Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hayley and welcome to text Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren Folk Oban, and today
Speaker 1: we wanted to talk about a an important figure in
Speaker 1: tech who often I think is overlooked. H not on purpose,
Speaker 1: it's just he himself was a very kind of conclusive
Speaker 1: is probably the wrong word. They didn't seek the spotlight.
Speaker 1: He became a very private person. And also the work
Speaker 1: that he was doing was technical enough in nature that
Speaker 1: I think it's a little bit less dynamic as explained
Speaker 1: to the general public. Yeah, it's a little more tricky
Speaker 1: than saying this person built this thing which changed the world.
Speaker 1: This is the person who came up with the idea
Speaker 1: that the things that were built that changed the world
Speaker 1: were built upon Did that make sense, I'd have to
Speaker 1: diagram the sentence. We're talking about Claude Shannon Shannon Folks,
Speaker 1: the father of in anmation theory right, also known as
Speaker 1: the father of the electronic communication age, and his full
Speaker 1: name Claude Ellwood Shannon. Very important person he's been. He's
Speaker 1: been compared to, you know, some some pretty impressive, big,
Speaker 1: basic big people like Einstein, Yeah, Einstein being one of them,
Speaker 1: and you might say, well, whoa you know Einstein, Like,
Speaker 1: Einstein's name has become synonymous with just the concept of genius,
Speaker 1: like to the point where we use it in phrases
Speaker 1: where we're being you know, a little a little condescenating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: way to go Einstein, that kind of thing. But as
Speaker 1: you'll see when we go through this this episode and
Speaker 1: explain what Claude Shannon did and his his contributions to technology,
Speaker 1: as well as just kind of his wacky personality, you'll
Speaker 1: really kind of see how that that applies. So exactly
Speaker 1: who was he and what did he do? When was
Speaker 1: this guy born? He was born in nineteen sixteen in Potaski. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: his father was a probate judge and his mother was
Speaker 1: a high school principle. He also did have some mildly
Speaker 1: famous family. A very distant cousin of his kind of
Speaker 1: made a name for himself, Yeah, for killing an elephant
Speaker 1: with electricity, Thomas Edison. He did a few other things too, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the requisite doing from the internet. Thomas Edison obviously
Speaker 1: did many, many important things, some of them not remotely
Speaker 1: involving putting an animal to death with electricity. Yeah, thet
Speaker 1: the large majority of which so kill an elephant once. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, you just sticks with you right. Well. As
Speaker 1: a boy, Claude Shannon became interested in electronics and began
Speaker 1: experimenting with different stuff. He was just curious about how
Speaker 1: things work and how to build them himself. He built
Speaker 1: a working model of an airplane. Pretty impressive. Think I
Speaker 1: think he was born in nineteen sixteen. You didn't have
Speaker 1: airplanes for very long. They were pretty new. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: were brand new back in the early twentieth century. And
Speaker 1: he also reportedly made a working telegraph system that they
Speaker 1: set up between his bedroom and a friend's bedroom. His
Speaker 1: friend lived half a mile away, and it was all
Speaker 1: made out of fencing wire. Yeah, so he could all
Speaker 1: but I mean the wire itself. Yeah, he could actually
Speaker 1: end up sending messages to his friend have a mile away.
Speaker 1: He was also really into radio circuits and built a
Speaker 1: radio controlled model boat. Yeah, so very much that. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is the growing world of radio technology
Speaker 1: and the growing world of communications technology. So he was
Speaker 1: interested in it as a kid. Now a little bit
Speaker 1: later on, when he was a teenager, he got work
Speaker 1: as a basic mechanic in a drug store, running a
Speaker 1: fix it shop in a drug store, because that's that
Speaker 1: was like the center of town. Yeah, where you go
Speaker 1: and you go and get your your chocolate malt and
Speaker 1: your your your fan fixed. You know, it's a one
Speaker 1: stop shop. He attended an Arbor College, where he studied
Speaker 1: mathematics and electrical engineering. He graduated an Arbor College in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six and then went on to enroll in
Speaker 1: graduate level study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And
Speaker 1: he decided upon m i T because he saw this
Speaker 1: work study ad like pinned onto a physical bulletin board
Speaker 1: on his college campus that was advertising for someone interested
Speaker 1: in working on Vanavar Bush's differential analyzer, which was an
Speaker 1: analog computer that used these physical mechanical connections to make calculations.
Speaker 1: The deal here was that he would spend half his
Speaker 1: time working towards his degree and the other half in
Speaker 1: the lab with bush Um, who was then m i
Speaker 1: t s vice president and also their dean of engineering.
Speaker 1: So this was kind of sort of a big deal Um,
Speaker 1: and this machine was huge. It was the system of
Speaker 1: gears and pulleys and rods that calculated with an entire
Speaker 1: range values that were based on the physical rotation of
Speaker 1: the rods, and you could program it by physically rearranging
Speaker 1: all of these mechanical bits to correspond with different equations
Speaker 1: the control circuit. I mean that this is how early
Speaker 1: this was in computing technology. The control circuit itself was
Speaker 1: a system of some hundred electromagnetic switches. Yeah. This this
Speaker 1: is a kind of the the evolution of what Charles
Speaker 1: Babbage created way back in the day, the difference engine.
Speaker 1: Uh so we've done the text us done episodes about
Speaker 1: and a Lovelace, who was the first computer programmer she built.
Speaker 1: She kind of saw that computers could be things that
Speaker 1: could do more than just crunch numbers. They could analyze
Speaker 1: any kind of data. Yeah, they could represent stuff that
Speaker 1: isn't numbers as numbers, so that you could She had
Speaker 1: this brilliant idea of, oh, a computer might be able
Speaker 1: to represent something like a piece of music and be
Speaker 1: able to create, you know, replicated in some way. Years
Speaker 1: and years ahead of her time. And the computers of
Speaker 1: those days were these giant analog actual machines. Yeah, sometimes manpowered.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they had this electro mechanical element to it. So
Speaker 1: we're predating the time of the electronic computer at this point,
Speaker 1: so uh As Claude Shannon began to work on this machine,
Speaker 1: you know now that he had had enrolled with M
Speaker 1: I T. He noticed something interesting. He saw that the
Speaker 1: switches corresponded with a concept he had started on studying
Speaker 1: first as an undergraduate, and that was really focusing on,
Speaker 1: which was symbolic logic. Now. I took symbolic logic in college.
Speaker 1: I loved it because the basic idea of symbolic logic
Speaker 1: is you reduce logical statements to mathematical statements. Actually, I
Speaker 1: took a similar class. It was it was basically the
Speaker 1: at least mathematical math class I could get away with
Speaker 1: as an English major. Well, the neat thing about it
Speaker 1: that if you could prove that it mathematically made sense,
Speaker 1: then you could say that the statement is true right,
Speaker 1: and if it does exactly so, you could you could
Speaker 1: start to listen to your friends argue and sketch it out.
Speaker 1: And then he said, look, here's where you went wrong.
Speaker 1: But at any rate, while he was at M I T.
Speaker 1: He started really studying the work of a thinker named
Speaker 1: George Boole, who was from the nineteenth century and back
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty four, George Bull published an investigation of
Speaker 1: the laws of thought on which are founded the mathematical
Speaker 1: theories of logic and probabilities, sometimes known as the laws
Speaker 1: of the We usually shorten that to just laws of thought.
Speaker 1: So this discussion about the mathematical theories of logic had
Speaker 1: Bull using algebraic equations to represent logical forms and syllogisms,
Speaker 1: which is exactly what you know I experienced when I
Speaker 1: was in college. In this work, he also said that
Speaker 1: the only i'd impotent numbers, which are numbers that can
Speaker 1: be put through a certain operation multiple times without changing
Speaker 1: the result, are zero and one. For example, one times
Speaker 1: one equals one, and no matter how many times you
Speaker 1: will multiply one by one, it will always be one. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you take the product of that of that
Speaker 1: that equation and then multiplied by itself, you still stay
Speaker 1: with one, same thing with zero, although also with zero
Speaker 1: you can add and subtract and still end up with zero.
Speaker 1: So zero zero, zero, zero, so bool use zero and
Speaker 1: one for the values of the symbols. In his algebraic logic,
Speaker 1: he said an argument held in logic if when reduced
Speaker 1: to an algebraic equation, it held in common algebra with
Speaker 1: the zero one restriction of the possible interpretations of the symbols,
Speaker 1: meaning that if you could replace the symbols with a
Speaker 1: zero or a one and it's still made sense, it
Speaker 1: still worked, then it held true. So Claude Shannon looked
Speaker 1: at this and he was thinking, this is a really
Speaker 1: cool idea. I love this, this approach to logic. And hey,
Speaker 1: you know a switch has two positions on and off,
Speaker 1: so sort of like a one in zero. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean what if we were to, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: so play with that, that whole switch process, And that
Speaker 1: became something that would percolated in the back of his
Speaker 1: head for a while. In fact, it percolated so long
Speaker 1: that people suspect that he had fully formed this whole
Speaker 1: idea of applying boolean logic to electronic devices for years
Speaker 1: before writing it down, and once he wrote it out
Speaker 1: and presented it, well, we'll get there. We'll get there.
Speaker 1: I also do want to note that around this time
Speaker 1: Shannon became interested in juggling, I think originally for like
Speaker 1: physical mathematical purposes. He showed up, he started showing up
Speaker 1: at the m I T Juggling Club, Juggling Club I
Speaker 1: see what you did there, and asking some of its
Speaker 1: members if he could like measure their juggling, and and
Speaker 1: thereby sort of got involved with them, and this would
Speaker 1: be a lifelong in trist As we will get into
Speaker 1: a little bit later on a little bit of trivia.
Speaker 1: A certain podcaster by the name of Jonathan Strickland was
Speaker 1: a founding member of the University of Georgia Juggling Club. So, uh,
Speaker 1: that's the only thing I really share in common with
Speaker 1: claud I loved symbolic logic and I enjoyed juggling. They're
Speaker 1: the comparison ends for he was far more intelligent than
Speaker 1: I can ever hope to aspire. But yeah, you have
Speaker 1: to agree with no, It's it's fine. I I have
Speaker 1: come to grips with it. Okay. If you told me, hey, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: you're never going to be as smart as say Claude
Speaker 1: Shannon or Albert Einstein, it's alright. Most people won't be,
Speaker 1: so I guess. Ninety eight, Claude Shannon writes a thesis
Speaker 1: applying Bulls approach to circuitry by equating the zero one
Speaker 1: restriction as the off and on positions of a switch
Speaker 1: within a circuit. He was twenty two years old. This,
Speaker 1: this had never been done. This has never been the
Speaker 1: first time anyone had ever said this, certainly out loud,
Speaker 1: and other thinkers have said that it would have taken
Speaker 1: decades for anyone else to have come to this kind
Speaker 1: of conclusion. Right, we could have been sort of groping
Speaker 1: around with other approaches for years before someone had come
Speaker 1: up with this particular version. And not only did he
Speaker 1: come up with this idea, but the way he he
Speaker 1: presented it in his thesis, it was very elegant, and
Speaker 1: he would he would expand upon it a little bit later,
Speaker 1: to the point where people said, this is this is
Speaker 1: why he gets compared to Einstein. It's like Einstein saying
Speaker 1: not just I figured out this one component to how
Speaker 1: the universe works, but being able to express it elegantly
Speaker 1: and have a whole picture right. Like it's like it's
Speaker 1: not just a fact, it's a hill host of facts
Speaker 1: that are all support one another. And it's like they say,
Speaker 1: it's it's like you come up with a fundamental theory
Speaker 1: of science and unfold it all at once. It's just so.
Speaker 1: His thesis also laid out how logical functions such as
Speaker 1: and or and not could be implemented within a physical circuit,
Speaker 1: so building of logic gates. Now keep in mind this
Speaker 1: is all in a hypothetical slash theoretical approach, right, It's
Speaker 1: not like he was. He wasn't building this mechanically or
Speaker 1: or electronically. That's the case. Maybe exactly, yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: He was. He was laying out how this could be possible,
Speaker 1: not actually building them himself. Claude Shannon leaves m I
Speaker 1: T after earning a doctorate in mathematics to teach for
Speaker 1: one year at Princeton Um. And here's the story. Has
Speaker 1: a couple of different who has some alternate endings. We
Speaker 1: will present you with the two that we know of.
Speaker 1: But the story goes that he was teaching at Princeton
Speaker 1: and while he was teaching a class he was holding
Speaker 1: a lecture. Albert Einstein himself opened the door and stepped inside,
Speaker 1: and Claude Shannon kept going on with a lecture, but
Speaker 1: obviously was very much impressed with the fact that this
Speaker 1: genius has walked into his classroom. He sees I'm Stein
Speaker 1: bend over and whisper something to one of the students
Speaker 1: in the back. He sees that the student replies and
Speaker 1: then he sees that Einstein quietly leaves the room. He
Speaker 1: continues on with his lecture. At the end of the lecture,
Speaker 1: he holds the student back and with great anticipation, asks
Speaker 1: the student, what did this brilliant man have to say
Speaker 1: about my lecture? And my version of the story was
Speaker 1: that Einstein had very quietly asked the student where are
Speaker 1: they currently serving tea? I've heard that he asked where
Speaker 1: the men's room was, so it maybe there's where are
Speaker 1: they currently allowing you to peet? Could possibly been at
Speaker 1: any rate. Apparently that became one of Claude Shannon's favorite stories.
Speaker 1: He would love to tell the story about how Albert
Speaker 1: Einstein walked into his classroom and asked something completely not
Speaker 1: connected with what he had to say, and that made
Speaker 1: him like just tickled in it tickled it, And I thought,
Speaker 1: well that that also tells you a lot about his
Speaker 1: his personality that he did not take himself seriously. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty one, he joined a company famous for
Speaker 1: its research and development, Bell Telephone Labs, and his work
Speaker 1: mostly focused on things that had to do with the
Speaker 1: war effort. In this ninety one is World War two,
Speaker 1: and it included anti aircraft devices that could calculate and
Speaker 1: target counter missiles, which came pretty seriously in handy during
Speaker 1: the German blitz on England. Yeah. Yeah, it turns out
Speaker 1: if if your enemy is blasting you with missiles, counter
Speaker 1: missiles are a high priority. He also got to work
Speaker 1: in cryptography, so here's something where he's got a you know,
Speaker 1: a connection with people like Alan Turing who was working
Speaker 1: on cracking the Enigma machine back over in England. He
Speaker 1: was now Claude Shannon was designed devices used by Allied
Speaker 1: powers to send messages back and forth, so he was
Speaker 1: looking at keeping Allied messages safe rather than cracking German
Speaker 1: messages or access power messages. He later wrote a paper
Speaker 1: about communication theory of secrecy systems, which, according to M. I.
Speaker 1: T is generally credited with transforming cryptography from an art
Speaker 1: to a science. UM it was a mathematical proof that
Speaker 1: an encryption scheme called the one time pad or the
Speaker 1: Vernon cipher is is unbreakable. And it's the that cipher
Speaker 1: is the basic idea of encoding a message with a
Speaker 1: random series of digits a key, as we have talked
Speaker 1: about on the show before UM which both parties communicating
Speaker 1: have a copy of But you know, this is a
Speaker 1: very simple concept in cryptography, but having the mathematical proof
Speaker 1: that it is in fact unbreakable if the system is,
Speaker 1: then that's really awesome. And when we talked about the
Speaker 1: Enigma machine, that was one of those systems that could
Speaker 1: have been unbreakable had people actually been able to follow
Speaker 1: the rules properly. But because there were two things that
Speaker 1: really fell apart for the Enigma machine. And I know
Speaker 1: this is a bit of a tangent, but it relates
Speaker 1: to this. Yeah, those two things were. One, the Enigma
Speaker 1: machine was designed so that no matter what the letter
Speaker 1: you pressed would never light up as the same the
Speaker 1: same letter would never light up as the letter that
Speaker 1: you had pressed, So knowing that meant that you could
Speaker 1: remove one variable from all the possible outcomes. Secondly, people
Speaker 1: were not as careful with their log books, with their
Speaker 1: code books as they needed to be um and that
Speaker 1: that led to the code being broken. But everyone seems
Speaker 1: to agree that had every had the Germans, had the
Speaker 1: access powers, been incredibly careful, then that would have been
Speaker 1: an unbreakable code. Of course, times of war, you can't
Speaker 1: really do share in human error being what it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's that's the difference between the ideal
Speaker 1: and reality. Meanwhile, uh, Claude Shannon began to develop theories
Speaker 1: on how to apply his ideas about bully and logic
Speaker 1: and circuitry to telephone switching lines. Because of course he's
Speaker 1: working at Bell Labs in something else not involved of
Speaker 1: in Claude Shannon happened that Bell Labs the development of
Speaker 1: the transistor. Now, the transistor was a huge breakthrough. It
Speaker 1: meant that the world of electronics could move away from
Speaker 1: things like vacuum tubes and allow this other device to
Speaker 1: take its place, essentially, which ultimately lead to the manatorization
Speaker 1: of electronics. But it wouldn't be until Claude Shannon um
Speaker 1: published his concepts about information theory that would let that
Speaker 1: be a functional item in the way that it became. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was really this idea of digitizing information that Shannon
Speaker 1: had that made this a a practical device beyond just
Speaker 1: especially that early transistor. It's enormous if you ever see
Speaker 1: a picture of it, I think compared to the If
Speaker 1: you think that billions of transistors can now fit on
Speaker 1: a microprocessor chip, and then you look at the first
Speaker 1: one it's it's enormous difference. Obviously. Now, this idea of
Speaker 1: digitizing information was pretty much what would allow the transistor
Speaker 1: to become useful. And also it's what would lead to
Speaker 1: things like encoding information onto storage media like uh, like
Speaker 1: a compact disc. This is what would make not just uh,
Speaker 1: processing data possible, but storing it. Yeah, and right, it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of a really beautiful coincidence that both of
Speaker 1: these technologies were being developed at Bell Labs within a
Speaker 1: year of each other. As it turns out, because in
Speaker 1: that is when claudean and actually published his paper Mathematical
Speaker 1: Theory of Communication. Yes, and that's available in PDF form.
Speaker 1: Will will share the link because you can actually read
Speaker 1: his paper on information theory. And this is the one
Speaker 1: that I said earlier that you know, people, people who
Speaker 1: were information theory experts, they say like, this is this
Speaker 1: is like Einstein coming out with the theories of relativity.
Speaker 1: This idea of a complete picture, not just an idea,
Speaker 1: but a complete picture of an approach that laid the
Speaker 1: groundwork for digitizing information so it can be transmitted and stored. Now, again,
Speaker 1: he was a theorist. He did not build this. He
Speaker 1: explained how it is mathematically possible, right, and so it
Speaker 1: left it up to engineers and computer scientists to figure out, Okay,
Speaker 1: if this is theoretically possible, how do we make it real?
Speaker 1: What do we do to actually put this stuff into
Speaker 1: into reality and have it work for us? Uh? Now
Speaker 1: was when it was published, But there are people who
Speaker 1: have looked into Claude Shannon's life who say that he
Speaker 1: may have had this fully formed as early as ninety three,
Speaker 1: and he thought that it was a really cool idea,
Speaker 1: but just didn't think, you know, no one else is
Speaker 1: going to care about this. I would, I would argue.
Speaker 1: I mean, from from what I've read, it sounded to
Speaker 1: me more like he kind of had it brewing and
Speaker 1: just didn't want to present it until it was done.
Speaker 1: He did seem like the kind of person who he
Speaker 1: wanted to make sure that he had as complete a
Speaker 1: picture of an idea as possible before presenting it to
Speaker 1: anyone else. He did not want to have the experience
Speaker 1: of coming forward with just half an idea. So yeah,
Speaker 1: he's kind of a perfectionist in that sense. And it
Speaker 1: really is a challenge to explain just to an average
Speaker 1: person exactly how important this theory was, but you know,
Speaker 1: in a in a practical sense at the time that
Speaker 1: he was coming up with this, it was necessary to
Speaker 1: create a better telephone system. So in the old analog
Speaker 1: telephone system, you've got some pretty big limitations, some some
Speaker 1: barriers you've got to get across due to signal loss
Speaker 1: or noise, and analog telephone signal gets weaker the longer
Speaker 1: that the telephone line it's traveling along is. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: in order to get around that, engineers would place amplifiers
Speaker 1: along a telephone line to boost the signal. So you
Speaker 1: get a weak signal coming in, it goes through the amplifier,
Speaker 1: the signals boosted, it's stronger going out. But unfortunately, um
Speaker 1: the along with the signal that you want to get staid,
Speaker 1: all of the noise that's on the line also gets boosted.
Speaker 1: So eventually you run out I mean, I mean just
Speaker 1: the noise takes over. Yeah, Yeah, you lose the signal
Speaker 1: in the noise. So that would be you know, if
Speaker 1: you've ever heard like one of those those telephone conversations
Speaker 1: that goes on in an old movie where it's just
Speaker 1: like all you hear is cracked, like yeah, just imagine
Speaker 1: that if you're far enough away that all you would
Speaker 1: get was the stack. You would not get any voice
Speaker 1: at all. So, uh, the interesting thing was that by
Speaker 1: switching from analog signals to digital signals, they didn't have
Speaker 1: to worry about the signal boosting problem. Instead of a
Speaker 1: continuous signal like a sign wave, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: an acoustic wave, is what you would get with an
Speaker 1: analog telephone line, digital signals are sent in a series
Speaker 1: of bits, and a bit is either a zero or
Speaker 1: a one. That's all based off of Claude Shannon's application
Speaker 1: of Boolean algebra to electronics, and it worked so you
Speaker 1: could do this with telephones, which was great, but it
Speaker 1: meant you could also do it with just about any
Speaker 1: other kind of nation transfer from radio to telegraph, telephones, everything.
Speaker 1: And again this was one of those things that could
Speaker 1: not immediately be implemented. The engineers had to build the
Speaker 1: technology sporting. But once they did, they realized, we can
Speaker 1: build out a nationwide telephone, even a global telephone system
Speaker 1: that doesn't require amplifiers every x number of miles because
Speaker 1: you're never going to lose that that signal clarity, all right,
Speaker 1: Like hypothetically, you can do this with literally zero loss
Speaker 1: in quality. So so long as you don't mind taking
Speaker 1: the necessary amount of time for each bit to be transferred,
Speaker 1: really the transfer speed is the only cap that you're
Speaker 1: working with at this junction, exactly. And Claude Shannon he
Speaker 1: kind of came up with that too. He said, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, if if we have an infinite amount of time,
Speaker 1: you'll have zero signal laws. But that any medium of
Speaker 1: transmission is going to have ultimately a cap of how
Speaker 1: much data it can care y at any given within
Speaker 1: a given amount of time. So it was interesting because
Speaker 1: that was one of those things that ended up becoming
Speaker 1: a challenge to engineers. He said, look, for whatever medium
Speaker 1: you choose, it's and it's specific to each medium. You're
Speaker 1: going to have this limit that you're going to hit
Speaker 1: and you can't go beyond it. And the engineer said,
Speaker 1: all right, we agree, there's no way we can go
Speaker 1: beyond that limit. So what our goal is is to
Speaker 1: get as close to that limit as we possibly can.
Speaker 1: And and this also led into some really interesting side
Speaker 1: concepts about digital compression and error. Yeah exactly, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: had to. You could end up compressing data into smaller
Speaker 1: data packages, which helps you get around that bandwidth cap
Speaker 1: But in order to do that, you also have to
Speaker 1: have that that error correction software, that those algorithms that
Speaker 1: are able to detect and and fix any errors that
Speaker 1: come across while you're transmitting this information. These were all
Speaker 1: laid out his ideas, and and that that error correction
Speaker 1: concept also ties back into the idea that, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: if you scratch a c D, you can still it
Speaker 1: can still be read. Yeah, yeah, because you have these
Speaker 1: extra bits that are built into the data itself, these
Speaker 1: bits that otherwise would seem superfluous. They're not necessary for
Speaker 1: you to have the full message, but those extra bits
Speaker 1: actually allow some redundancy. So if there is some damage
Speaker 1: to the physical medium, you can still end up using it.
Speaker 1: And it's not like you get a smudge on your
Speaker 1: your your disk and now you can't use it. Right.
Speaker 1: So the concept of a disc also being new because
Speaker 1: that was something that he laid out in here, saying
Speaker 1: that this is a method for possible storage, not just transmission,
Speaker 1: but also storage. Yeah, so so big big ideas. Uh.
Speaker 1: At any rate, moving on with his life, I mean
Speaker 1: he's so he's already gotten to the point where he's
Speaker 1: laid out everything that's going to lead to things like
Speaker 1: JPEG's m P three's ZIP files. UH, data transmission a
Speaker 1: ross cable across telephone lines. All of this stuff is
Speaker 1: possible because of the ideas he came up with. His
Speaker 1: life continues on and in nineteen forty nine he marries
Speaker 1: Mary Elizabeth Moore Betty Betty. She was a new miracle
Speaker 1: analyst at Bell Labs, and they would go on to
Speaker 1: have two children together. And he also, during his time
Speaker 1: off from changing the world UH, decided to build a
Speaker 1: simple computer to play chess, and he wrote a paper
Speaker 1: about programming computers and computer chess algorithms. A lot of
Speaker 1: computer like chess playing computers are still based upon the
Speaker 1: foundations that he laid out while he was working on
Speaker 1: this UH. You find that the Claude Shannon in his
Speaker 1: spirit time often did things that that most of us
Speaker 1: would be like, well, you could have a full time
Speaker 1: job doing that. He's like, no, I just want you know,
Speaker 1: I'd like to keep my hand in. Around that time,
Speaker 1: engineers at Bell Labs at that time being ninety nine,
Speaker 1: began to actually create the technolog The implemented Shannon's ideas,
Speaker 1: and they built something called a regenerative repeater and the
Speaker 1: idea was that a bit could be regenerated perfectly and
Speaker 1: repeatedly as long as the bits weren't quote unquote too small.
Speaker 1: So as long as the messages weren't too small, they
Speaker 1: could consistently regenerate a message. Uh and that would mean
Speaker 1: that you would again have no signal loss, You wouldn't
Speaker 1: lose any data in the process because you could just
Speaker 1: just as quickly as it was coming into the regenerative
Speaker 1: regenerative repeater, it would send out a copy the same
Speaker 1: data message back out again. Um. Also to around this time,
Speaker 1: as the engineers at Bell Labs were creating that that
Speaker 1: physical technology to incorporate Shannon's ideas, he started to introduce
Speaker 1: the idea of bandwidth limits. Yeah, this is what I
Speaker 1: was talking about when he said, it doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: medium you're using, eventually you're going to hit that capacity.
Speaker 1: And eventually they started calling this the Shannon capacity or
Speaker 1: Shannon limit. So it was again a very important idea
Speaker 1: that ended up being playing a huge role in the
Speaker 1: telecommunications industry as well as just electronics and computing in general.
Speaker 1: Uh So, this is what gives engineers that goal, This
Speaker 1: is where they want to hit as close to that
Speaker 1: number as they possibly can to maximize the amount of
Speaker 1: data they can shove through any particular medium at top speed. So,
Speaker 1: you know, we often talk about data transmission speeds, but
Speaker 1: speed is really kind of a deceptive term because it's
Speaker 1: not just how fast something gets from point A to
Speaker 1: point B. Usually we're talking about speeds that are approaching
Speaker 1: the speed of light. That's really fast. What we're what
Speaker 1: we're really concerned with is throughput, which is the amount
Speaker 1: of data that can travel at that speed to get
Speaker 1: from point A to point B. Because if you're dividing
Speaker 1: that data up into lots of of bits like a
Speaker 1: long string, yes, each individual bit is moving at the
Speaker 1: speed of light, but you still got to get that
Speaker 1: whole string through. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's the you know,
Speaker 1: getting the campus through at the end. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: the idea of if the if we hear that there's
Speaker 1: pizza in the kitchen, uh, and we're all invited to
Speaker 1: go and eat it. Then the problem isn't that we
Speaker 1: have a bunch of slow people on staff. We're all
Speaker 1: very very fast. The problem is the doors only so wide,
Speaker 1: and eventually four or five of us while just try
Speaker 1: and cram through it, at the same time. So that's
Speaker 1: the difference between just speed and throughput. Now, sept ones
Speaker 1: and zeroes don't usually elbow you in the face, that's true,
Speaker 1: but we have no such restriction, as we have demonstrated
Speaker 1: upon multiple occasions. Now, at this time, engineers were also
Speaker 1: trying to find on ways to take on other elements
Speaker 1: of this theory, like the compression and redundancy ideas, and
Speaker 1: build working devices and algorithms that turned that theory into reality,
Speaker 1: actually making products that could take advantage of the ideas
Speaker 1: that Shannon had produced. And uh. Meanwhile, Shannon received a
Speaker 1: very special present at Christmas of from his wife this year,
Speaker 1: a unicycle, and stories say that he frequently rode through
Speaker 1: the halls of Bell Labs at night on this unicycle
Speaker 1: while juggling. He is my hero because of why not? Now, See,
Speaker 1: if my wife gave me a unicycle for Christmas, I
Speaker 1: would imagine she was plotting my demise and perhaps had
Speaker 1: put taken out yet another life insurance policy on me
Speaker 1: because she knows my my lack of balance. But but
Speaker 1: I I have nothing but respect for someone who is
Speaker 1: transforming information theory while writing a unicycle and juggling juggling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so because because it Meanwhile he was looking into machine
Speaker 1: intelligence and memory. Yeah, he was really branching out, you know,
Speaker 1: he was he was very much interested in exploring all
Speaker 1: these different ideas. Now, by nineteen fifties six, he decides
Speaker 1: to leave Bell Labs, though he continues on as a
Speaker 1: consultant and he goes back to M I. T. To teach.
Speaker 1: He also wrote a paper he was called the Bandwagon,
Speaker 1: and uh, that's when he said he didn't really like
Speaker 1: how the words information theory were being thrown around. So
Speaker 1: essentially what he was saying was that they were losing
Speaker 1: their value. Information theory as a concept was losing its
Speaker 1: value because companies were using it to describe things that
Speaker 1: didn't really fall within the umbrella of information. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: was a really popular and pop culture almost term in
Speaker 1: the scientific community at the time. And I mean people
Speaker 1: were publishing papers that had information theory and the title
Speaker 1: just because they thought it sounded cool, when in fact, right,
Speaker 1: it had nothing to do with that. So it was
Speaker 1: kind of like how virtual reality became this buzzword that
Speaker 1: began to lose meaning, particularly when the public started to
Speaker 1: see what the reality of the field was as compared
Speaker 1: to the Hollywood depiction of what virtual reality was back
Speaker 1: in the early nineties. Sure, sure like artificial intelligence or
Speaker 1: I read an essay recently from the guy who coined
Speaker 1: the term manic Pixie dreamgirls saying that he just wished
Speaker 1: he had never done that thing. I would like to
Speaker 1: apologize to the world. Yeah. So this was one of
Speaker 1: those interesting things were the paper wasn't so much about
Speaker 1: advancing the concept, but just saying, let's use our words
Speaker 1: carefully and correctly. He said that perhaps the term had
Speaker 1: quote ballooned to an importance beyond its actual accomplishments end quote.
Speaker 1: I think that's a little bit modest on his part, Honestly,
Speaker 1: I think so too, considering that again, without that theory,
Speaker 1: computers and electronics would not work the way they do today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but at any rate, this kind of marked the beginning
Speaker 1: of Shannon's disappearance from the research and technology scene. He
Speaker 1: he really didn't want to be a celebrity, I think,
Speaker 1: and he had this huge push from the media and
Speaker 1: the government and science in general to be made into one,
Speaker 1: and it it kind of pulled him away from from
Speaker 1: both research and public education, right and he was it
Speaker 1: wasn't that he was cold from why, I understand whenever
Speaker 1: he gave talks they were really great, and whenever he
Speaker 1: wrote papers they were really great. He was constantly being
Speaker 1: pressured to do that, and it was starting to become
Speaker 1: more of something that would cause him anxiety as opposed
Speaker 1: to something that he would enjoy doing well. In nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three, the Information Theory Society, which is part of
Speaker 1: the I Triple E or I, created an annual Shannon
Speaker 1: lecture that became the Shannon Award UH And in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, Claude Shannon officially retired from m T, although
Speaker 1: he had not really been actively working there for some
Speaker 1: years before. Certainly UH and in nineteen eight seven, Claude
Speaker 1: Shannon gave his last interview to Omni Magazine. Now, by
Speaker 1: the late eighties, Claude Shannon began to suffer from Alzheimer's
Speaker 1: and withdrew from the public eye entirely. His wife would
Speaker 1: go and attend events instead in his place, and in
Speaker 1: February two thousand one, at the age of eighty four,
Speaker 1: he would pass away. Yes, there are some very UH
Speaker 1: inspiring and moving tributes to Claude Shannon that were published.
Speaker 1: Really beautiful things. You can certainly go online and read
Speaker 1: a lot of those those tributes that were written the
Speaker 1: week and month following his passing. And we have a
Speaker 1: collection of interesting little trivia that we didn't really want
Speaker 1: to fit into the overall episode. But it didn't really
Speaker 1: fit into the timeline. But so much of I mean,
Speaker 1: if it wasn't charming enough, I mean, if charming is
Speaker 1: the correct word, actually charming is totally the correct word.
Speaker 1: According to me, I find it downright charming that he wrote,
Speaker 1: you know, papers that mathematically proved the computers can exist.
Speaker 1: But but but but other than that, there's just a
Speaker 1: lot of little just so. So one of those things
Speaker 1: is that, you know, we just said he he was
Speaker 1: not big on on pursuing the limelight. He didn't he
Speaker 1: didn't go after that at all, and and often he
Speaker 1: would reluctantly take the stage, but as time went on,
Speaker 1: he did that even less frequently. He wouldn't go out
Speaker 1: very much at all to address the public, and according
Speaker 1: to M I. T. Technology Review, he even had a
Speaker 1: file labeled letters I've procrastinated too long on So if
Speaker 1: he got something from colleagues or government officials or scientific
Speaker 1: institutions and had just been sitting around for a really
Speaker 1: long while. He would just put this in a file, saying, well,
Speaker 1: that's too that's too late, and that's never gonna happen.
Speaker 1: So I'm just gonna put that in this file. Um. He,
Speaker 1: like we said, love to build stuff, to engineer stuff.
Speaker 1: You know that whole telegraph line stories one of my favorites. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: as a parent, he built a chairlift that would take
Speaker 1: his kids from his house to a nearby lake so
Speaker 1: they didn't have to walk the whole way to the lake.
Speaker 1: He also, from what I understand, designed a hidden panel
Speaker 1: in his office that didn't lead anywhere at all. He
Speaker 1: just he just felt like building one. He just needed it.
Speaker 1: It made me think of a Mitchell and Web sketch
Speaker 1: where this wall must rotate both here and not here. Look, Mite,
Speaker 1: that's a load bearing wool. But anyway, he just decided
Speaker 1: he wanted to make one. He also built a life
Speaker 1: sized electric mouse named Theseus, after the Greek mythology figure
Speaker 1: that's the one who was stuck in the labyrinth that
Speaker 1: had to find his way out in the minotaur or minotar,
Speaker 1: depending upon your preferred pronunciations, after him. So this mouse,
Speaker 1: what it would do is it would explore a maze
Speaker 1: and quote unquote remember where it comes from. It was
Speaker 1: it was going after some little metal cheese bits. I think.
Speaker 1: So the the way this mouse would go through the
Speaker 1: maze is it would go down a pathway and whenever
Speaker 1: the pathway would branch, it would start to rotate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it would take one and then it would, uh,
Speaker 1: it could backtrack if it went down an incorrect route, right,
Speaker 1: and then it could take the path it had not
Speaker 1: taken as opposed to you know, if this were just
Speaker 1: an electronic mouse that had some collision detection, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: It could potentially just go back and forth down the
Speaker 1: same little pathway forever. Yeah, but this was branching that
Speaker 1: this one knew. Okay, well I already took the path
Speaker 1: that's on the right, so I have to take the
Speaker 1: path that's on the left. So it's pretty cool that
Speaker 1: he built this thing, you know, just for the fun
Speaker 1: of it. He built it also probably my my favorite
Speaker 1: robotic piece of his eight juggling robot, a bounce juggling
Speaker 1: robot to be precise, bounce juggling robot that like w
Speaker 1: C Fields to be even more precise. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: like having a like, imagine a drumhead, right, and the
Speaker 1: drumhead allows things that are dropped on it, like a
Speaker 1: ball bearing to be bounced on it. And then two
Speaker 1: little uh angled platforms that are serving his hands that
Speaker 1: are bouncing this again, these little these balls. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it just kept it going in a in a bounced
Speaker 1: juggling pattern perfectly. And he basically made it out of
Speaker 1: like erector set pieces. Yeah, you know, just like you do.
Speaker 1: And then he wrote a paper on the dynamics of
Speaker 1: keeping multiple objects in the air simultaneously. It's pretty famous
Speaker 1: within the juggling community. I tried to read it what
Speaker 1: I actually wrote, how Juggling works for how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. In fact, if you go to that that
Speaker 1: article on how stuff works and you look up how
Speaker 1: juggling works, there's a video of me juggling in that article.
Speaker 1: I still I still say it because I juggle a
Speaker 1: little bit. I still say that we really need to
Speaker 1: do a video of all Right, I juggled torches in mine.
Speaker 1: You're ready to pick those up? Okay, well, well we'll
Speaker 1: start small. Uh. He also made a robot that could
Speaker 1: solve a Rubic's cube, which is pretty amazing. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously that needs I can't either. I know there are
Speaker 1: algorithms for how to solve it the most efficiently, and
Speaker 1: I've seen people who are really good at who just
Speaker 1: like it's like it's like magic. You know. The way
Speaker 1: I saw a Rubik's cube is by peeling the stickers
Speaker 1: off and then replacing them properly. I cheat, but yeah, no.
Speaker 1: He he created a robot that could follow these algorithms
Speaker 1: and also just recognize what the pattern was on any
Speaker 1: given side, so it could, you know, create the rules
Speaker 1: that needed to solve it. UM and he made a
Speaker 1: calculator that worked with Roman numerals. It was called throwback,
Speaker 1: which stood for a thrifty Roman numerical backward looking computer.
Speaker 1: UM also rocket powered Frisbees and motorized poco sticks. Yes,
Speaker 1: the motorized pogo stick. I was thinking, like, again, that
Speaker 1: sounds terrible. If the unicycle hadn't killed me already, that
Speaker 1: certainly would. He built the ultimate machine. My favorite machine
Speaker 1: of all time is the ultimate machine. All right, tell
Speaker 1: us about it, Jonathan. All right. Now, imagine you have
Speaker 1: before you a box, and on that box you can
Speaker 1: see the outline of a trap door, and the only
Speaker 1: other really interesting feature on this box is a simple
Speaker 1: switch has switched to off, and you push the switch
Speaker 1: to on. The trap door opens and a hand emerges
Speaker 1: from beneath the trap door and hits the switch back
Speaker 1: to the off position, with draws back inside and trap
Speaker 1: door closes. That's it. That's it. You hit the switch
Speaker 1: and the harm comes back out yet the switch, the
Speaker 1: arm comes back out. Uh. I want to share this
Speaker 1: video too. There's a video of a brilliant variation of
Speaker 1: the Ultimate Machine that is hysterically funny. It doesn't just
Speaker 1: do that like, it starts to do it so um.
Speaker 1: It ends up at first looking like it's a variation
Speaker 1: on the Ultimate Machine, like oh, that's cute, But then
Speaker 1: it starts doing other things too, because this particular box
Speaker 1: had wheels on it and can move autll the way,
Speaker 1: so it's starting to avoid the person who's trying to
Speaker 1: hit the switch, or it would playback prerecorded messages saying
Speaker 1: like hey, hands off, buddy, that kind of stuff and
Speaker 1: was really really entertaining. So we'll share that one as well.
Speaker 1: But you have to remember that that particular very entertaining
Speaker 1: machine is based off this thing that Claude Shannon built
Speaker 1: for no reason other than it tickled him just because
Speaker 1: he could. Um. He also had a collection of exotic unicycles,
Speaker 1: including some that were because he he was wondering, how
Speaker 1: small could you make a unicycle before someone would be
Speaker 1: unable to write it? Uh? For me, that's any size.
Speaker 1: But but I think me too, that would be any size.
Speaker 1: Assuming that you are capable of writing a unicycle, how
Speaker 1: small could you go before you could no longer maintain
Speaker 1: your balance? In fact, he had a couple that I've
Speaker 1: heard are essentially unwriteable. Uh. He also lectured on using
Speaker 1: information theory as an application to playing the stock market,
Speaker 1: though he never really published any work on this. He
Speaker 1: did do a lecture, but he didn't write a paper.
Speaker 1: He also did really well in the stock market himself,
Speaker 1: although he wasn't necessarily employing information theory to do so.
Speaker 1: He was investing in companies that friends of his. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he made some very savvy stock purchases based on amazing
Speaker 1: work that his friends were doing. These are These are
Speaker 1: the people who were inventing like the basic components of
Speaker 1: computers and electronics, going on to form their own companies,
Speaker 1: and he would invest in those and then they ended
Speaker 1: up being these these enormous companies we know today. So
Speaker 1: he did quite well. Um, and there's no Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: for mathematics, which is why Claude Shanna never won one, right,
Speaker 1: but he certainly did win a number, I mean, probably
Speaker 1: way too numerous to mention here awards, but but one
Speaker 1: that we wanted to mention it is the very first
Speaker 1: Kyoto Prize, which was created in Japan to award honors
Speaker 1: to contributions in mathematics. Essentially, it was supposed to be
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize for mathematics, right, and this was all
Speaker 1: the way in the nineteen eighties, and this came into invention. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the very first one went to Claude Shannon, and from
Speaker 1: what I understand, it actually came with an even larger
Speaker 1: cash prize than the Nobel Prize does. So so if
Speaker 1: you if you feel like he was he was snubbed
Speaker 1: because Nobel Prizes don't recognize mathematics, fear not, the Kyoto
Speaker 1: Prize had him covered. So I hope you guys, uh,
Speaker 1: if you had not ever heard of Claude Shannon before,
Speaker 1: I hope you learned something in this episode, because he
Speaker 1: really did seem to be a remarkable person. In multiple ways.
Speaker 1: I mean, this guy seems like the kind of professor
Speaker 1: I would have absolutely adored um. But then you know,
Speaker 1: I like all of my professors who had lots of personality,
Speaker 1: and we're unafraid of coming across as a little unusual
Speaker 1: or yeah those are my favorite. Yeah, so awesome. And
Speaker 1: I hope if there are any other really important figures
Speaker 1: in technology that you would love to hear us cover,
Speaker 1: you should let us know. Send us a message you
Speaker 1: can in says an email that addresses tech stuff at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com, or drop us a line
Speaker 1: on Tumbler, Twitter or Facebook, or handle it. All three
Speaker 1: is text stuff hs W, and we will talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Because it has to works dot Com