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

by Jimmy Soni

First, communication is a war against noise. Noise is interference between telephone wires, or static that interrupts a radio transmission, or a telegraph signal corrupted by failing insulation and decaying on its way across an ocean. It is the randomness that creeps into our conversations, accidentally or deliberately, and blocks our understanding. Across short distances, or over relatively uncomplicated media—Bell calling Watson from the next room, or a landline telegraph from London to Manchester—noise could be coped with. But as distances increased and the means of sending and storing messages proliferated, the problems of noise grew with them. And the provisional solutions—whether closer to Thomson’s solution of listening more closely or Whitehouse’s solution of shouting louder—were ad hoc and distinct from source to source, put into practice as engineers stumbled upon them. At certain distances, or in certain channels of communication, perfect accuracy looked impossible: communication would be permanently linked to doubt. Until Claude Shannon, few people, if any, suspected that there could be a unified answer to noise.