TechStuff Classic: Who was Claude Shannon?

It's time for a tech Stuff classic episode. This episode originally published August six, two thousand fourteen, and it's it's 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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

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

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 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,

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 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

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, 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 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 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

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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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, 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.