TechStuff Classic: Who was Claude Shannon?

TechStuff salutes an incredibly influential (and yet relatively unknown) tech genius: Claude Shannon. What did he do?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. It is a Friday,
It's time for a tech Stuff classic episode. This episode
originally published August six, two thousand fourteen, and it's it's

(00:29):
one about an important person in tech, an important person who,
at least at the time not a not a lot
of people outside of certain text spheres really knew a
lot about him. So this episode is titled who was
Claude Shannon? The Father of information theory right also known
as the father of the electronic communication age, and his

(00:53):
full name Claude Ellwood Shannon. Very important person he's been.
He's been compared to, you know, some some pretty impressive,
big recently big people like Einstein. Yeah, Einstein being one
of them. And you might say, well, whoa you know Einstein, Like,
Einstein's name has become synonymous with just the concept of genius,

(01:15):
like to the point where we use it in phrases
where we're being you know, a little a little condescenating. Yeah,
way to go, Einstein, that kind of thing. But as
you'll see when we go through this this episode and
explain what Claude Shannon did and his his contributions to technology,
as well as just kind of his wacky personality, you'll
really kind of see how that that applies. So exactly

(01:40):
who was he and what did he do? When was
this guy born? He was born in nineteen sixteen in Potaski. Yeah. Yeah,
his father was a probate judge and his mother was
a high school principle. He also did have some mildly
famous family. A very distant cousin of his kind of

(02:00):
made a name for himself, Yeah, for killing an elephant
with electricity, Thomas Edison. He did a few other things too, Yeah,
that's the requisite doing from the internet. Thomas Edison obviously
did many many important things, some of them not remotely
involving putting an animal to death with electricity. Yeah, the

(02:23):
large majority of which so kill an elephant once. Yeah,
I know, you just sticks with you right. Well. As
a boy, Claude Shannon became interested in electronics and began
experimenting with different stuff. He was just curious about how
things work and how to build them himself. He built
a working model of an airplane. Pretty impressive. Think, I

(02:44):
think he was born in nineteen sixteen. You didn't have
airplanes for very long. They were pretty new. Yeah, they
were brand new back in the early twentieth century. And
he also reportedly made a working telegraph system that they
set up between his bedroom and a friends bedroom. His
friend lived half a mile away, and it was all
made out of fencing wire. Yeah, so he could all

(03:05):
but I mean the wire itself. Yeah, he could actually
end up sending messages to his friend have a mile away.
He was also really into radio circuits and built a
radio controlled model boat. Yeah, so very much interest that. Yeah, yeah,
this is this is the growing world of radio technology
and the growing world of communications technology. So he was
interested in it as a kid. Now a little bit

(03:29):
later on, when he was a teenager, he got work
as a basic mechanic in a drug store, running a
fix it shop in a drug store, because that's that
was like the center of town. Yeah, where you go
and you go and get your your chocolate malt and
your your your fan fixed. You know, it's a one
stop shop. He attended an Arbor College, where he studied

(03:51):
mathematics and electrical engineering. He graduated an Arbor College in
nineteen thirty six and then went on to enroll in
date level study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And
he decided upon m i T because he saw this
work study add like pinned onto a physical bulletin board

(04:11):
on his college campus that was advertising for someone interested
in working on Vanavar Bush's differential analyzer, which was an
analog computer that used these physical mechanical connections to make calculations.
The deal here was that he would spend half his
time working towards his degree and the other half in
the lab with bush Um, who was then m i

(04:34):
t s vice president and also their dean of engineering.
So this was kind of sort of a big deal Um,
And this machine was huge. It was the system of
gears and pulleys and rods that calculated with an entire
range of values that were based on the physical rotation
of the rods. And you could program it by physically
rearranging all of these mechanical bits to correspond with different equations.

(04:57):
The control circuit, I mean, this is how early this
was in computing technology. The control circuit itself was a
system of some hundred electromagnetic switches. Yeah, this this is
a kind of the the evolution of what Charles Babbage
created way back in the day, the Difference Engine. Uh

(05:17):
so we've done the text us done episodes about and
A Lovelace, who was the first computer programmer she built.
She kind of saw that computers could be things that
could do more than just crunch numbers. They could analyze
any kind of data. Yeah, they could represent stuff that
isn't numbers as numbers, so that you could She had

(05:39):
this brilliant idea of, oh, a computer might be able
to represent something like a piece of music and be
able to create, you know, replicated in some way years
and years ahead of her time. And the computers of
those days were these giant analog actual machines. Yeah, sometimes manpowered.
Sometimes they had this electro mechanical element to it. So

(06:00):
we're predating the time of the electronic computer at this point. So, uh,
as Claude Shannon began to work on this machine, you
know now that he had had enrolled with m I T,
he noticed something interesting. He saw that the switches corresponded
with a concept he had started on studying first as
an undergraduate, and that was really focusing on, which was

(06:21):
symbolic logic. Now, I took symbolic logic in college. I
loved it because the basic idea of symbolic logic is
you reduce logical statements to mathematical statements. Actually, I took
a similar class. It was it was basically the at
least mathematical math class I could get away with as

(06:43):
an English major. Well, the neat thing about it is
that if you could prove that it mathematically made sense,
then you could say that the statement is true, right,
And if it does exactly so, you could you could
start to listen to your friends argue and sketch it out.
And then he said, look, here's where you went wrong.

(07:05):
But at any rate, while he was at m I T.
He started really studying the work of a thinker named
George Boole, who was from the nineteenth century and back.
In eighteen fifty four, George Bull published an investigation of
the laws of thought on which are founded the mathematical
theories of logic and probabilities, sometimes known as the laws

(07:26):
of thought. We usually shorten that to just laws of thought.
So this discussion about the mathematical theories of logic had
Bull using algebraic equations to represent logical forms and syllogisms,
which is exactly what you know I experienced when I
was in college. In this work, he also said that
the only idempotent numbers, which are numbers that can be

(07:48):
put through a certain operation multiple times without changing the result,
are zero and one. For example, one times one equals one,
and no matter how many times you will multiply by one,
it will always be one. Right, So if you take
the product of that of that that equation and then
multiplied by itself, you still stay with one. Same thing

(08:08):
with zero, although also with zero you can add and
subtract and still end up with zero. So zero zero zero, zero,
so bool. Use zero and one for the values of
the symbols. In his algebraic logic, he said an argument
held in logic if when reduced to an algebraic equation,
it held in common algebra with the zero one restriction
of the possible interpretations of the symbols, meaning that if

(08:31):
you could replace the symbols with a zero or a
one and it's still made sense, it still worked, then
it held true. So Claude Shannon looked at this and
he was thinking, this is a really cool idea. I
love this, this approach to logic, and hey, you know
a switch has two positions on and off, so sort

(08:51):
of like a one in zero. Yeah, I mean, what
if we were to you know, kind of, oh, play
with that, that whole switch process. And that became something
that would percolated in the back of his head for
a while. In fact, it percolated so long that people
suspect that he had fully formed this whole idea of
applying Boolean logic to electronic devices for years before writing

(09:16):
it down. And once he wrote it out and presented it, well,
we'll get there. We'll get there. I also do want
to note that around this time, Shannon became interested in juggling,
I think originally for like physical mathematical purposes. He showed up,
he started showing up at the M I T. Juggling
Club Juggling Club, I see what you did there, and

(09:36):
asking some of its members if he could like measure
their juggling and and thereby sort of got involved with them,
and this would be a lifelong interest. As we will
get into a little bit later on a little bit
of trivia. A certain podcaster by the name of Jonathan
Strickland was a founding member of the University of Georgia
Juggling Club. So uh, that's the only thing I really

(09:59):
share in common with. I loved symbolic logic and I
enjoyed juggling. They're the comparison ends for he was far
more intelligent than I can ever hope to aspire. But yeah,
you have to agree with It's sorry, man, it's fine.
I have come to grips with it. Okay. If you
told me, hey, Jonathan, you're never going to be as

(10:21):
smart as say Claude Shannon or Albert Einstein, it's alright,
most people won't be, so, I guess night. Claude Shannon
writes a thesis applying Bulls approach to circuitry by equating
the zero one restriction as the off and on positions
of a switch within a circuit. He was twenty two
years old. This this had never been done. This has

(10:43):
never been the first time anyone had ever said this,
certainly out loud, and other thinkers have said that it
would have taken decades for anyone else to have come
to this kind of conclusion. Right, we could have been
sort of groping around with other approaches for years before
someone had come up with this particular or version and
not only did he come up with this idea, but

(11:05):
the way he he presented it in his thesis it
was very elegant, and he would he would expand upon
it a little bit later, to the point where people said,
this is this is why he gets compared to Einstein.
It's like Einstein saying not just I figured out this
one component to how the universe works, but being able
to express it elegantly and have a whole picture, right. Like,

(11:26):
it's like, it's not just a fact, it's a hill
host of facts that are all support one another. And
it's like they say, it's it's like you come up
with a fundamental theory of science and unfold it all
at once. It's just so. His thesis also laid out
how logical functions such as and or and not could

(11:48):
be implemented within a physical circuit, so building of logic gates.
Now keep in mind, this is all in a hypothetical
slash theoretical approach, right, It's not like he was He
wasn't building this, McCay or electronically, that's the case, maybe exactly, yeah,
he was. He was. He was laying out how this
could be possible, not actually building them. Himself. Claude Shannon

(12:10):
leaves m I T after earning a doctorate in mathematics
to teach for one year at Princeton Um. And here's
the story. Has a couple of different who has some
alternate endings. We will present you with the two that
we know of. But the story goes that he was
teaching at Princeton and while he was teaching a class
he was holding a lecture. Albert Einstein himself opened the

(12:32):
door and stepped inside, and Claude Shannon kept going on
with the lecture, but obviously was very much impressed with
the fact that this genius has walked into his classroom.
He sees Einstein bend over and whispers something to one
of the students in the back. He sees that the
student replies, and then he sees that Einstein quietly leaves

(12:53):
the room. He continues on with his lecture. At the
end of the lecture, he holds the student back and
with great anticipation asks the student, what did this brilliant
man have to say about my lecture? And my version
of the story was that Einstein had very quietly asked
the student, where are they currently serving tea? I've heard

(13:16):
that he asked where the men's room was, so maybe
there's where are they currently allowing you to peat could
possibly been at any rate. Apparently that became one of
Claude Shannon's favorite stories. He would love to tell the
story about how Albert Einstein walked into his classroom and
asked something completely not connected with what he had to say,

(13:36):
and that made him like, just tickled it. It tickled it,
And I thought, well that that also tells you a
lot about his personality that he did not take himself. Uh.
In nineteen forty one he joined a company famous for
its research and development, Bell Telephone Labs, and his work

(13:57):
mostly focused on things that had to do with the
war effort in this one is World War two, and
it included anti aircraft devices that could calculate and target
counter missiles, which came pretty seriously in handy during the
German blitz on England. Yeah. Yeah, it turns out if
if your enemy is blasting you with missiles, counter missiles

(14:18):
are a high priority. He also got to work in cryptography,
so here's something where he's got a you know, a
connection with people like Alan Turing, who was working on
cracking the Enigma machine back over in England he was
now Claude Shannon was designed devices used by Allied powers
to send messages back and forth, so he was looking
at keeping Allied messages safe rather than cracking German messages

(14:41):
or access power messages. He later wrote a paper about
communication theory of secrecy systems, which according to M. I.
T is generally credited with transforming cryptography from an art
to a science. UM. It was a mathematical proof that
an encryption scheme called the one time pad or the
Vernon cipher is is unbreakable. And it's the that cipher

(15:04):
is the basic idea of encoding a message with a
random series of digits a key, as we have talked
about on the show before UM, which both parties communicating
have a copy of. But you know, this is a
very simple concept in cryptography. But having the mathematical proof
that it is in fact unbreakable if the system is,

(15:26):
then that's really awesome. And when we talked about the
Enigma machine, that was one of those systems that could
have been unbreakable had people actually been able to follow
the rules properly. But because there were two things that
really fell apart. For the Enigma machine and I know
this is a bit of a tangent, but it relates
to this. Those two things were one. The Enigma machine

(15:47):
was designed so that no matter what the letter you
pressed would never light up as the same The same
letter would never light up as the letter that you
had pressed, So knowing that meant that you could remove
one variable from all the possible outcomes. Secondly, people were
not as careful with their log books, with their code
books as they needed to be um and that that

(16:09):
led to the code being broken. But everyone seems to
agree that had every had the Germans, had the access powers,
been incredibly careful, then that would have been an unbreakable code.
Of course, times of war, you can't really do share
in human error being what it is. Yeah, I mean,
it's it's that's the difference between the ideal and reality. Meanwhile, uh,

(16:32):
Claude Shannon began to develop theories on how to apply
his ideas about bully and logic and circuitry to telephone
switching lines. We have more episode to go, but first
let's take a quick break in something else not involving

(16:55):
Claude Channon. Happened that bell laps the development of the transistor.
Now the transistor was a huge breakthrough. It meant that
the world of electronics could move away from things like
vacuum tubes and allow this other device to take its place, essentially,
which ultimately lead to the manatorization of electronics. But it

(17:17):
wouldn't be until Claude Shannon Um published his concepts about
information theory that would let that be a functional item
in the way that it became. Yeah. Yeah, it was
really this idea of digitizing information that Shannon had that
made this a a practical device beyond just especially that

(17:40):
early transistor. It's enormous if you ever see a picture
of it, I mean compared to the if you think
that billions of transistors can now fit on a microprocessor
chip and then you look at the first one, it's
it's enormous difference. Obviously. Now, this idea of digitizing information
was pretty much what would allow the transistor become useful,

(18:00):
and also it's what would lead to things like encoding
information onto storage media like uh, like a compact disc.
This is what would make not just uh, processing data possible,
but storing it. Yeah, and right, it's it's kind of
a really beautiful coincidence that both of these technologies were
being developed at Bell Labs within a year of each other.

(18:23):
As it turns out, because in night that is when
Claude and actually published his paper Mathematical Theory of Communication. Yes,
and that's available in PDF form. Will will share the
link because you can actually read his paper on information theory.
And this is the one that I said earlier that
you know, people people who were information theory experts, they say, like,

(18:47):
this is this is like Einstein coming out with the
theories of relativity. This idea of a complete picture, not
just an idea, but a complete picture of an approach
that laid the groundwork for digitizing information so it can
be transmitted and stored. Now, again, he was a theorist.
He did not build this. He explained how it is

(19:07):
mathematically possible, right, and so it left it up to
engineers and computer scientists to figure out, Okay, if this
is theoretically possible, how do we make it real? What
do we do to actually put this stuff into into
reality and have it work for us? Uh? Now, when
it was published, but there are people who have looked

(19:29):
into Claude Shannon's life who say that he may have
had this fully formed as early as ninety three, and
he thought that it was a really cool idea, but
just didn't think, you know, no one else is going
to care about this. I would, I would argue. I mean,
from from what I've read, it sounded to me more
like he kind of had it brewing and just didn't
want to present it until it was done. He did

(19:49):
seem like the kind of person who he wanted to
make sure that he had as complete a picture of
an idea as possible before presenting it to anyone else.
He and not want to have the experience of coming
forward with just half an idea. So yeah, he's kind
of a perfectionist in that sense. And it really is

(20:11):
a challenge to explain just to an average person exactly
how important this theory was. But you know, in a
in a practical sense, at the time that he was
coming up with this, it was necessary to create a
better telephone system. So in the old analog telephone system,
you've got some pretty big limitations, some some barriers you've

(20:31):
got to get across due to signal loss or noise,
and analog telephone signal gets weaker the longer that the
telephone line it's traveling along is Yeah, so In order
to get around that, engineers would place amplifiers along a
telephone line to boost the signal. So you get a
weak signal coming in, it goes through the amplifier, the
signals boosted, it's stronger going out. But unfortunately, um the

(20:53):
along with the signal that you want to get boosted,
all of the noise that's on the line also gets boosted.
So eventually you run out. I mean, I mean just
the noise takes over. Yeah, yeah, you lose the signal
in the noise. So that would be you know, if
you've ever heard like one of those those telephone conversations
that goes on in an old movie where it's just
like all you hear is cracked. Yeah, just imagine that

(21:15):
if you're far enough away that all you would get
was the stack, you would not get any voice at all.
So uh. The interesting thing was that by switching from
analog signals to digital signals, they didn't have to worry
about this signal boosting problem. Instead of a continuous signal
like a sign wave, which is you know, an acoustic wave,
is what you would get with an analog telephone line,

(21:38):
digital signals are sent in a series of bits and
a bit is either a zero or a one. That's
all based off of Claude Shannon's application of Boolean algebra
to electronics, and it worked. So you could do this
with telephones, which was great, but it meant you could
also do it with just about any other kind of
information transfer from radio to telegraph, telephones, everything. And again

(22:01):
this was one of those things that could not immediately
be implemented. The engineers had to build the technology sported.
But once they did, they realized, we can build out
a nationwide telephone, even a global telephone system that doesn't
require amplifiers every x number of miles because you're never
going to lose that that signal clarity, all right, Like hypothetically,

(22:22):
you can do this with literally zero loss in quality.
So so long as you don't mind taking the necessary
amount of time for each bit to be transferred. Really,
the transfer speed is the only cap that you're working
with at this junction exactly. And Claude Shannon he kind
of came up with that too. He said, uh, you know,
if if we have an infinite amount of time, you'll

(22:44):
have zero signal laws. But that any medium of transmission
is going to have ultimately a cap of how much
data it can carry at any given within a given
amount of time. So it was interesting because that was
one of those things that ended up becoming a challenge
to engineers. He said, look, for whatever medium you choose,

(23:09):
it's and it's specific to each medium. You're going to
have this limit that you're going to hit and you
can't go beyond it. And the engineer said, all right,
we agree, there's no way we can go beyond that limit.
So what our goal is is to get as close
to that limit as we possibly can. And and this
also led into some really interesting side concepts about digital

(23:29):
compression and error. Yeah exactly, Yeah, you had to. You
could end up compressing data into smaller data packages, which
helps you get around that bandwidth cap. But in order
to do that, you also have to have that that
error correction software, that those algorithms that are able to
detect and and fix any errors that come across while

(23:52):
you're transmitting this information. These were all laid out his ideas,
and and that that error correction concept also ties back
into the idea that, uh, you know, if you scratch
a c D you can still it can still be read. Yeah, yeah,
because you have these extra bits that are built into
the data itself, these bits that otherwise would seem superfluous.

(24:14):
They're not necessary for you to have the full message,
but those extra bits actually allow some redundancy. So if
there is some damage to the physical medium, you can
still end up using it. And it's not like you
get a smudge on your your your disk and now
you can't use it. Right. The concept of a disc
also being new, because that was something that he laid

(24:35):
out in here, saying that this is a method for
possible storage, not just transmission, but also storage. Yeah, so
so big big ideas. Uh. At any rate, moving on
with his life, I mean he's so he's already gotten
to the point where he's laid out everything that's going
to lead to things like JPEG's, MP three's ZIP files. Uh,
data transmission across cable, across telephone lines. All of this

(24:58):
stuff is possible because of the ideas he came up with.
His life continues on and in nineteen forty nine he
marries Mary Elizabeth Moore Betty Betty. She was a new
miracle analyst at Bell Labs, and they would go on
to have two children together. And he also during his
time off from changing the world. UH. Decided to build

(25:21):
a simple computer to play chess, and he wrote a
paper about programming computers and computer chess algorithms. A lot
of computer like chess playing computers are still based upon
the foundations that he laid out while he was working
on this. UH. You find that the Claude Shannon in
his spirit time often did things that that most of

(25:42):
us would be like, well, you could have a full
time job doing that. He's like, no, I just want
to do that, you know, I'd like to keep my
hand in. Around that time, engineers at Bell Labs at
that time being ninety nine began to actually create the
technology that implemented Shannon's ideas, and they built something called
a regenerative repeater. And the idea was that a bit

(26:03):
could be regenerated perfectly and repeatedly as long as the
bits weren't quote unquote too small, So as long as
the messages weren't too small, they could consistently regenerate a message. UH.
And that would mean that you would again have no
signal loss, You wouldn't lose any data in the process
because you could just just as quickly as it was

(26:24):
coming into the regenerative regenerative repeater, it would send out
a copy the same data message back out again. Um.
Also to around this time, as the engineers at Bell
Labs were creating that that physical technology to incorporate Shannon's ideas,
he started to introduce the idea of bandwidth limits. Yeah,
this is what I was talking about when he said,

(26:45):
it doesn't matter what medium you're using, Eventually you're going
to hit that capacity. And eventually they started calling this
the Shannon capacity or Shannon limit. So it was again
a very important idea that ended up being playing a
huge role in the telecommunications industry as well as just
electronics and computing in general. Uh so this is what

(27:07):
gives engineers that goal. This is where they want to
hit as close to that number as they possibly can
to maximize the amount of data they can shove through
any particular medium at top speed. So, you know, we
often talk about data transmission speeds, but speed is really
kind of a deceptive term because it's not just how

(27:27):
fast something gets from point A to point B. Usually
we're talking about speeds that are approaching the speed of light.
That's really fast. What we're what we're really concerned with
is throughput, which is the amount of data that can
travel at that speed to get from point A to
point B. Because if you're dividing that data up into
lots of of bits like a long string, yes, each

(27:48):
individual bit is moving at the speed of light, but
you still got to get that whole string through. Yeah. Yeah,
it's it's the you know, getting the caboose through at
the end. Really. Yeah, it's the idea of if the
if we hear that there's pizza in the kitchen and
uh and we're all invited to go and eat it,
then the problem isn't that we have a bunch of
slow people on staff. We're all very very fast. The
problem is the doors only so wide, and eventually four

(28:10):
or five of us while just try and cram through
it at the same time. So that's the difference between
just speed and throughput. Now, tipt ones and zeroes don't
usually elbow you in the face, that's true, but we
have no such restriction, as we have demonstrated upon multiple occasions. Uh. Now.
At this time, engineers were also trying to find on
ways to take on other elements of this theory, like

(28:33):
the compression and redundancy ideas and build working devices and
algorithms that turned that theory into reality, actually making products
that could take advantage of the ideas that Shannon had produced.
And uh. Meanwhile, Shannon received a very special present at
Christmas of from his wife this year, a unicycle, and

(28:55):
stories say that he frequently rode through the halls of
Bell Labs at night on this cycle while juggling. He
is my hero because of why not. Now, See, if
my wife gave me a unicycle for Christmas, I would
imagine she was plotting my demise and perhaps had put
taken out yet another life insurance policy on me because
she knows my my lack of balance. But but I

(29:19):
I have nothing but respect for someone who is transforming
information theory while writing a unicycle and juggling. Juggling. Yeah
so because because it Meanwhile, he was looking into machine
intelligence and memory. Yeah, he was really branching out, you know,
he was. He was very much interested in exploring all

(29:40):
these different ideas. Time for us to take another break,
but we will be right back now. By nineteen fifty six,
he decides to leave Bell Labs, though he continues on
as a consultant, and he goes back to M I.
T To teach UH he also wrote a paper he

(30:03):
was called the Bandwagon, and uh, that's when he said
he didn't really like how the words information theory were
being thrown around. So essentially what he was saying was
that they were losing their value. Information theory as a
concept was losing its value because companies were using it
to describe things that didn't really fall within the umbrella

(30:23):
of information. Yeah, it was a really popular and pop
culture almost term in the scientific community at the time.
And I mean people were publishing papers that had information
theory in the title just because they thought it sounded cool,
when in fact, right, it had nothing to do with that.
So it was kind of like how virtual reality became
this buzzword that began to lose meaning, particularly when the

(30:46):
public started to see what the reality of the field
was as compared to the Hollywood depiction of what virtual
reality was back in the early nineties. Sure sure, like
artificial intelligence or I read an essay recently from the
guy who coined to the term manic Pixie dream girls
saying that he just wished he had never done that thing.
I would like to apologize to the world. Yeah, so

(31:07):
this was one of those interesting things were the paper
wasn't so much about advancing the concept, but just saying,
let's use our words carefully and correctly. He said that
perhaps the term had quote ballooned to an importance beyond
its actual accomplishments end quote. I think that's a little
bit modest on his part. Honestly, I think so too,
considering that again, without that theory, computers and electronics would

(31:32):
not work the way they do today. Yeah, but at
any rate, this kind of marked the beginning of Shannon's
disappearance from the research and technology scene. He he really
didn't want to be a celebrity, I think, and he
had this huge push from the media and the government
and science in general to be made into one, and

(31:52):
it it kind of pulled him away from from both
research and public education, right and he was It wasn't
that he was old, from why, I understand. Whenever he
gave talks they were really great, and whenever he wrote papers,
they were really great. But he was constantly being pressured
to do that, and it was starting to become more
of something that would cause him anxiety as opposed to

(32:14):
something that he would enjoy doing well. In nineteen seventy three,
the information theory Society, which is part of the I
Triple E or I created an annual Shannon lecture that
became the Shannon Award UH And in nineteen seventy eight,
Claude Shannon officially retired from m T, although he had
not really been actively working there for some years before.

(32:36):
Certainly UH And in nineteen eight seven, Claude Shannon gave
his last interview to Omni Magazine. Now, by the late eighties,
Claude Shannon began to suffer from Alzheimer's and withdrew from
the public eye entirely. His wife would go and attend
events instead in his place, and in February two thousand one,
at the age of eighty four, he would pass away. Yes,

(32:58):
there are some very uh inspiring and moving tributes to
Claude Shannon that were published, really beautiful things. You can
certainly go online and read a lot of those those
tributes that were written the week and month following his passing.
And we have a collection of interesting little trivia that

(33:19):
we didn't really want to fit into the overall episode,
but it didn't really fit into the timeline. But so
much of I mean, if it wasn't charming enough, I mean,
if charming is the correct word. Actually, charming is totally
the correct word. Parting to me, I find it downright
charming that he wrote, you know, papers that mathematically proved
the computers can exist. But but but but other than that,

(33:42):
there's just a lot of little just yeah. So so
one of those things is that, you know, we just
said he he was not big on on pursuing the limelight.
He didn't. He didn't go after that at all, and
and often he would reluctantly take the stage, but as
time went on, he did that even less frequently. He

(34:03):
wouldn't go out very much at all to to address
the public, and according to M I. T. Technology Review,
he even had a file labeled letters I've procrastinated too
long on So if he got something from colleagues or
government officials or scientific institutions and had just been sitting
around for a really long while, he would just put

(34:24):
this in a file, saying, well, that's too that's too late,
and that's never gonna happen, So I'm just gonna put
that in this file. Um. He, like we said, love
to build stuff, to engineer stuff. You know, that whole
telegraph line stories. One of my favorites um Now as
a parent, he built a chairlift that would take his
kids from his house to a nearby lake, so they

(34:46):
didn't have to walk the whole way to the lake.
He also, from what I understand, designed a hidden panel
in his office that didn't lead anywhere at all. He
just he just felt like building one. He just needed it.
It made me think of a Mitchell and Web sketch
where this wall must rotate, be both here and not here.
We look, mate, that's a load bearing wool. But anyway,

(35:09):
he just decided he wanted to make one. He also
built a life sized electric mouse named Theseus, after the
Greek mythology figure that's the one who was stuck in
the labyrinth that had to find his way out, and
the minotaur or Minotar depending upon your preferred pronunciations after him.
So this mouse, what it was due is it would
explore a maze and quote unquote remember where it comes from.

(35:32):
It was it was going after some little metal cheese bits.
I think. So the the way this mouse would go
through the maze is it would go down a pathway
and whenever the pathway would branch, it would start to rotate. Yeah,
so it would take one and then it would, uh
it could backtrack if it went down an incorrect route, right,
and then it could take the path it had not

(35:54):
taken as opposed to you know, if this were just
an electronic mouse that had some collision detection, it wouldn't
could potentially just go back and forth down the same
little pathway forever. Yeah, but this was branching. This one knew, Okay, well,
I already took the path that's on the right, so
I have to take the path that's on the left.
So it's pretty cool that he built this thing, you know,

(36:14):
just for the fun of it. He built it also
probably my my favorite robotic piece of his eight juggling robot,
a bounce juggling robot to be precise, bounce juggling robot
that like w C Fields to be even more precise. Yeah.
It was like having a like imagine a drumhead, right,
and the drumhead allows things that are dropped on it,

(36:37):
like a ball bearing to be bounced on it. And
then two little uh angled platforms that are serving his
hands that are bouncing this again, these little these balls. Yeah,
and they just kept it going in a in a
bounced juggling pattern. Perfectly, and he basically made it out
of like erector set pieces. Yeah, you know, just like
you do. And then he wrote a paper on the

(36:58):
dynamics of keeping multiple objects in the air simultaneously. It's
pretty famous within the juggling community. I tried to read
it what I actually wrote, how juggling works for how
stuff works dot com. In fact, if you go to
that that article on how stuff works and you look
up how juggling works, there's a video of me juggling
in that article. I still I still say it because
I juggle a little bit. I still say that we

(37:19):
really need to do a video of both jugged. All right,
I juggled torches in mine. You're ready to pick those up? Okay, well,
well we'll start small. Uh. He also made a robot
that could solve a Rubic's cube, which is pretty amazing.
I mean, obviously that needs I can't either. I know
there are algorithms for how to solve it the most efficiently,

(37:41):
and I've seen people who are really good at who
just like it's like it's like magic. You know. The
way I saw a Rubik's cube is by peeling the
stickers off and then replacing them properly, I cheat, but yeah, no.
He he created a robot that could follow these algorithms
and also just recognize what the pattern was on any
given side, so it could, you know, create e the
rules that needed to solve it. UM. And he made

(38:03):
a calculator that worked with Roman numerals. It was called throwback,
which stood for a thrifty Roman numerical backward looking computer. UM.
Also a rocket powered Frisbees, and motorized poco sticks. Yes,
the motorized pogo stick. I was thinking, like again, that
sounds terrible. If the unicycle hadn't killed me already, that

(38:24):
certainly would. He built the ultimate machine. My favorite machine
of all time is the ultimate machine. All right, tell
us about it, Jonathan. All right. Now, imagine you have
before you a box, and on that box you can
see the outline of a trap door. And the only
other really interesting feature on this box is a simple

(38:45):
switch that switched to off, and you push the switch
to on. The trap door opens, and a hand emerges
from beneath the trap door and hits the switch back
to the off position, with draws back inside, and trap
door closes. That's it. That's it. Hit the switch and
the harm comes back out, yet the switch the arm
comes back out. Uh. I want to share this video too.

(39:08):
There's a video of a brilliant variation of the Ultimate
Machine that is hysterically funny. It doesn't just do that like,
it starts to do it so um. It ends up
at first looking like it's a variation on the Ultimate Machine, like, oh,
that's cute, But then it starts doing other things too,
because this particular box had wheels on it and can
move all the way, so it's starting to avoid the

(39:30):
person who's trying to hit the switch, or it would
playback prerecorded messages saying like hey, hands off, buddy, that
kind of stuff and was really really entertaining. So we'll
share that one as well. But you have to remember
that that particular very entertaining machine is based off this
thing that Claude Shannon built for no reason other than
it tickled him just because he could. Um. He also

(39:50):
had a collection of exotic unicycles, including some that were
because he he was wondering how small could you make
a unicycle before someone would be unable to write it? Uh,
for me, that's any size, but I think me too,
that would be any size. But assuming that you are
capable of writing a unicycle, how small could you go
before you could no longer maintain your balance? In fact,

(40:12):
he had a couple that I've heard are essentially unwriteable. Uh.
He also lectured on using information theory as an application
to playing the stock market, though he never really published
any work on this. He did do a lecture, but
he didn't write a paper. He also did really well
in the stock market himself, although he wasn't necessarily employing
information theory to do so. He was investing in companies

(40:36):
that friends of his. Yeah, he made some very savvy
stock purchases based on amazing work that his friends were doing.
These are these are the people who were inventing like
the basic components of computers and electronics, going on to
form their own companies, and he would invest in those
and then they ended up being these these enormous companies
we know today. So he did quite well. Uh. And

(40:58):
there's no Nobel Eries for mathematics, which is why Claude
Shannon never won one, right, But he certainly did win
a number, I mean, probably way too numerous to mention
here awards, but but one that we wanted to mention
is the very first Kyoto Prize, which was created in
Japan to award honors to contributions in mathematics. Essentially, it

(41:18):
was supposed to be the Nobel Prize for mathematics, right right,
And this was all the way in the nineteen eighties,
and this came into invention. Yea, the very first one
went to Claude Shannon, and from what I understand, it
actually came with an even larger cash prize than the
Nobel Prize does. So, so if you if you feel
like he was he was snubbed because Nobel Prizes don't

(41:39):
recognize mathematics. Fear not, the Kyoto Prize had him covered.
I hope you guys enjoyed this classic episode Who Was
Claude Shannon? Published back in August of two thousand fourteen.
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
future episodes of Tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a trend,
maybe it's another important person in the field of techno

(42:00):
oology and you feel like this person hasn't really you know,
received the full treatment that they should, let me know,
reach out to me. The best way to do that
is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is
text Stuff h S. W and I'll talk to you
again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production.

(42:23):
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