The Information - James Gleick [189]
The legal edifices of intellectual property were rattled. The response was a species of panic—a land grab in trademarks. As recently as 1980, the United States registered about ten thousand a year. Three decades later, the number approached three hundred thousand, jumping every year. The vast majority of trademark applications used to be rejected; now the opposite is true. All the words of the language, in all possible combinations, seem eligible for protection by governments. A typical batch of early twenty-first century United States trademarks: GREEN CIRCLE, DESERT ISLAND, MY STUDENT BODY, ENJOY A PARTY IN EVERY BOWL!, TECHNOLIFT, MEETINGS IDEAS, TAMPER PROOF KEY RINGS, THE BEST FROM THE WEST, AWESOME ACTIVITIES.
The collision of names, the exhaustion of names—it has happened before, if never on this scale. Ancient naturalists knew perhaps five hundred different plants and, of course, gave each a name. Through the fifteenth century, that is as many as anyone knew. Then, in Europe, as printed books began to spread with lists and drawings, an organized, collective knowledge came into being, and with it, as the historian Brian Ogilvie has shown, the discipline called natural history.♦ The first botanists discovered a profusion of names. Caspar Ratzenberger, a student at Wittenberg in the 1550s, assembled a herbarium and tried to keep track: for one species he noted eleven names in Latin and German: Scandix, Pecten veneris, Herba scanaria, Cerefolium aculeatum, Nadelkrautt, Hechelkam, NadelKoerffel, Venusstrahl, Nadel Moehren, Schnabel Moehren, Schnabelkoerffel.♦ In England it would have been called shepherd’s needle or shepherd’s comb. Soon enough the profusion of species overtook the profusion of names. Naturalists formed a community; they corresponded, and they traveled. By the end of the century a Swiss botanist had published a catalogue of 6,000 plants.♦ Every naturalist who discovered a new one had the privilege and the responsibility of naming it; a proliferation of adjectives and compounds was inevitable, as were duplication and redundancy. To shepherd’s needle and shepherd’s comb were added, in English alone, shepherd’s bag, shepherd’s purse, shepherd’s beard, shepherd’s bedstraw, shepherd’s bodkin, shepherd’s cress, shepherd’s hour-glass, shepherd’s rod, shepherd’s gourd, shepherd’s joy, shepherd’s knot, shepherd’s myrtle, shepherd’s peddler, shepherd’s pouche, shepherd’s staff, shepherd’s teasel, shepherd’s scrip, and shepherd’s delight.
Carl Linnaeus had yet to invent taxonomy; when he did, in the eighteenth century, he had 7,700 species of plants to name, along with 4,400 animals. Now there are about 300,000, not counting insects, which add millions more. Scientists still try to name them all: there are beetle species named after Barack Obama, Darth Vader, and Roy Orbison. Frank Zappa has lent his name to a spider, a fish, and a jellyfish.
“The name of a man is like his shadow,”♦ said the Viennese onomatologist Ernst Pulgram in 1954. “It is not of his substance and not of his soul, but it lives with him and by him. Its presence is not vital, nor its absence fatal.” Those were simpler times.
When Claude Shannon took a sheet of paper and penciled his outline of the measures of information in 1949, the scale went from tens of bits to hundreds to thousands, millions, billions, and trillions. The transistor was one year old and Moore’s law yet to be conceived. The top of the pyramid was Shannon’s estimate for the Library of Congress—one hundred trillion bits, 1014. He was about right, but the pyramid was growing.
After bits came