WEBVTT - TechStuff Classic: Who was Claude Shannon? 0:00:04.400 --> 0:00:07.800 Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. 0:00:12.000 --> 0:00:14.520 Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, 0:00:14.640 --> 0:00:17.840 Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio 0:00:17.880 --> 0:00:20.360 and I love all things tech. It is a Friday, 0:00:20.560 --> 0:00:23.720 It's time for a tech Stuff classic episode. This episode 0:00:23.720 --> 0:00:29.080 originally published August six, two thousand fourteen, and it's it's 0:00:29.120 --> 0:00:32.880 one about an important person in tech, an important person who, 0:00:32.920 --> 0:00:35.519 at least at the time not a not a lot 0:00:35.560 --> 0:00:38.920 of people outside of certain text spheres really knew a 0:00:38.920 --> 0:00:42.720 lot about him. So this episode is titled who was 0:00:42.920 --> 0:00:47.760 Claude Shannon? The Father of information theory right also known 0:00:47.800 --> 0:00:53.000 as the father of the electronic communication age, and his 0:00:53.280 --> 0:00:57.520 full name Claude Ellwood Shannon. Very important person he's been. 0:00:57.960 --> 0:01:01.840 He's been compared to, you know, some some pretty impressive, 0:01:01.840 --> 0:01:07.039 big recently big people like Einstein. Yeah, Einstein being one 0:01:07.040 --> 0:01:10.240 of them. And you might say, well, whoa you know Einstein, Like, 0:01:11.240 --> 0:01:15.839 Einstein's name has become synonymous with just the concept of genius, 0:01:15.880 --> 0:01:18.319 like to the point where we use it in phrases 0:01:18.319 --> 0:01:21.520 where we're being you know, a little a little condescenating. Yeah, 0:01:21.600 --> 0:01:24.760 way to go, Einstein, that kind of thing. But as 0:01:24.800 --> 0:01:27.840 you'll see when we go through this this episode and 0:01:27.880 --> 0:01:32.560 explain what Claude Shannon did and his his contributions to technology, 0:01:32.840 --> 0:01:35.640 as well as just kind of his wacky personality, you'll 0:01:35.640 --> 0:01:40.040 really kind of see how that that applies. So exactly 0:01:40.280 --> 0:01:43.680 who was he and what did he do? When was 0:01:43.720 --> 0:01:51.280 this guy born? He was born in nineteen sixteen in Potaski. Yeah. Yeah, 0:01:51.640 --> 0:01:53.920 his father was a probate judge and his mother was 0:01:53.960 --> 0:01:57.360 a high school principle. He also did have some mildly 0:01:57.480 --> 0:02:00.560 famous family. A very distant cousin of his kind of 0:02:00.560 --> 0:02:04.120 made a name for himself, Yeah, for killing an elephant 0:02:03.920 --> 0:02:09.359 with electricity, Thomas Edison. He did a few other things too, Yeah, 0:02:09.400 --> 0:02:13.440 that's the requisite doing from the internet. Thomas Edison obviously 0:02:14.040 --> 0:02:17.799 did many many important things, some of them not remotely 0:02:17.880 --> 0:02:23.280 involving putting an animal to death with electricity. Yeah, the 0:02:23.400 --> 0:02:27.280 large majority of which so kill an elephant once. Yeah, 0:02:27.440 --> 0:02:30.239 I know, you just sticks with you right. Well. As 0:02:30.280 --> 0:02:35.000 a boy, Claude Shannon became interested in electronics and began 0:02:35.840 --> 0:02:38.320 experimenting with different stuff. He was just curious about how 0:02:38.360 --> 0:02:41.120 things work and how to build them himself. He built 0:02:41.160 --> 0:02:44.160 a working model of an airplane. Pretty impressive. Think, I 0:02:44.200 --> 0:02:47.079 think he was born in nineteen sixteen. You didn't have 0:02:47.240 --> 0:02:50.400 airplanes for very long. They were pretty new. Yeah, they 0:02:50.440 --> 0:02:53.320 were brand new back in the early twentieth century. And 0:02:53.360 --> 0:02:57.680 he also reportedly made a working telegraph system that they 0:02:57.720 --> 0:03:00.840 set up between his bedroom and a friends bedroom. His 0:03:00.880 --> 0:03:03.200 friend lived half a mile away, and it was all 0:03:03.240 --> 0:03:05.800 made out of fencing wire. Yeah, so he could all 0:03:05.840 --> 0:03:08.680 but I mean the wire itself. Yeah, he could actually 0:03:08.760 --> 0:03:11.240 end up sending messages to his friend have a mile away. 0:03:11.560 --> 0:03:14.000 He was also really into radio circuits and built a 0:03:14.080 --> 0:03:18.399 radio controlled model boat. Yeah, so very much interest that. Yeah, yeah, 0:03:18.440 --> 0:03:22.280 this is this is the growing world of radio technology 0:03:22.320 --> 0:03:25.680 and the growing world of communications technology. So he was 0:03:25.720 --> 0:03:28.960 interested in it as a kid. Now a little bit 0:03:29.080 --> 0:03:31.760 later on, when he was a teenager, he got work 0:03:31.840 --> 0:03:34.800 as a basic mechanic in a drug store, running a 0:03:34.800 --> 0:03:37.800 fix it shop in a drug store, because that's that 0:03:37.920 --> 0:03:41.320 was like the center of town. Yeah, where you go 0:03:41.400 --> 0:03:43.400 and you go and get your your chocolate malt and 0:03:43.480 --> 0:03:47.200 your your your fan fixed. You know, it's a one 0:03:47.240 --> 0:03:51.880 stop shop. He attended an Arbor College, where he studied 0:03:51.920 --> 0:03:56.920 mathematics and electrical engineering. He graduated an Arbor College in 0:03:57.080 --> 0:03:59.720 nineteen thirty six and then went on to enroll in 0:04:00.040 --> 0:04:05.040 date level study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And 0:04:05.120 --> 0:04:07.880 he decided upon m i T because he saw this 0:04:07.960 --> 0:04:11.880 work study add like pinned onto a physical bulletin board 0:04:11.960 --> 0:04:15.560 on his college campus that was advertising for someone interested 0:04:15.600 --> 0:04:20.880 in working on Vanavar Bush's differential analyzer, which was an 0:04:20.920 --> 0:04:26.480 analog computer that used these physical mechanical connections to make calculations. 0:04:27.000 --> 0:04:29.039 The deal here was that he would spend half his 0:04:29.080 --> 0:04:31.440 time working towards his degree and the other half in 0:04:31.440 --> 0:04:34.240 the lab with bush Um, who was then m i 0:04:34.320 --> 0:04:36.919 t s vice president and also their dean of engineering. 0:04:36.960 --> 0:04:39.520 So this was kind of sort of a big deal Um, 0:04:39.640 --> 0:04:41.880 And this machine was huge. It was the system of 0:04:42.200 --> 0:04:45.480 gears and pulleys and rods that calculated with an entire 0:04:45.600 --> 0:04:48.479 range of values that were based on the physical rotation 0:04:48.520 --> 0:04:52.080 of the rods. And you could program it by physically 0:04:52.279 --> 0:04:56.680 rearranging all of these mechanical bits to correspond with different equations. 0:04:57.040 --> 0:04:59.800 The control circuit, I mean, this is how early this 0:04:59.880 --> 0:05:03.880 was in computing technology. The control circuit itself was a 0:05:03.920 --> 0:05:08.760 system of some hundred electromagnetic switches. Yeah, this this is 0:05:08.800 --> 0:05:13.839 a kind of the the evolution of what Charles Babbage 0:05:13.920 --> 0:05:17.200 created way back in the day, the Difference Engine. Uh 0:05:17.240 --> 0:05:20.840 so we've done the text us done episodes about and 0:05:20.920 --> 0:05:24.160 A Lovelace, who was the first computer programmer she built. 0:05:24.360 --> 0:05:27.800 She kind of saw that computers could be things that 0:05:27.880 --> 0:05:31.280 could do more than just crunch numbers. They could analyze 0:05:31.279 --> 0:05:34.400 any kind of data. Yeah, they could represent stuff that 0:05:34.640 --> 0:05:39.520 isn't numbers as numbers, so that you could She had 0:05:39.560 --> 0:05:42.000 this brilliant idea of, oh, a computer might be able 0:05:42.040 --> 0:05:44.800 to represent something like a piece of music and be 0:05:44.880 --> 0:05:48.520 able to create, you know, replicated in some way years 0:05:48.520 --> 0:05:51.200 and years ahead of her time. And the computers of 0:05:51.240 --> 0:05:57.360 those days were these giant analog actual machines. Yeah, sometimes manpowered. 0:05:57.400 --> 0:06:00.560 Sometimes they had this electro mechanical element to it. So 0:06:00.720 --> 0:06:06.360 we're predating the time of the electronic computer at this point. So, uh, 0:06:06.560 --> 0:06:09.480 as Claude Shannon began to work on this machine, you 0:06:09.560 --> 0:06:11.680 know now that he had had enrolled with m I T, 0:06:12.279 --> 0:06:15.320 he noticed something interesting. He saw that the switches corresponded 0:06:15.320 --> 0:06:18.160 with a concept he had started on studying first as 0:06:18.160 --> 0:06:21.280 an undergraduate, and that was really focusing on, which was 0:06:21.760 --> 0:06:27.600 symbolic logic. Now, I took symbolic logic in college. I 0:06:27.640 --> 0:06:31.719 loved it because the basic idea of symbolic logic is 0:06:31.880 --> 0:06:37.200 you reduce logical statements to mathematical statements. Actually, I took 0:06:37.200 --> 0:06:40.120 a similar class. It was it was basically the at 0:06:40.320 --> 0:06:43.000 least mathematical math class I could get away with as 0:06:43.000 --> 0:06:46.000 an English major. Well, the neat thing about it is 0:06:46.040 --> 0:06:50.120 that if you could prove that it mathematically made sense, 0:06:50.480 --> 0:06:53.200 then you could say that the statement is true, right, 0:06:53.560 --> 0:06:57.000 And if it does exactly so, you could you could 0:06:57.040 --> 0:07:00.320 start to listen to your friends argue and sketch it out. 0:07:00.400 --> 0:07:04.600 And then he said, look, here's where you went wrong. 0:07:05.040 --> 0:07:07.280 But at any rate, while he was at m I T. 0:07:07.440 --> 0:07:11.080 He started really studying the work of a thinker named 0:07:11.240 --> 0:07:14.560 George Boole, who was from the nineteenth century and back. 0:07:14.600 --> 0:07:18.720 In eighteen fifty four, George Bull published an investigation of 0:07:18.760 --> 0:07:21.960 the laws of thought on which are founded the mathematical 0:07:22.000 --> 0:07:26.120 theories of logic and probabilities, sometimes known as the laws 0:07:26.120 --> 0:07:29.000 of thought. We usually shorten that to just laws of thought. 0:07:29.640 --> 0:07:34.480 So this discussion about the mathematical theories of logic had 0:07:34.560 --> 0:07:38.880 Bull using algebraic equations to represent logical forms and syllogisms, 0:07:38.880 --> 0:07:41.280 which is exactly what you know I experienced when I 0:07:41.320 --> 0:07:44.240 was in college. In this work, he also said that 0:07:44.280 --> 0:07:48.520 the only idempotent numbers, which are numbers that can be 0:07:48.560 --> 0:07:51.920 put through a certain operation multiple times without changing the result, 0:07:52.160 --> 0:07:57.200 are zero and one. For example, one times one equals one, 0:07:57.520 --> 0:08:00.560 and no matter how many times you will multiply by one, 0:08:00.640 --> 0:08:02.520 it will always be one. Right, So if you take 0:08:02.560 --> 0:08:05.680 the product of that of that that equation and then 0:08:05.760 --> 0:08:08.720 multiplied by itself, you still stay with one. Same thing 0:08:08.800 --> 0:08:11.440 with zero, although also with zero you can add and 0:08:11.520 --> 0:08:15.320 subtract and still end up with zero. So zero zero zero, zero, 0:08:15.640 --> 0:08:18.120 so bool. Use zero and one for the values of 0:08:18.120 --> 0:08:21.080 the symbols. In his algebraic logic, he said an argument 0:08:21.120 --> 0:08:24.840 held in logic if when reduced to an algebraic equation, 0:08:25.120 --> 0:08:28.120 it held in common algebra with the zero one restriction 0:08:28.160 --> 0:08:31.160 of the possible interpretations of the symbols, meaning that if 0:08:31.160 --> 0:08:33.640 you could replace the symbols with a zero or a 0:08:33.679 --> 0:08:36.960 one and it's still made sense, it still worked, then 0:08:37.000 --> 0:08:40.160 it held true. So Claude Shannon looked at this and 0:08:40.200 --> 0:08:43.280 he was thinking, this is a really cool idea. I 0:08:43.320 --> 0:08:46.880 love this, this approach to logic, and hey, you know 0:08:47.640 --> 0:08:51.880 a switch has two positions on and off, so sort 0:08:51.920 --> 0:08:54.640 of like a one in zero. Yeah, I mean, what 0:08:54.720 --> 0:08:58.080 if we were to you know, kind of, oh, play 0:08:58.120 --> 0:09:01.280 with that, that whole switch process. And that became something 0:09:01.280 --> 0:09:03.280 that would percolated in the back of his head for 0:09:03.320 --> 0:09:07.200 a while. In fact, it percolated so long that people 0:09:07.240 --> 0:09:10.719 suspect that he had fully formed this whole idea of 0:09:10.760 --> 0:09:16.040 applying Boolean logic to electronic devices for years before writing 0:09:16.040 --> 0:09:19.800 it down. And once he wrote it out and presented it, well, 0:09:19.840 --> 0:09:22.439 we'll get there. We'll get there. I also do want 0:09:22.440 --> 0:09:26.640 to note that around this time, Shannon became interested in juggling, 0:09:26.800 --> 0:09:30.240 I think originally for like physical mathematical purposes. He showed up, 0:09:30.320 --> 0:09:32.880 he started showing up at the M I T. Juggling 0:09:32.920 --> 0:09:36.120 Club Juggling Club, I see what you did there, and 0:09:36.240 --> 0:09:38.600 asking some of its members if he could like measure 0:09:38.840 --> 0:09:43.480 their juggling and and thereby sort of got involved with them, 0:09:43.640 --> 0:09:46.800 and this would be a lifelong interest. As we will 0:09:46.800 --> 0:09:48.520 get into a little bit later on a little bit 0:09:48.559 --> 0:09:52.080 of trivia. A certain podcaster by the name of Jonathan 0:09:52.120 --> 0:09:55.280 Strickland was a founding member of the University of Georgia 0:09:55.440 --> 0:09:59.520 Juggling Club. So uh, that's the only thing I really 0:09:59.520 --> 0:10:02.840 share in common with. I loved symbolic logic and I 0:10:02.960 --> 0:10:08.079 enjoyed juggling. They're the comparison ends for he was far 0:10:08.240 --> 0:10:12.400 more intelligent than I can ever hope to aspire. But yeah, 0:10:12.440 --> 0:10:15.840 you have to agree with It's sorry, man, it's fine. 0:10:15.559 --> 0:10:18.800 I have come to grips with it. Okay. If you 0:10:18.880 --> 0:10:20.960 told me, hey, Jonathan, you're never going to be as 0:10:21.000 --> 0:10:24.400 smart as say Claude Shannon or Albert Einstein, it's alright, 0:10:24.600 --> 0:10:29.440 most people won't be, so, I guess night. Claude Shannon 0:10:29.480 --> 0:10:33.480 writes a thesis applying Bulls approach to circuitry by equating 0:10:33.480 --> 0:10:36.840 the zero one restriction as the off and on positions 0:10:36.840 --> 0:10:40.320 of a switch within a circuit. He was twenty two 0:10:40.679 --> 0:10:43.320 years old. This this had never been done. This has 0:10:43.440 --> 0:10:45.839 never been the first time anyone had ever said this, 0:10:46.160 --> 0:10:49.400 certainly out loud, and other thinkers have said that it 0:10:49.480 --> 0:10:53.080 would have taken decades for anyone else to have come 0:10:53.120 --> 0:10:55.079 to this kind of conclusion. Right, we could have been 0:10:55.240 --> 0:10:58.280 sort of groping around with other approaches for years before 0:10:58.320 --> 0:11:02.000 someone had come up with this particular or version and 0:11:02.200 --> 0:11:04.960 not only did he come up with this idea, but 0:11:05.000 --> 0:11:08.360 the way he he presented it in his thesis it 0:11:08.480 --> 0:11:11.319 was very elegant, and he would he would expand upon 0:11:11.360 --> 0:11:13.480 it a little bit later, to the point where people said, 0:11:13.760 --> 0:11:16.360 this is this is why he gets compared to Einstein. 0:11:16.720 --> 0:11:19.960 It's like Einstein saying not just I figured out this 0:11:20.080 --> 0:11:23.320 one component to how the universe works, but being able 0:11:23.320 --> 0:11:26.480 to express it elegantly and have a whole picture, right. Like, 0:11:26.520 --> 0:11:29.520 it's like, it's not just a fact, it's a hill 0:11:29.800 --> 0:11:33.360 host of facts that are all support one another. And 0:11:33.440 --> 0:11:35.560 it's like they say, it's it's like you come up 0:11:35.600 --> 0:11:38.959 with a fundamental theory of science and unfold it all 0:11:39.000 --> 0:11:43.920 at once. It's just so. His thesis also laid out 0:11:44.000 --> 0:11:48.000 how logical functions such as and or and not could 0:11:48.000 --> 0:11:51.560 be implemented within a physical circuit, so building of logic gates. 0:11:51.760 --> 0:11:55.439 Now keep in mind, this is all in a hypothetical 0:11:55.480 --> 0:11:58.440 slash theoretical approach, right, It's not like he was He 0:11:58.520 --> 0:12:03.520 wasn't building this, McCay or electronically, that's the case, maybe exactly, yeah, 0:12:03.559 --> 0:12:05.200 he was. He was. He was laying out how this 0:12:05.280 --> 0:12:10.160 could be possible, not actually building them. Himself. Claude Shannon 0:12:10.280 --> 0:12:13.280 leaves m I T after earning a doctorate in mathematics 0:12:13.280 --> 0:12:17.160 to teach for one year at Princeton Um. And here's 0:12:17.160 --> 0:12:19.360 the story. Has a couple of different who has some 0:12:19.440 --> 0:12:21.840 alternate endings. We will present you with the two that 0:12:21.880 --> 0:12:24.440 we know of. But the story goes that he was 0:12:24.640 --> 0:12:27.640 teaching at Princeton and while he was teaching a class 0:12:27.679 --> 0:12:32.080 he was holding a lecture. Albert Einstein himself opened the 0:12:32.120 --> 0:12:36.400 door and stepped inside, and Claude Shannon kept going on 0:12:36.440 --> 0:12:40.640 with the lecture, but obviously was very much impressed with 0:12:40.679 --> 0:12:44.640 the fact that this genius has walked into his classroom. 0:12:44.679 --> 0:12:48.440 He sees Einstein bend over and whispers something to one 0:12:48.440 --> 0:12:50.280 of the students in the back. He sees that the 0:12:50.280 --> 0:12:53.760 student replies, and then he sees that Einstein quietly leaves 0:12:53.800 --> 0:12:56.240 the room. He continues on with his lecture. At the 0:12:56.320 --> 0:12:59.080 end of the lecture, he holds the student back and 0:12:59.320 --> 0:13:04.079 with great anticipation asks the student, what did this brilliant 0:13:04.160 --> 0:13:08.319 man have to say about my lecture? And my version 0:13:08.320 --> 0:13:11.360 of the story was that Einstein had very quietly asked 0:13:11.360 --> 0:13:16.320 the student, where are they currently serving tea? I've heard 0:13:16.320 --> 0:13:18.640 that he asked where the men's room was, so maybe 0:13:18.640 --> 0:13:22.480 there's where are they currently allowing you to peat could 0:13:22.520 --> 0:13:26.599 possibly been at any rate. Apparently that became one of 0:13:26.640 --> 0:13:29.560 Claude Shannon's favorite stories. He would love to tell the 0:13:29.600 --> 0:13:33.480 story about how Albert Einstein walked into his classroom and 0:13:33.520 --> 0:13:36.760 asked something completely not connected with what he had to say, 0:13:36.800 --> 0:13:39.920 and that made him like, just tickled it. It tickled it, 0:13:40.760 --> 0:13:42.480 And I thought, well that that also tells you a 0:13:42.520 --> 0:13:48.160 lot about his personality that he did not take himself. Uh. 0:13:48.200 --> 0:13:52.120 In nineteen forty one he joined a company famous for 0:13:52.200 --> 0:13:57.000 its research and development, Bell Telephone Labs, and his work 0:13:57.320 --> 0:13:59.719 mostly focused on things that had to do with the 0:13:59.760 --> 0:14:03.320 war effort in this one is World War two, and 0:14:03.559 --> 0:14:07.400 it included anti aircraft devices that could calculate and target 0:14:07.640 --> 0:14:11.320 counter missiles, which came pretty seriously in handy during the 0:14:11.400 --> 0:14:14.800 German blitz on England. Yeah. Yeah, it turns out if 0:14:15.280 --> 0:14:18.120 if your enemy is blasting you with missiles, counter missiles 0:14:18.120 --> 0:14:22.400 are a high priority. He also got to work in cryptography, 0:14:22.480 --> 0:14:25.040 so here's something where he's got a you know, a 0:14:25.080 --> 0:14:28.720 connection with people like Alan Turing, who was working on 0:14:29.080 --> 0:14:32.400 cracking the Enigma machine back over in England he was 0:14:32.520 --> 0:14:35.160 now Claude Shannon was designed devices used by Allied powers 0:14:35.160 --> 0:14:37.160 to send messages back and forth, so he was looking 0:14:37.200 --> 0:14:41.480 at keeping Allied messages safe rather than cracking German messages 0:14:41.840 --> 0:14:45.120 or access power messages. He later wrote a paper about 0:14:45.200 --> 0:14:49.760 communication theory of secrecy systems, which according to M. I. 0:14:49.840 --> 0:14:53.600 T is generally credited with transforming cryptography from an art 0:14:53.680 --> 0:14:57.080 to a science. UM. It was a mathematical proof that 0:14:57.160 --> 0:15:00.120 an encryption scheme called the one time pad or the 0:15:00.200 --> 0:15:04.840 Vernon cipher is is unbreakable. And it's the that cipher 0:15:04.920 --> 0:15:06.880 is the basic idea of encoding a message with a 0:15:06.920 --> 0:15:09.560 random series of digits a key, as we have talked 0:15:09.600 --> 0:15:13.480 about on the show before UM, which both parties communicating 0:15:13.520 --> 0:15:16.480 have a copy of. But you know, this is a 0:15:16.600 --> 0:15:21.840 very simple concept in cryptography. But having the mathematical proof 0:15:21.840 --> 0:15:24.840 that it is in fact unbreakable if the system is, 0:15:26.240 --> 0:15:29.120 then that's really awesome. And when we talked about the 0:15:29.240 --> 0:15:32.400 Enigma machine, that was one of those systems that could 0:15:32.400 --> 0:15:36.800 have been unbreakable had people actually been able to follow 0:15:36.960 --> 0:15:40.600 the rules properly. But because there were two things that 0:15:40.680 --> 0:15:42.760 really fell apart. For the Enigma machine and I know 0:15:42.840 --> 0:15:44.320 this is a bit of a tangent, but it relates 0:15:44.360 --> 0:15:47.520 to this. Those two things were one. The Enigma machine 0:15:47.560 --> 0:15:50.560 was designed so that no matter what the letter you 0:15:50.640 --> 0:15:53.720 pressed would never light up as the same The same 0:15:53.800 --> 0:15:55.560 letter would never light up as the letter that you 0:15:55.600 --> 0:15:58.720 had pressed, So knowing that meant that you could remove 0:15:58.960 --> 0:16:03.560 one variable from all the possible outcomes. Secondly, people were 0:16:03.600 --> 0:16:06.560 not as careful with their log books, with their code 0:16:06.560 --> 0:16:09.000 books as they needed to be um and that that 0:16:09.120 --> 0:16:12.160 led to the code being broken. But everyone seems to 0:16:12.200 --> 0:16:16.080 agree that had every had the Germans, had the access powers, 0:16:16.080 --> 0:16:21.280 been incredibly careful, then that would have been an unbreakable code. 0:16:21.280 --> 0:16:25.160 Of course, times of war, you can't really do share 0:16:25.160 --> 0:16:27.280 in human error being what it is. Yeah, I mean, 0:16:27.320 --> 0:16:32.680 it's it's that's the difference between the ideal and reality. Meanwhile, uh, 0:16:32.800 --> 0:16:35.800 Claude Shannon began to develop theories on how to apply 0:16:36.040 --> 0:16:39.160 his ideas about bully and logic and circuitry to telephone 0:16:39.240 --> 0:16:43.120 switching lines. We have more episode to go, but first 0:16:43.400 --> 0:16:55.600 let's take a quick break in something else not involving 0:16:55.640 --> 0:16:59.840 Claude Channon. Happened that bell laps the development of the transistor. 0:17:00.560 --> 0:17:04.000 Now the transistor was a huge breakthrough. It meant that 0:17:04.680 --> 0:17:07.600 the world of electronics could move away from things like 0:17:07.720 --> 0:17:12.639 vacuum tubes and allow this other device to take its place, essentially, 0:17:13.000 --> 0:17:17.439 which ultimately lead to the manatorization of electronics. But it 0:17:17.480 --> 0:17:23.040 wouldn't be until Claude Shannon Um published his concepts about 0:17:23.160 --> 0:17:27.520 information theory that would let that be a functional item 0:17:27.600 --> 0:17:30.159 in the way that it became. Yeah. Yeah, it was 0:17:30.240 --> 0:17:34.560 really this idea of digitizing information that Shannon had that 0:17:34.920 --> 0:17:40.280 made this a a practical device beyond just especially that 0:17:40.400 --> 0:17:42.920 early transistor. It's enormous if you ever see a picture 0:17:42.920 --> 0:17:45.280 of it, I mean compared to the if you think 0:17:45.320 --> 0:17:49.000 that billions of transistors can now fit on a microprocessor 0:17:49.080 --> 0:17:51.320 chip and then you look at the first one, it's 0:17:51.359 --> 0:17:56.760 it's enormous difference. Obviously. Now, this idea of digitizing information 0:17:57.320 --> 0:18:00.720 was pretty much what would allow the transistor become useful, 0:18:00.800 --> 0:18:04.520 and also it's what would lead to things like encoding 0:18:04.560 --> 0:18:08.400 information onto storage media like uh, like a compact disc. 0:18:09.359 --> 0:18:13.760 This is what would make not just uh, processing data possible, 0:18:13.760 --> 0:18:16.840 but storing it. Yeah, and right, it's it's kind of 0:18:16.880 --> 0:18:19.280 a really beautiful coincidence that both of these technologies were 0:18:19.320 --> 0:18:23.040 being developed at Bell Labs within a year of each other. 0:18:23.200 --> 0:18:26.720 As it turns out, because in night that is when 0:18:27.240 --> 0:18:32.640 Claude and actually published his paper Mathematical Theory of Communication. Yes, 0:18:33.000 --> 0:18:35.679 and that's available in PDF form. Will will share the 0:18:35.720 --> 0:18:39.439 link because you can actually read his paper on information theory. 0:18:39.920 --> 0:18:42.440 And this is the one that I said earlier that 0:18:42.560 --> 0:18:46.960 you know, people people who were information theory experts, they say, like, 0:18:47.040 --> 0:18:49.639 this is this is like Einstein coming out with the 0:18:49.640 --> 0:18:53.400 theories of relativity. This idea of a complete picture, not 0:18:53.480 --> 0:18:55.760 just an idea, but a complete picture of an approach 0:18:56.200 --> 0:19:00.440 that laid the groundwork for digitizing information so it can 0:19:00.440 --> 0:19:04.680 be transmitted and stored. Now, again, he was a theorist. 0:19:04.920 --> 0:19:07.600 He did not build this. He explained how it is 0:19:07.800 --> 0:19:10.920 mathematically possible, right, and so it left it up to 0:19:11.200 --> 0:19:14.679 engineers and computer scientists to figure out, Okay, if this 0:19:14.760 --> 0:19:17.639 is theoretically possible, how do we make it real? What 0:19:17.680 --> 0:19:21.399 do we do to actually put this stuff into into 0:19:21.560 --> 0:19:26.000 reality and have it work for us? Uh? Now, when 0:19:26.000 --> 0:19:29.200 it was published, but there are people who have looked 0:19:29.200 --> 0:19:31.320 into Claude Shannon's life who say that he may have 0:19:31.440 --> 0:19:35.040 had this fully formed as early as ninety three, and 0:19:35.080 --> 0:19:36.840 he thought that it was a really cool idea, but 0:19:36.920 --> 0:19:39.199 just didn't think, you know, no one else is going 0:19:39.240 --> 0:19:42.760 to care about this. I would, I would argue. I mean, 0:19:42.800 --> 0:19:44.640 from from what I've read, it sounded to me more 0:19:44.680 --> 0:19:46.840 like he kind of had it brewing and just didn't 0:19:46.840 --> 0:19:49.760 want to present it until it was done. He did 0:19:49.880 --> 0:19:52.119 seem like the kind of person who he wanted to 0:19:52.160 --> 0:19:56.840 make sure that he had as complete a picture of 0:19:56.960 --> 0:19:59.840 an idea as possible before presenting it to anyone else. 0:19:59.840 --> 0:20:03.200 He and not want to have the experience of coming 0:20:03.320 --> 0:20:06.920 forward with just half an idea. So yeah, he's kind 0:20:06.920 --> 0:20:10.760 of a perfectionist in that sense. And it really is 0:20:11.040 --> 0:20:15.240 a challenge to explain just to an average person exactly 0:20:15.280 --> 0:20:19.040 how important this theory was. But you know, in a 0:20:19.080 --> 0:20:21.119 in a practical sense, at the time that he was 0:20:21.160 --> 0:20:23.480 coming up with this, it was necessary to create a 0:20:23.480 --> 0:20:27.479 better telephone system. So in the old analog telephone system, 0:20:27.720 --> 0:20:31.520 you've got some pretty big limitations, some some barriers you've 0:20:31.520 --> 0:20:34.520 got to get across due to signal loss or noise, 0:20:34.880 --> 0:20:38.320 and analog telephone signal gets weaker the longer that the 0:20:38.320 --> 0:20:41.280 telephone line it's traveling along is Yeah, so In order 0:20:41.320 --> 0:20:44.480 to get around that, engineers would place amplifiers along a 0:20:44.520 --> 0:20:46.760 telephone line to boost the signal. So you get a 0:20:46.760 --> 0:20:49.399 weak signal coming in, it goes through the amplifier, the 0:20:49.440 --> 0:20:53.240 signals boosted, it's stronger going out. But unfortunately, um the 0:20:53.520 --> 0:20:55.720 along with the signal that you want to get boosted, 0:20:55.760 --> 0:20:58.240 all of the noise that's on the line also gets boosted. 0:20:58.320 --> 0:21:00.800 So eventually you run out. I mean, I mean just 0:21:00.840 --> 0:21:03.280 the noise takes over. Yeah, yeah, you lose the signal 0:21:03.359 --> 0:21:05.000 in the noise. So that would be you know, if 0:21:05.000 --> 0:21:08.959 you've ever heard like one of those those telephone conversations 0:21:09.000 --> 0:21:12.360 that goes on in an old movie where it's just 0:21:12.440 --> 0:21:15.280 like all you hear is cracked. Yeah, just imagine that 0:21:15.320 --> 0:21:17.760 if you're far enough away that all you would get 0:21:17.800 --> 0:21:19.640 was the stack, you would not get any voice at all. 0:21:20.040 --> 0:21:24.120 So uh. The interesting thing was that by switching from 0:21:24.200 --> 0:21:28.320 analog signals to digital signals, they didn't have to worry 0:21:28.400 --> 0:21:31.840 about this signal boosting problem. Instead of a continuous signal 0:21:31.880 --> 0:21:34.280 like a sign wave, which is you know, an acoustic wave, 0:21:34.440 --> 0:21:37.359 is what you would get with an analog telephone line, 0:21:38.240 --> 0:21:40.840 digital signals are sent in a series of bits and 0:21:40.880 --> 0:21:43.160 a bit is either a zero or a one. That's 0:21:43.240 --> 0:21:46.720 all based off of Claude Shannon's application of Boolean algebra 0:21:46.840 --> 0:21:50.720 to electronics, and it worked. So you could do this 0:21:50.800 --> 0:21:53.120 with telephones, which was great, but it meant you could 0:21:53.119 --> 0:21:55.199 also do it with just about any other kind of 0:21:55.240 --> 0:22:00.919 information transfer from radio to telegraph, telephones, everything. And again 0:22:01.000 --> 0:22:03.040 this was one of those things that could not immediately 0:22:03.080 --> 0:22:05.840 be implemented. The engineers had to build the technology sported. 0:22:06.440 --> 0:22:09.840 But once they did, they realized, we can build out 0:22:09.960 --> 0:22:14.480 a nationwide telephone, even a global telephone system that doesn't 0:22:14.480 --> 0:22:18.600 require amplifiers every x number of miles because you're never 0:22:18.640 --> 0:22:22.680 going to lose that that signal clarity, all right, Like hypothetically, 0:22:22.800 --> 0:22:26.480 you can do this with literally zero loss in quality. 0:22:26.560 --> 0:22:29.440 So so long as you don't mind taking the necessary 0:22:29.440 --> 0:22:31.960 amount of time for each bit to be transferred. Really, 0:22:32.000 --> 0:22:35.040 the transfer speed is the only cap that you're working 0:22:35.040 --> 0:22:38.520 with at this junction exactly. And Claude Shannon he kind 0:22:38.560 --> 0:22:40.840 of came up with that too. He said, uh, you know, 0:22:41.680 --> 0:22:44.960 if if we have an infinite amount of time, you'll 0:22:44.960 --> 0:22:50.960 have zero signal laws. But that any medium of transmission 0:22:51.080 --> 0:22:54.440 is going to have ultimately a cap of how much 0:22:54.520 --> 0:22:57.720 data it can carry at any given within a given 0:22:57.760 --> 0:23:01.399 amount of time. So it was interesting because that was 0:23:01.440 --> 0:23:03.840 one of those things that ended up becoming a challenge 0:23:03.880 --> 0:23:08.399 to engineers. He said, look, for whatever medium you choose, 0:23:09.040 --> 0:23:11.720 it's and it's specific to each medium. You're going to 0:23:11.800 --> 0:23:14.359 have this limit that you're going to hit and you 0:23:14.400 --> 0:23:16.920 can't go beyond it. And the engineer said, all right, 0:23:16.920 --> 0:23:19.560 we agree, there's no way we can go beyond that limit. 0:23:19.640 --> 0:23:21.719 So what our goal is is to get as close 0:23:21.760 --> 0:23:24.760 to that limit as we possibly can. And and this 0:23:24.880 --> 0:23:29.080 also led into some really interesting side concepts about digital 0:23:29.119 --> 0:23:34.280 compression and error. Yeah exactly, Yeah, you had to. You 0:23:34.320 --> 0:23:38.680 could end up compressing data into smaller data packages, which 0:23:38.720 --> 0:23:42.080 helps you get around that bandwidth cap. But in order 0:23:42.119 --> 0:23:43.959 to do that, you also have to have that that 0:23:44.119 --> 0:23:48.000