Five Things About Claude Shannon

Show me a decent historian of technology and all things digital and I'll show you a man whose blood boils at the mention of Claude Shannon. Shannon is typically seen as much-maligned in the study of technological history: he more or less singlehandedly laid the groundwork for digital circuits, digital computing, and modern information theory before age 35. Many believe his foundational theories belong to the class containing Newton's and Einstein's, and that his wide-ranging work rivals Edison's. (Pro tip: Shannon and Edison were distantly related cousins.) And yet, he's far from a household name.

Tomorrow, April 30^th, Shannon would've turned 98 were he still living. In celebration of Claude Shannon's life, here are five things you may not know about him.

*His pre-war work dealt with switches and relays. Shannon's master's thesis of 1937 discussed the application of Boolean logic to switches with the intention of simplifying telephone switchboards. As his ideas developed, however, he realized that the binary function of switches could be used as the basis for a standardized logic circuit and functional digital computers.

*Shannon (more or less) introduced the bit in 1948. He was not the first to use this term - his advisor Vannevar Bush referred to "bits of information" in a 1936 paper. But Shannon's landmark paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication established the bit as the building block for digital communication. Interestingly, Shannon's use was still a borrowed idea - he was inspired by an internal Bell Labs memo from the previous year, which is the first known use of "bit" to describe a binary digit.

*He reaped considerable financial gain using information and game theory. Shannon's intelligence served him well outside his professional life. He co-developed what's now referred to as the Kelly criterion for optimizing bets and investments with John Kelly, Jr. in the early 1950s; applying this strategy to Las Vegas blackjack and the stock market made Shannon a fortune. (Shannon continued his attempts to exploit Vegas by developing a "wearable computer" to boost roulette odds in 1961.)

*Shannon had interesting hobbies and a well-developed sense of humor. Friends and acquaintances attest to his interests in the fine arts of juggling and unicycle riding. Among his more harebrained inventions are a flame-throwing trumpet, rocket-powered Frisbee, and a motorized pogo stick. Perhaps his most inspired contraption, the Ultimate Machine, was a simple wooden box with an on-off switch; Shannon kept one on his desk at all times. When the switch was flipped, a small door on top of the box flipped open and a mechanical hand reached out and turned the switch off. For reasons unknown, the Machine is experiencing renewed interest thanks to DIY hackers.

*Shannon never witnessed the transcendence of his theories. The end of his life reads like a classic, ironic tragedy: although Shannon died in 2002 at the age of 84, his later life was marred by Alzheimer's disease, so that he was not able to observe (or at least comprehend) the Information Age he helped create. His wife Betty hinted in his obituary that he would've regarded such developments with bewilderment.

Image credit: Gandini Juggling