’t have superb intuition.”

As Betty put it, “some of his early papers and even later papers are in my handwriting, so called, and not in his, which confused people at first.” Confusing, perhaps—but also testament to one of the great mathematical marriages of our time: one that produced path-breaking work and lasted the rest of Claude’s life.

The new theory, still almost unknown to the general public, goes under either of two names: communication theory or information theory. Whether or not it will ultimately rank with the enduring great is a question now being resolved in a score of major laboratories here and abroad.

Though Shannon praised an early draft of the article, calling it a “bang-up job of scientific reporting,” he took characteristic exception to these two opening paragraphs. “Much as I wish it were so, communication theory is not in the same league with relativity and quantum mechanics. The first two paragraphs should be rewritten with a much more modest and realistic view of the importance of the theory.” Shannon also urged Bello to acknowledge Norbert Wiener for his contemporary work on cybernetics—and to make sure Bell Labs researchers were given their due.

“There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon’s insight to Einstein’s. Others found that comparison unfair—unfair to Shannon.” Despite Shannon’s protests, the similarities impressed themselves on his contemporaries: revolutionary theoretical work, a kind of playfulness of spirit, a curious combination of creative skill and the ability to stand apart from the prestige-soaked, ladder-climbing world of elite academia.

OMNI: 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 Bandwagon” was his attempt to shut the lid, discipline the discipline, and remind at least the engineering world that the theory he had pioneered—and the work that had made him famous—could only remain meaningful within its own proper bounds.

Kingman Douglass was one of the sons of the upper crust whose life was a mix of prestigious private schools, paneled boardrooms, and pressurized war rooms. A graduate of the Hill School and Yale University, he flew planes in World War I and ran intelligence operations in World War II. He also served on two separate occasions with the CIA, including as assistant director for current intelligence.

Joseph Wenger also spent his career in the highest echelons of the intelligence world. “One of the first naval officers to realize the role of communications intelligence,” he was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who would rise to become a rear admiral—and along the way would transform the way the Navy thought about and implemented cryptologic operations, becoming “one of the architects of centralized cryptology.” In the Pacific Theater of World War II, he found that the close study of Japan’s “message externals,” or seemingly trivial details ranging from call signs to communication habits, could be as cryptographically fruitful as the analysis of the messages themselves. By 1949, with two wars’ worth of experience and understanding, he was a leader in the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), the forerunner to the modern NSA.

John von Neumann also contacted Shannon that week, impressing upon him the significance of the request. It was very much in keeping with Shannon’s sensibility that he was neither overawed by being sought out for such a consultancy nor too quick to jump at the problem before knowing its full scope.

The war’s end had brought the military a thorny problem: the exit from public service of many of the nation’s top scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. Beginning in wartime, as Sylvia Nasar wrote, “to be plucked from academe and initiated into the secret world of the military had become something of a rite of passage for the mathematical elite.” Now, though, “how to keep the best and brightest thinking about military problems was far from obvious.

The leadership with which Shannon was interacting had come of age in the midst of two massive intelligence failures. The horror of Pearl Harbor was seared in their memories. More recently, the invasion of South Korea by North Korea had again blindsided American policy makers, and by 1950, the country was again on a war footing. Which is all to say that Shannon was speaking with and working for men who had seen armed combat and were sending a new generation of Americans into another bloody conflict. The stakes were real; the intelligence requirements were manifold. Mathematical thinkers of Shannon’s and Von Neumann’s caliber were a necessary external measure of the defense establishment’s technological and scientific soundness.

After 1948, the Bell Labs bureaucracy could not touch him—which was precisely as Shannon preferred it. Henry Pollak, director of Bell Labs’ Mathematics Division, spoke for a generation of Bell leaders when he declared that Shannon “had earned the right to be non-productive.” Shannon arrived at the Murray Hill office late, if at all, and often spent the day absorbed in games of chess and hex in the common areas. When not besting his colleagues in board games, he could be found piloting a unicycle through Bell Labs’ narrow passageways, occasionally while juggling; sometimes he would pogo-stick his way around the Bell Labs campus, much to the consternation, we imagine, of the people who signed his paychecks.

After all, the “founder of information theory” had, essentially, dropped the theory into everyone’s laps after finishing it in private. Who was to question what else he might be up to behind closed doors?

Hubbard would later write to Shannon thanking him for help on his research and promising a copy of Dianetics when it was released. No further correspondence between the founder of information theory and the pope of Scientology has been recorded. Yet, as William Poundstone notes, “to this day Hubbard’s Scientology faith cites Shannon and information theoretic jargon in its literature and web sites.”

He was so convinced of a machine-enabled future, and so eager to explore its boundaries, that he was willing to tolerate a degree of ridicule to bring it to pass. He was preoccupied, as he wrote to a correspondent, “with the possible capabilities and applications of large scale electronic computers.” Considered in the light of that future, our present, his machines weren’t hobbies—they were proofs.

Technically, as Shannon would point out, the mouse wasn’t solving the maze; the maze was solving the mouse. Yet, one way or another, the system was able to learn.

“My fondest dream is to someday build a machine that really thinks, learns, communicates with humans and manipulates its environment in a fairly sophisticated way,” Shannon admitted. But he was not bothered by the usual fears of a world run by machines or a human race taking a backseat to robots. If anything, Shannon believed the opposite: “In the long run [the machines] will be a boon to humanity, and the point is to make them so as rapidly as possible. . . . There is much greater empathy between man and machines [today] . . . we’d like to close it up so that we are actually talking back and forth.”

believe that today, that we are going to invent something, it’s not going to be the biological process of evolution anymore, it’s going to be the inventive process whereby we invent machines which are smarter than we are and so we’re no longer useful, not only smarter but they last longer and have replaceable parts and they’re so much better. There are so many of these things about the human system, it’s just terrible. The only thing surgeons can do to help you basically is to cut something out of you. They don’t cut it out and put something better in, or a new part in.