The Information (80 page)

♦
MY MIND WANDERS AROUND:
Robert Price, “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,”
IEEE Communications Magazine
22 (1984): 126.

♦
TRANSISTOR … BIT:
The committee got
transistor
from John R. Pierce; Shannon got
bit
from John W. Tukey.

♦
SHANNON SUPPOSEDLY BELONGED
: Interview, Mary Elizabeth Shannon, 25 July 2006.

♦
BY 1948 MORE THAN 125 MILLION
:
Statistical Abstract of the United States 1950
. More exactly: 3,186 radio and television broadcasting stations, 15,000 newspapers and periodicals, 500 million books and pamphlets, and 40 billion pieces of mail.

♦
CAMPBELL’S SOLUTION
: George A. Campbell, “On Loaded Lines in Telephonic Transmission,”
Philosophical Magazine
5 (1903): 313.

♦
“THEORIES PERMIT CONSCIOUSNESS TO ‘JUMP OVER ITS OWN SHADOW’ ”
: Hermann Weyl, “The Current Epistemological Situation in Mathematics” (1925), quoted in John L. Bell, “Hermann Weyl on Intuition and the Continuum,”
Philosophia Mathematica
8, no. 3 (2000): 261.

♦
“SHANNON WANTS TO FEED NOT JUST
DATA
”
: Andrew Hodges,
Alan Turing: The Enigma
(London: Vintage, 1992), 251.

♦
“OFF AND ON … I HAVE BEEN WORKING”
: Letter, Shannon to Vannevar Bush, 16 February 1939, in Claude Elwood Shannon,
Collected Papers
, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 455.

♦
“NOWE USED FOR AN ELEGANT WORDE”
: Thomas Elyot,
The Boke Named The Governour
(1531), III: xxiv.

♦
“MAN THE FOOD-GATHERER REAPPEARS”
: Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 302.

♦
“WHAT LIES AT THE HEART OF EVERY LIVING THING”
: Richard Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
(New York: Norton, 1986), 112.

♦
“THE INFORMATION CIRCLE BECOMES THE UNIT OF LIFE”
: Werner R. Loewenstein,
The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xvi.

♦
“EVERY IT—EVERY PARTICLE, EVERY FIELD OF FORCE”
: John Archibald Wheeler, “It from Bit,” in
At Home in the Universe
(New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 296.

♦
“THE BIT COUNT OF THE COSMOS”
: John Archibald Wheeler, “The Search for Links,” in Anthony J. G. Hey, ed.,
Feynman and Computation
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002), 321.

♦
“NO MORE THAN 10
¹²⁰
OPS”
: Seth Lloyd, “Computational Capacity of the Universe,”
Physical Review Letters
88, no. 23 (2002).

♦
“TOMORROW … WE WILL HAVE LEARNED TO UNDERSTAND”
: John Archibald Wheeler, “It from Bit,” 298.

♦
“IT IS HARD TO PICTURE THE WORLD BEFORE SHANNON”
: John R. Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,”
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
19, no. 1 (1973): 4.

♦
“NUMBERS TOO, CHIEFEST OF SCIENCES”
: Aeschylus,
Prometheus Bound
, trans. H. Smyth, 460–61.

♦
“THE INVENTION OF PRINTING, THOUGH INGENIOUS”
: Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
(London: Andrew Crooke, 1660), ch. 4.

♦
“ACROSS THE DARK CONTINENT SOUND”
: Irma Wassall, “Black Drums,”
Phylon Quarterly
4 (1943): 38.

♦
“MAKE YOUR FEET COME BACK”
: Walter J. Ong,
Interfaces of the Word
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 105.

♦
IN 1730 FRANCIS MOORE SAILED EASTWARD
: Francis Moore,
Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa
(London: J. Knox, 1767).

♦
“SUDDENLY HE BECAME TOTALLY ABSTRACTED”
: William Allen and Thomas R. H. Thompson,
A Narrative of the Expedition to the River Niger in 1841
, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1848), 393.

♦
A MISSIONARY, ROGER T. CLARKE
: Roger T. Clarke, “The Drum Language of the Tumba People,”
American Journal of Sociology
40, no. 1 (1934): 34–48.

♦
“VERY OFTEN ARRIVING BEFORE THE MESSENGERS”
: G. Suetonius Tranquillus,
The Lives of the Caesars
, trans. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 87.

♦
“YET WHO SO SWIFT COULD SPEED THE MESSAGE”
: Aeschylus,
Agamemnon
, trans. Charles W. Eliot, 335.

♦
A GERMAN HISTORIAN, RICHARD HENNIG
: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson,
The Early History of Data Networks
(Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1995), 17.

♦
A “CONCEIT … WHISPERED THOROW THE WORLD”
: Thomas Browne,
Pseudoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries Into Very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths
, 3rd ed. (London: Nath. Ekins, 1658), 59.

♦
IN ITALY A MAN TRIED TO SELL GALILEO
: Galileo Galilei,
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican
, trans. Stillman Drake (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1967), 95.

♦
“A SYSTEM OF SIGNS FOR LETTERS”
:
Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals
, vol. 2, ed. Edward Lind Morse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 12.

♦
“THE DICTIONARY OR VOCABULARY CONSISTS OF WORDS”
: U. S. Patent 1647, 20 June 1840, 6.

♦
“THE SUPERIORITY OF THE ALPHABETIC MODE”
: Samuel F. B. Morse, letter to Leonard D. Gale, in
Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals
, vol. 2, 65.

♦
“WHEN THE CIRCUIT WAS CLOSED A LONGER TIME”
: Ibid., 64.

♦
“THE CLERKS WHO ATTEND AT THE RECORDING INSTRUMENT”
: “The Atlantic Telegraph,”
The New York Times
, 7 August 1858.

♦
IN SEARCH OF DATA ON THE LETTERS’ RELATIVE FREQUENCIES
: Morse claimed that this was he, and their partisans differ. Cf.
Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals
, vol. 2, 68; George P. Oslin,
The Story of Telecommunications
(Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1992), 24; Franklin Leonard Pope, “The American Inventors of the Telegraph,”
Century Illustrated Magazine
(April 1888): 934; Kenneth Silverman,
Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse
(New York: Knopf, 2003), 167.

♦
LONG AFTERWARD, INFORMATION THEORISTS CALCULATED
: John R. Pierce,
An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise
, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1980), 25.

♦
“ONLY A FEW DAYS AGO I READ IN THE
TIMES
”
: Robert Sutherland Rattray, “The Drum Language of West Africa: Part II,”
Journal of the Royal African Society
22, no. 88 (1923): 302.

♦
“HE IS NOT REALLY A EUROPEAN”
: John F. Carrington,
La Voix des tambours: comment comprendre le langage tambouriné d’Afrique
(Kinshasa: Protestant d’Édition et de Diffusion, 1974), 66, quoted in Walter J. Ong,
Interfaces of the Word
, 95.

♦
“I MUST HAVE BEEN GUILTY MANY A TIME”
: John F. Carrington,
The Talking Drums of Africa
(London: Carey Kingsgate, 1949), 19.

♦
EVEN THE LIMITED DICTIONARY OF THE MISSIONARIES
: Ibid., 33.

♦
“AMONG PEOPLES WHO KNOW NOTHING OF WRITING”
: Robert Sutherland Rattray, “The Drum Language of West Africa: Part I,”
Journal of the Royal African Society
22, no. 87 (1923): 235.

♦
FOR THE YAUNDE, THE ELEPHANT
: Theodore Stern, “Drum and Whistle ‘Languages’: An Analysis of Speech Surrogates,”
American Anthropologist
59 (1957): 489.

♦
“THIS COUNTERSPELL MAY SAVE YOUR SOUL”
: James Merrill, “Eight Bits,” in
The Inner Room
(New York: Knopf, 1988), 48.

♦
A PAPER BY A BELL LABS TELEPHONE ENGINEER
: Ralph V. L. Hartley, “Transmission of Information,”
Bell System Technical Journal
7 (1928): 535–63.

♦
HE SAW LOKELE YOUTH PRACTICING THE DRUMS LESS AND LESS
: John F. Carrington,
The Talking Drums of Africa
, 83.

♦
A VISITOR FROM THE UNITED STATES FOUND HIM
: Israel Shenker, “Boomlay,”
Time
, 22 November 1954.

♦
“ODYSSEUS WEPT”
: Ward Just,
An Unfinished Season
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 153.

♦
“TRY TO IMAGINE”
: Walter J. Ong,
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Methuen, 1982), 31.

♦
THE PASTNESS OF THE PAST
: Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
5, no. 3 (1963): 304–45.

♦
“THE OTHER EMINENT CATHOLIC-ELECTRONIC PROPHET”
: Frank Kermode, “Free Fall,”
New York Review of Books
10, no. 5 (14 March 1968).

♦
“HORSES AS AUTOMOBILES WITHOUT WHEELS”
: Walter J. Ong,
Orality and Literacy
, 12.

♦
“LANGUAGE IN FACT BEARS THE SAME RELATIONSHIP”
: Jonathan Miller,
Marshall McLuhan
(New York: Viking, 1971), 100.

♦
“FOR THIS INVENTION WILL PRODUCE FORGETFULNESS”
: Plato,
Phaedrus
, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Fairfield, Iowa: First World Library, 2008), 275a.

♦
“TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF MANUSCRIPT CULTURE”
: Marshall McLuhan, “Culture Without Literacy,” in Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds.,
Essential McLuhan
(New York: Basic Books, 1996), 305.

♦
“THIS MIRACULOUS REBOUNDING OF THE VOICE”
: Pliny the Elder,
The Historie of the World
, vol. 2, trans. Philemon Holland (London: 1601), 581.

♦
“THE WRITTEN SYMBOL EXTENDS INFINITELY”
: Samuel Butler,
Essays on Life, Art, and Science
(Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970), 198.

♦
“THERE NEVER WAS A MAN”
: David Diringer and Reinhold Regensburger,
The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind
, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), 166.

♦
“IT WAS SOMETHING LIKE A THUNDER-CLAP”
: “The Alphabetization of Homer,” in Eric Alfred Havelock and Jackson P. Hershbell,
Communication Arts in the Ancient World
(New York: Hastings House, 1978), 3.

♦
“HAPPENS, UP TO THE PRESENT DAY”
: Aristotle,
Poetics
, trans. William Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 1447b.

♦
HAVELOCK DESCRIBED IT AS CULTURAL WARFARE
: Eric A. Havelock,
Preface to Plato
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 300–301.

♦
“A
BEGINNING
IS THAT WHICH ITSELF DOES NOT FOLLOW”
: Aristotle,
Poetics
, 1450b.

♦
“THE MULTITUDE CANNOT ACCEPT”
:
Republic
, 6.493e. Cf. in Eric A. Havelock,
Preface to Plato
, 282.

♦
“LOSE THEMSELVES AND WANDER”
:
Republic
, 6.484b.

♦
“TRYING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY”
: Eric A. Havelock,
Preface to Plato
, 282.

♦
LOGIC DESCENDED FROM THE WRITTEN WORD
: Not everyone agrees with all this. A counterargument: John Halverson, “Goody and the Implosion of the Literacy Thesis,”
Man
27, no. 2 (1992): 301–17.

♦
IF IT IS POSSIBLE FOR NO MAN TO BE A HORSE
: Aristotle,
Prior Analytics
, trans. A. J. Jenkinson, 1:3.

♦
“WE KNOW THAT FORMAL LOGIC”
: Walter J. Ong,
Orality and Literacy
, 49.

♦
FIELDWORK OF THE RUSSIAN PSYCHOLOGIST
: A. R. Luria,
Cognitive Development, Its Cultural and Social Foundations
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 86.