Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. It is a Friday,
Speaker 1: It's time for a tech Stuff classic episode. This episode
Speaker 1: originally published August six, two thousand fourteen, and it's it's
Speaker 1: one about an important person in tech, an important person who,
Speaker 1: at least at the time not a not a lot
Speaker 1: of people outside of certain text spheres really knew a
Speaker 1: lot about him. So this episode is titled who was
Speaker 1: Claude Shannon? The Father of information theory right also known
Speaker 1: as the father of the electronic communication age, and his
Speaker 1: full name Claude Ellwood Shannon. Very important person he's been.
Speaker 1: He's been compared to, you know, some some pretty impressive,
Speaker 1: big recently big people like Einstein. Yeah, Einstein being one
Speaker 1: of them. 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, the
Speaker 1: 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 friends 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 interest 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: date 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 add 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 of values that were based on the physical rotation
Speaker 1: of the rods. And you could program it by physically
Speaker 1: rearranging all of these mechanical bits to correspond with different equations.
Speaker 1: The control circuit, I mean, this is how early this
Speaker 1: was in computing technology. The control circuit itself was a
Speaker 1: system of some hundred electromagnetic switches. Yeah, this this is
Speaker 1: a kind of the the evolution of what Charles Babbage
Speaker 1: created way back in the day, the Difference Engine. Uh
Speaker 1: so we've done the text us done episodes about and
Speaker 1: 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. So, uh,
Speaker 1: as Claude Shannon began to work on this machine, you
Speaker 1: know now that he had had enrolled with m I T,
Speaker 1: he noticed something interesting. He saw that the switches corresponded
Speaker 1: with a concept he had started on studying first as
Speaker 1: an undergraduate, and that was really focusing on, which was
Speaker 1: symbolic logic. Now, I took symbolic logic in college. I
Speaker 1: loved it because the basic idea of symbolic logic is
Speaker 1: you reduce logical statements to mathematical statements. Actually, I took
Speaker 1: a similar class. It was it was basically the at
Speaker 1: least mathematical math class I could get away with as
Speaker 1: an English major. Well, the neat thing about it is
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 thought. 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 idempotent numbers, which are numbers that can be
Speaker 1: put through a certain operation multiple times without changing the result,
Speaker 1: are zero and one. For example, one times one equals one,
Speaker 1: and no matter how many times you will multiply by one,
Speaker 1: it will always be one. Right, So if you take
Speaker 1: the product of that of that that equation and then
Speaker 1: multiplied by itself, you still stay with one. Same thing
Speaker 1: with zero, although also with zero you can add and
Speaker 1: subtract and still end up with zero. So zero zero zero, zero,
Speaker 1: so bool. Use zero and one for the values of
Speaker 1: the symbols. In his algebraic logic, he said an argument
Speaker 1: held in logic if when reduced to an algebraic equation,
Speaker 1: it held in common algebra with the zero one restriction
Speaker 1: of the possible interpretations of the symbols, meaning that if
Speaker 1: you could replace the symbols with a zero or a
Speaker 1: one and it's still made sense, it still worked, then
Speaker 1: it held true. So Claude Shannon looked at this and
Speaker 1: he was thinking, this is a really cool idea. I
Speaker 1: love this, this approach to logic, and hey, you know
Speaker 1: a switch has two positions on and off, so sort
Speaker 1: of like a one in zero. Yeah, I mean, what
Speaker 1: if we were to you know, kind of, oh, play
Speaker 1: with that, that whole switch process. And that became something
Speaker 1: that would percolated in the back of his head for
Speaker 1: a while. In fact, it percolated so long that people
Speaker 1: suspect that he had fully formed this whole idea of
Speaker 1: applying Boolean logic to electronic devices for years before writing
Speaker 1: it down. And once he wrote it out and presented it, well,
Speaker 1: we'll get there. We'll get there. I also do want
Speaker 1: to note that around this time, Shannon became interested in juggling,
Speaker 1: I think originally for like physical mathematical purposes. He showed up,
Speaker 1: he started showing up at the M I T. Juggling
Speaker 1: Club Juggling Club, I see what you did there, and
Speaker 1: asking some of its members if he could like measure
Speaker 1: their juggling and and thereby sort of got involved with them,
Speaker 1: and this would be a lifelong interest. As we will
Speaker 1: get into a little bit later on a little bit
Speaker 1: of trivia. A certain podcaster by the name of Jonathan
Speaker 1: Strickland was a founding member of the University of Georgia
Speaker 1: Juggling Club. So uh, that's the only thing I really
Speaker 1: share in common with. I loved symbolic logic and I
Speaker 1: enjoyed juggling. They're the comparison ends for he was far
Speaker 1: more intelligent than I can ever hope to aspire. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you have to agree with It's sorry, man, it's fine.
Speaker 1: I have come to grips with it. Okay. If you
Speaker 1: told me, hey, Jonathan, you're never going to be as
Speaker 1: smart as say Claude Shannon or Albert Einstein, it's alright,
Speaker 1: most people won't be, so, I guess night. Claude Shannon
Speaker 1: writes a thesis applying Bulls approach to circuitry by equating
Speaker 1: the zero one restriction as the off and on positions
Speaker 1: of a switch within a circuit. He was twenty two
Speaker 1: years old. This this had never been done. This has
Speaker 1: never been the first time anyone had ever said this,
Speaker 1: certainly out loud, and other thinkers have said that it
Speaker 1: would have taken decades for anyone else to have come
Speaker 1: to this kind of conclusion. Right, we could have been
Speaker 1: sort of groping around with other approaches for years before
Speaker 1: someone had come up with this particular or version and
Speaker 1: not only did he come up with this idea, but
Speaker 1: the way he he presented it in his thesis it
Speaker 1: was very elegant, and he would he would expand upon
Speaker 1: it a little bit later, to the point where people said,
Speaker 1: this is this is why he gets compared to Einstein.
Speaker 1: It's like Einstein saying not just I figured out this
Speaker 1: one component to how the universe works, but being able
Speaker 1: to express it elegantly and have a whole picture, right. Like,
Speaker 1: it's like, it's not just a fact, it's a hill
Speaker 1: host of facts that are all support one another. And
Speaker 1: it's like they say, it's it's like you come up
Speaker 1: with a fundamental theory of science and unfold it all
Speaker 1: at once. It's just so. His thesis also laid out
Speaker 1: how logical functions such as and or and not could
Speaker 1: be implemented within a physical circuit, so building of logic gates.
Speaker 1: Now keep in mind, this is all in a hypothetical
Speaker 1: slash theoretical approach, right, It's not like he was He
Speaker 1: wasn't building this, McCay or electronically, that's the case, maybe exactly, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was. He was. He was laying out how this
Speaker 1: could be possible, not actually building them. Himself. Claude Shannon
Speaker 1: leaves m I T after earning a doctorate in mathematics
Speaker 1: to teach for one year at Princeton Um. And here's
Speaker 1: the story. Has a couple of different who has some
Speaker 1: alternate endings. We will present you with the two that
Speaker 1: we know of. But the story goes that he was
Speaker 1: teaching at Princeton and while he was teaching a class
Speaker 1: he was holding a lecture. Albert Einstein himself opened the
Speaker 1: door and stepped inside, and Claude Shannon kept going on
Speaker 1: with the lecture, but obviously was very much impressed with
Speaker 1: the fact that this genius has walked into his classroom.
Speaker 1: He sees Einstein bend over and whispers something to one
Speaker 1: of the students in the back. He sees that the
Speaker 1: student replies, and then he sees that Einstein quietly leaves
Speaker 1: the room. He continues on with his lecture. At the
Speaker 1: end of the lecture, he holds the student back and
Speaker 1: with great anticipation asks the student, what did this brilliant
Speaker 1: man have to say about my lecture? And my version
Speaker 1: of the story was that Einstein had very quietly asked
Speaker 1: the student, where are they currently serving tea? I've heard
Speaker 1: that he asked where the men's room was, so maybe
Speaker 1: there's where are they currently allowing you to peat could
Speaker 1: possibly been at any rate. Apparently that became one of
Speaker 1: Claude Shannon's favorite stories. He would love to tell the
Speaker 1: story about how Albert Einstein walked into his classroom and
Speaker 1: asked something completely not connected with what he had to say,
Speaker 1: and that made him like, just tickled it. It tickled it,
Speaker 1: And I thought, well that that also tells you a
Speaker 1: lot about his personality that he did not take himself. 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 one is World War two, and
Speaker 1: it included anti aircraft devices that could calculate and target
Speaker 1: counter missiles, which came pretty seriously in handy during the
Speaker 1: German blitz on England. Yeah. Yeah, it turns out if
Speaker 1: if your enemy is blasting you with missiles, counter missiles
Speaker 1: are a high priority. He also got to work in cryptography,
Speaker 1: so here's something where he's got a you know, a
Speaker 1: connection with people like Alan Turing, who was working on
Speaker 1: cracking the Enigma machine back over in England he was
Speaker 1: now Claude Shannon was designed devices used by Allied powers
Speaker 1: to send messages back and forth, so he was looking
Speaker 1: at keeping Allied messages safe rather than cracking German messages
Speaker 1: or access power messages. He later wrote a paper about
Speaker 1: 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. Those two things were one. The Enigma machine
Speaker 1: was designed so that no matter what the letter you
Speaker 1: pressed would never light up as the same The same
Speaker 1: letter would never light up as the letter that you
Speaker 1: had pressed, So knowing that meant that you could remove
Speaker 1: one variable from all the possible outcomes. Secondly, people were
Speaker 1: not as careful with their log books, with their code
Speaker 1: books as they needed to be um and that that
Speaker 1: led to the code being broken. But everyone seems to
Speaker 1: agree that had every had the Germans, had the access powers,
Speaker 1: been incredibly careful, then that would have been an unbreakable code.
Speaker 1: Of course, times of war, you can't really do share
Speaker 1: in human error being what it is. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's that's the difference between the ideal and reality. Meanwhile, uh,
Speaker 1: Claude Shannon began to develop theories on how to apply
Speaker 1: his ideas about bully and logic and circuitry to telephone
Speaker 1: switching lines. We have more episode to go, but first
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break in something else not involving
Speaker 1: Claude Channon. Happened that bell laps the development of the transistor.
Speaker 1: Now the transistor was a huge breakthrough. It meant that
Speaker 1: the world of electronics could move away from things like
Speaker 1: vacuum tubes and allow this other device to take its place, essentially,
Speaker 1: which ultimately lead to the manatorization of electronics. But it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be until Claude Shannon Um published his concepts about
Speaker 1: information theory that would let that be a functional item
Speaker 1: in the way that it became. Yeah. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: really this idea of digitizing information that Shannon had that
Speaker 1: made this a a practical device beyond just especially that
Speaker 1: early transistor. It's enormous if you ever see a picture
Speaker 1: of it, I mean compared to the if you think
Speaker 1: that billions of transistors can now fit on a microprocessor
Speaker 1: chip and then you look at the first one, it's
Speaker 1: it's enormous difference. Obviously. Now, this idea of digitizing information
Speaker 1: was pretty much what would allow the transistor become useful,
Speaker 1: and also it's what would lead to things like encoding
Speaker 1: information onto storage media like uh, like a compact disc.
Speaker 1: This is what would make not just uh, processing data possible,
Speaker 1: but storing it. Yeah, and right, it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: a really beautiful coincidence that both of these technologies were
Speaker 1: being developed at Bell Labs within a year of each other.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, because in night that is when
Speaker 1: Claude and actually published his paper Mathematical Theory of Communication. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that's available in PDF form. Will will share the
Speaker 1: link because you can actually read his paper on information theory.
Speaker 1: And this is the one that I said earlier that
Speaker 1: you know, people people who were information theory experts, they say, like,
Speaker 1: this is this is like Einstein coming out with the
Speaker 1: theories of relativity. This idea of a complete picture, not
Speaker 1: just an idea, but a complete picture of an approach
Speaker 1: that laid the groundwork for digitizing information so it can
Speaker 1: be transmitted and stored. Now, again, he was a theorist.
Speaker 1: He did not build this. He explained how it is
Speaker 1: mathematically possible, right, and so it left it up to
Speaker 1: engineers and computer scientists to figure out, Okay, if this
Speaker 1: is theoretically possible, how do we make it real? What
Speaker 1: do we do to actually put this stuff into into
Speaker 1: reality and have it work for us? Uh? Now, when
Speaker 1: it was published, but there are people who have looked
Speaker 1: into Claude Shannon's life who say that he may have
Speaker 1: had this fully formed as early as ninety three, and
Speaker 1: he thought that it was a really cool idea, but
Speaker 1: just didn't think, you know, no one else is going
Speaker 1: to care about this. I would, I would argue. I mean,
Speaker 1: from from what I've read, it sounded to me more
Speaker 1: like he kind of had it brewing and just didn't
Speaker 1: want to present it until it was done. He did
Speaker 1: seem like the kind of person who he wanted to
Speaker 1: make sure that he had as complete a picture of
Speaker 1: an idea as possible before presenting it to anyone else.
Speaker 1: He and not want to have the experience of coming
Speaker 1: forward with just half an idea. So yeah, he's kind
Speaker 1: of a perfectionist in that sense. And it really is
Speaker 1: a challenge to explain just to an average person exactly
Speaker 1: how important this theory was. But you know, in a
Speaker 1: in a practical sense, at the time that he was
Speaker 1: coming up with this, it was necessary to create a
Speaker 1: better telephone system. So in the old analog telephone system,
Speaker 1: you've got some pretty big limitations, some some barriers you've
Speaker 1: got to get across due to signal loss or noise,
Speaker 1: and analog telephone signal gets weaker the longer that the
Speaker 1: telephone line it's traveling along is Yeah, so In order
Speaker 1: to get around that, engineers would place amplifiers along a
Speaker 1: telephone line to boost the signal. So you get a
Speaker 1: weak signal coming in, it goes through the amplifier, the
Speaker 1: signals boosted, it's stronger going out. But unfortunately, um the
Speaker 1: along with the signal that you want to get boosted,
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. Yeah, just imagine that
Speaker 1: if you're far enough away that all you would get
Speaker 1: was the stack, you would not get any voice at all.
Speaker 1: So uh. The interesting thing was that by switching from
Speaker 1: analog signals to digital signals, they didn't have to worry
Speaker 1: about this signal boosting problem. Instead of a continuous signal
Speaker 1: like a sign wave, which is you know, an acoustic wave,
Speaker 1: is what you would get with an analog telephone line,
Speaker 1: digital signals are sent in a series of bits and
Speaker 1: a bit is either a zero or a one. That's
Speaker 1: all based off of Claude Shannon's application of Boolean algebra
Speaker 1: to electronics, and it worked. So you could do this
Speaker 1: with telephones, which was great, but it meant you could
Speaker 1: also do it with just about any other kind of
Speaker 1: information transfer from radio to telegraph, telephones, everything. And again
Speaker 1: this was one of those things that could not immediately
Speaker 1: be implemented. The engineers had to build the technology sported.
Speaker 1: But once they did, they realized, we can build out
Speaker 1: a nationwide telephone, even a global telephone system that doesn't
Speaker 1: require amplifiers every x number of miles because you're never
Speaker 1: going to lose that that signal clarity, all right, Like hypothetically,
Speaker 1: you can do this with literally zero loss in quality.
Speaker 1: So so long as you don't mind taking the necessary
Speaker 1: amount of time for each bit to be transferred. Really,
Speaker 1: the transfer speed is the only cap that you're working
Speaker 1: with at this junction exactly. And Claude Shannon he kind
Speaker 1: of came up with that too. He said, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: if if we have an infinite amount of time, you'll
Speaker 1: have zero signal laws. But that any medium of transmission
Speaker 1: is going to have ultimately a cap of how much
Speaker 1: data it can carry at any given within a given
Speaker 1: amount of time. So it was interesting because that was
Speaker 1: one of those things that ended up becoming a challenge
Speaker 1: to engineers. He said, look, for whatever medium you choose,
Speaker 1: it's and it's specific to each medium. You're going to
Speaker 1: have this limit that you're going to hit and you
Speaker 1: can't go beyond it. And the engineer said, all right,
Speaker 1: we agree, there's no way we can go beyond that limit.
Speaker 1: So what our goal is is to get as close
Speaker 1: to that limit as we possibly can. And and this
Speaker 1: also led into some really interesting side concepts about digital
Speaker 1: compression and error. Yeah exactly, Yeah, you had to. You
Speaker 1: could end up compressing data into smaller data packages, which
Speaker 1: helps you get around that bandwidth cap. But in order
Speaker 1: to do that, you also have to have that that
Speaker 1: error correction software, that those algorithms that are able to
Speaker 1: detect and and fix any errors that come across while
Speaker 1: you're transmitting this information. These were all laid out his ideas,
Speaker 1: and and that that error correction concept also ties back
Speaker 1: into the idea that, uh, you know, if you scratch
Speaker 1: a c D you can still it can still be read. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because you have these extra bits that are built into
Speaker 1: the data itself, these bits that otherwise would seem superfluous.
Speaker 1: They're not necessary for you to have the full message,
Speaker 1: but those extra bits actually allow some redundancy. So if
Speaker 1: there is some damage to the physical medium, you can
Speaker 1: still end up using it. And it's not like you
Speaker 1: get a smudge on your your your disk and now
Speaker 1: you can't use it. Right. The concept of a disc
Speaker 1: also being new, because that was something that he laid
Speaker 1: out in here, saying that this is a method for
Speaker 1: possible storage, not just transmission, but also storage. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: so big big ideas. Uh. At any rate, moving on
Speaker 1: with his life, I mean he's so he's already gotten
Speaker 1: to the point where he's laid out everything that's going
Speaker 1: to lead to things like JPEG's, MP three's ZIP files. Uh,
Speaker 1: data transmission across cable, across telephone lines. All of this
Speaker 1: stuff is possible because of the ideas he came up with.
Speaker 1: His life continues on and in nineteen forty nine he
Speaker 1: marries Mary Elizabeth Moore Betty Betty. She was a new
Speaker 1: miracle analyst at Bell Labs, and they would go on
Speaker 1: to have two children together. And he also during his
Speaker 1: time off from changing the world. UH. Decided to build
Speaker 1: a simple computer to play chess, and he wrote a
Speaker 1: paper about programming computers and computer chess algorithms. A lot
Speaker 1: of computer like chess playing computers are still based upon
Speaker 1: the foundations that he laid out while he was working
Speaker 1: on this. UH. You find that the Claude Shannon in
Speaker 1: his spirit time often did things that that most of
Speaker 1: us would be like, well, you could have a full
Speaker 1: time job doing that. He's like, no, I just want
Speaker 1: to do that, you know, I'd like to keep my
Speaker 1: hand in. Around that time, engineers at Bell Labs at
Speaker 1: that time being ninety nine began to actually create the
Speaker 1: technology that implemented Shannon's ideas, and they built something called
Speaker 1: a regenerative repeater. And the idea was that a bit
Speaker 1: could be regenerated perfectly and repeatedly as long as the
Speaker 1: bits weren't quote unquote too small, So as long as
Speaker 1: the messages weren't too small, they could consistently regenerate a message. UH.
Speaker 1: And that would mean that you would again have no
Speaker 1: signal loss, You wouldn't lose any data in the process
Speaker 1: because you could just just as quickly as it was
Speaker 1: coming into the regenerative regenerative repeater, it would send out
Speaker 1: a copy the same data message back out again. Um.
Speaker 1: Also to around this time, as the engineers at Bell
Speaker 1: Labs were creating that that physical technology to incorporate Shannon's ideas,
Speaker 1: he started to introduce the idea of bandwidth limits. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is what I was talking about when he said,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter what medium you're using, Eventually you're going
Speaker 1: to hit that capacity. And eventually they started calling this
Speaker 1: the Shannon capacity or Shannon limit. So it was again
Speaker 1: a very important idea that ended up being playing a
Speaker 1: huge role in the telecommunications industry as well as just
Speaker 1: electronics and computing in general. Uh so this is what
Speaker 1: gives engineers that goal. This is where they want to
Speaker 1: hit as close to that number as they possibly can
Speaker 1: to maximize the amount of data they can shove through
Speaker 1: any particular medium at top speed. So, you know, we
Speaker 1: often talk about data transmission speeds, but speed is really
Speaker 1: kind of a deceptive term because it's not just how
Speaker 1: fast something gets from point A to point B. Usually
Speaker 1: we're talking about speeds that are approaching the speed of light.
Speaker 1: That's really fast. What we're what we're really concerned with
Speaker 1: is throughput, which is the amount of data that can
Speaker 1: travel at that speed to get from point A to
Speaker 1: point B. Because if you're dividing that data up into
Speaker 1: lots of of bits like a long string, yes, each
Speaker 1: individual bit is moving at the speed of light, but
Speaker 1: you still got to get that whole string through. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's the you know, getting the caboose through at
Speaker 1: the end. Really. Yeah, it's the idea of if the
Speaker 1: if we hear that there's pizza in the kitchen and
Speaker 1: uh and we're all invited to go and eat it,
Speaker 1: then the problem isn't that we have a bunch of
Speaker 1: slow people on staff. We're all very very fast. The
Speaker 1: problem is the doors only so wide, and eventually four
Speaker 1: or five of us while just try and cram through
Speaker 1: it at the same time. So that's the difference between
Speaker 1: just speed and throughput. Now, tipt ones and zeroes don't
Speaker 1: usually elbow you in the face, that's true, but we
Speaker 1: have no such restriction, as we have demonstrated upon multiple occasions. Uh. Now.
Speaker 1: At this time, engineers were also trying to find on
Speaker 1: ways to take on other elements of this theory, like
Speaker 1: the compression and redundancy ideas and build working devices and
Speaker 1: algorithms that turned that theory into reality, actually making products
Speaker 1: that could take advantage of the ideas that Shannon had produced.
Speaker 1: And uh. Meanwhile, Shannon received a very special present at
Speaker 1: Christmas of from his wife this year, a unicycle, and
Speaker 1: stories say that he frequently rode through the halls of
Speaker 1: Bell Labs at night on this cycle while juggling. He
Speaker 1: is my hero because of why not. Now, See, if
Speaker 1: my wife gave me a unicycle for Christmas, I would
Speaker 1: imagine she was plotting my demise and perhaps had put
Speaker 1: taken out yet another life insurance policy on me because
Speaker 1: she knows my my lack of balance. But but I
Speaker 1: I have nothing but respect for someone who is transforming
Speaker 1: 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. Time for us to take another break,
Speaker 1: but we will be right back now. By nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: he decides to leave Bell Labs, though he continues on
Speaker 1: as a consultant, and he goes back to M I.
Speaker 1: T To teach UH he also wrote a paper he
Speaker 1: was called the Bandwagon, and uh, that's when he said
Speaker 1: he didn't really like how the words information theory were
Speaker 1: being thrown around. So essentially what he was saying was
Speaker 1: that they were losing their value. Information theory as a
Speaker 1: concept was losing its value because companies were using it
Speaker 1: to describe things that didn't really fall within the umbrella
Speaker 1: of information. Yeah, it was a really popular and pop
Speaker 1: culture almost term in the scientific community at the time.
Speaker 1: And I mean people were publishing papers that had information
Speaker 1: theory in the title just because they thought it sounded cool,
Speaker 1: when in fact, right, it had nothing to do with that.
Speaker 1: So it was kind of like how virtual reality became
Speaker 1: this buzzword that began to lose meaning, particularly when the
Speaker 1: public started to see what the reality of the field
Speaker 1: was as compared to the Hollywood depiction of what virtual
Speaker 1: reality was back in the early nineties. Sure sure, like
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence or I read an essay recently from the
Speaker 1: guy who coined to the term manic Pixie dream girls
Speaker 1: saying that he just wished he had never done that thing.
Speaker 1: I would like to apologize to the world. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this was one of those interesting things were the paper
Speaker 1: wasn't so much about advancing the concept, but just saying,
Speaker 1: let's use our words carefully and correctly. He said that
Speaker 1: perhaps the term had quote ballooned to an importance beyond
Speaker 1: its actual accomplishments end quote. I think that's a little
Speaker 1: bit modest on his part. Honestly, I think so too,
Speaker 1: considering that again, without that theory, computers and electronics would
Speaker 1: not work the way they do today. Yeah, but at
Speaker 1: any rate, this kind of marked the beginning of Shannon's
Speaker 1: disappearance from the research and technology scene. He he really
Speaker 1: didn't want to be a celebrity, I think, and he
Speaker 1: had this huge push from the media and the government
Speaker 1: and science in general to be made into one, and
Speaker 1: it it kind of pulled him away from from both
Speaker 1: research and public education, right and he was It wasn't
Speaker 1: that he was old, from why, I understand. Whenever he
Speaker 1: gave talks they were really great, and whenever he wrote papers,
Speaker 1: they were really great. But he was constantly being pressured
Speaker 1: to do that, and it was starting to become more
Speaker 1: of something that would cause him anxiety as opposed to
Speaker 1: something that he would enjoy doing well. In nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: the information theory Society, which is part of the I
Speaker 1: Triple E or I created an annual Shannon lecture that
Speaker 1: became the Shannon Award UH And in nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: Claude Shannon officially retired from m T, although he had
Speaker 1: not really been actively working there for some years before.
Speaker 1: Certainly UH And in nineteen eight seven, Claude Shannon gave
Speaker 1: his last interview to Omni Magazine. Now, by the late eighties,
Speaker 1: Claude Shannon began to suffer from Alzheimer's and withdrew from
Speaker 1: the public eye entirely. His wife would go and attend
Speaker 1: events instead in his place, and in February two thousand one,
Speaker 1: at the age of eighty four, he would pass away. Yes,
Speaker 1: there are some very uh inspiring and moving tributes to
Speaker 1: Claude Shannon that were published, really beautiful things. You can
Speaker 1: certainly go online and read a lot of those those
Speaker 1: tributes that were written the week and month following his passing.
Speaker 1: And we have a collection of interesting little trivia that
Speaker 1: we didn't really want to fit into the overall episode,
Speaker 1: but it didn't really fit into the timeline. But so
Speaker 1: much of I mean, if it wasn't charming enough, I mean,
Speaker 1: if charming is the correct word. Actually, charming is totally
Speaker 1: the correct word. Parting to me, I find it downright
Speaker 1: charming that he wrote, you know, papers that mathematically proved
Speaker 1: the computers can exist. But but but but other than that,
Speaker 1: there's just a lot of little just yeah. So so
Speaker 1: one of those things is that, you know, we just
Speaker 1: said he he was not big on on pursuing the limelight.
Speaker 1: He didn't. He didn't go after that at all, and
Speaker 1: and often he would reluctantly take the stage, but as
Speaker 1: time went on, he did that even less frequently. He
Speaker 1: wouldn't go out very much at all to to address
Speaker 1: the public, and according to M I. T. Technology Review,
Speaker 1: he even had a file labeled letters I've procrastinated too
Speaker 1: long on So if he got something from colleagues or
Speaker 1: government officials or scientific institutions and had just been sitting
Speaker 1: around for a really long while, he would just put
Speaker 1: this in a file, saying, well, that's too that's too late,
Speaker 1: and that's never gonna happen, So I'm just gonna put
Speaker 1: that in this file. Um. He, like we said, love
Speaker 1: to build stuff, to engineer stuff. You know, that whole
Speaker 1: telegraph line stories. One of my favorites um Now as
Speaker 1: a parent, he built a chairlift that would take his
Speaker 1: kids from his house to a nearby lake, so they
Speaker 1: 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, be both here and not here.
Speaker 1: We look, mate, that's a load bearing wool. But anyway,
Speaker 1: he just decided he wanted to make one. He also
Speaker 1: built a life sized electric mouse named Theseus, after the
Speaker 1: Greek mythology figure that's the one who was stuck in
Speaker 1: the labyrinth that had to find his way out, and
Speaker 1: the minotaur or Minotar depending upon your preferred pronunciations after him.
Speaker 1: So this mouse, what it was due is it would
Speaker 1: explore a maze and quote unquote remember where it comes from.
Speaker 1: It was it was going after some little metal cheese bits.
Speaker 1: I think. So the the way this mouse would go
Speaker 1: through the maze is it would go down a pathway
Speaker 1: and whenever 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: could potentially just go back and forth down the same
Speaker 1: little pathway forever. Yeah, but this was branching. This one knew, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I already took the path that's on the right, so
Speaker 1: I have to take the path that's on the left.
Speaker 1: So it's pretty cool that he built this thing, you know,
Speaker 1: just for the fun of it. He built it also
Speaker 1: probably my my favorite robotic piece of his eight juggling robot,
Speaker 1: a bounce juggling robot to be precise, bounce juggling robot
Speaker 1: that like w C Fields to be even more precise. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was like having a like imagine a drumhead, right,
Speaker 1: and the drumhead allows things that are dropped on it,
Speaker 1: like a ball bearing to be bounced on it. And
Speaker 1: then two little uh angled platforms that are serving his
Speaker 1: hands that are bouncing this again, these little these balls. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they just kept it going in a in a
Speaker 1: bounced juggling pattern. Perfectly, and he basically made it out
Speaker 1: of like erector set pieces. Yeah, you know, just like
Speaker 1: you do. And then he wrote a paper on the
Speaker 1: dynamics of keeping multiple objects in the air simultaneously. It's
Speaker 1: pretty famous within the juggling community. I tried to read
Speaker 1: it what I actually wrote, how juggling works for how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. In fact, if you go to
Speaker 1: that that article on how stuff works and you look
Speaker 1: up how juggling works, there's a video of me juggling
Speaker 1: in that article. I still I still say it because
Speaker 1: I juggle a little bit. I still say that we
Speaker 1: really need to do a video of both jugged. All right,
Speaker 1: I juggled torches in mine. You're ready to pick those up? Okay, well,
Speaker 1: well we'll start small. Uh. He also made a robot
Speaker 1: that could solve a Rubic's cube, which is pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously that needs I can't either. I know
Speaker 1: there are algorithms for how to solve it the most efficiently,
Speaker 1: and I've seen people who are really good at who
Speaker 1: just like it's like it's like magic. You know. The
Speaker 1: way I saw a Rubik's cube is by peeling the
Speaker 1: stickers 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 e the
Speaker 1: rules that needed to solve it. UM. And he made
Speaker 1: a calculator that worked with Roman numerals. It was called throwback,
Speaker 1: which stood for a thrifty Roman numerical backward looking computer. UM.
Speaker 1: Also a 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 that 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. Hit the switch and
Speaker 1: the harm comes back out, yet the switch the arm
Speaker 1: comes back out. Uh. I want to share this video too.
Speaker 1: There's a video of a brilliant variation of the Ultimate
Speaker 1: Machine that is hysterically funny. It doesn't just do that like,
Speaker 1: it starts to do it so um. It ends up
Speaker 1: at first looking like it's a variation on the Ultimate Machine, like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's cute, But then it starts doing other things too,
Speaker 1: because this particular box had wheels on it and can
Speaker 1: move all the way, so it's starting to avoid the
Speaker 1: person who's trying to hit the switch, or it would
Speaker 1: playback prerecorded messages saying like hey, hands off, buddy, that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff and was really really entertaining. So we'll
Speaker 1: share that one as well. But you have to remember
Speaker 1: that that particular very entertaining machine is based off this
Speaker 1: thing that Claude Shannon built for no reason other than
Speaker 1: it tickled him just because he could. Um. He also
Speaker 1: had a collection of exotic unicycles, including some that were
Speaker 1: because he he was wondering how small could you make
Speaker 1: a unicycle before someone would be unable to write it? Uh,
Speaker 1: for me, that's any size, but I think me too,
Speaker 1: that would be any size. But assuming that you are
Speaker 1: capable of writing a unicycle, how small could you go
Speaker 1: before you could no longer maintain your balance? In fact,
Speaker 1: he had a couple that I've heard are essentially unwriteable. Uh.
Speaker 1: He also lectured on using information theory as an application
Speaker 1: to playing the stock market, though he never really published
Speaker 1: any work on this. He did do a lecture, but
Speaker 1: he didn't write a paper. He also did really well
Speaker 1: in the stock market himself, although he wasn't necessarily employing
Speaker 1: information theory to do so. He was investing in companies
Speaker 1: that friends of his. Yeah, he made some very savvy
Speaker 1: stock purchases based on amazing work that his friends were doing.
Speaker 1: These are these are the people who were inventing like
Speaker 1: the basic components of computers and electronics, going on to
Speaker 1: form their own companies, and he would invest in those
Speaker 1: and then they ended up being these these enormous companies
Speaker 1: we know today. So he did quite well. Uh. And
Speaker 1: there's no Nobel Eries for mathematics, which is why Claude
Speaker 1: Shannon never won one, right, But he certainly did win
Speaker 1: a number, I mean, probably way too numerous to mention
Speaker 1: here awards, but but one that we wanted to mention
Speaker 1: is the very first Kyoto Prize, which was created in
Speaker 1: Japan to award honors to contributions in mathematics. Essentially, it
Speaker 1: was supposed to be the Nobel Prize for mathematics, right right,
Speaker 1: And this was all the way in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: and this came into invention. Yea, the very first one
Speaker 1: went to Claude Shannon, and from what I understand, it
Speaker 1: actually came with an even larger cash prize than the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize does. So, so if you if you feel
Speaker 1: like he was he was snubbed because Nobel Prizes don't
Speaker 1: recognize mathematics. Fear not, the Kyoto Prize had him covered.
Speaker 1: I hope you guys enjoyed this classic episode Who Was
Speaker 1: Claude Shannon? Published back in August of two thousand fourteen.
Speaker 1: If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
Speaker 1: future episodes of Tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a trend,
Speaker 1: maybe it's another important person in the field of techno
Speaker 1: oology and you feel like this person hasn't really you know,
Speaker 1: received the full treatment that they should, let me know,
Speaker 1: reach out to me. The best way to do that
Speaker 1: is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is
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