The Information - James Gleick [207]
♦ “THE DICTIONARY OR VOCABULARY CONSISTS OF WORDS”: U. S. Patent 1647, 20 June 1840, 6.
♦ “THE SUPERIORITY OF THE ALPHABETIC MODE”: Samuel F. B. Morse, letter to Leonard D. Gale, in Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 2, 65.
♦ “WHEN THE CIRCUIT WAS CLOSED A LONGER TIME”: Ibid., 64.
♦ “THE CLERKS WHO ATTEND AT THE RECORDING INSTRUMENT”: “The Atlantic Telegraph,” The New York Times, 7 August 1858.
♦ IN SEARCH OF DATA ON THE LETTERS’ RELATIVE FREQUENCIES: Morse claimed that this was he, and their partisans differ. Cf. Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 2, 68; George P. Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1992), 24; Franklin Leonard Pope, “The American Inventors of the Telegraph,” Century Illustrated Magazine (April 1888): 934; Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Knopf, 2003), 167.
♦ LONG AFTERWARD, INFORMATION THEORISTS CALCULATED: John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1980), 25.
♦ “ONLY A FEW DAYS AGO I READ IN THE TIMES”: Robert Sutherland Rattray, “The Drum Language of West Africa: Part II,” Journal of the Royal African Society 22, no. 88 (1923): 302.
♦ “HE IS NOT REALLY A EUROPEAN”: John F. Carrington, La Voix des tambours: comment comprendre le langage tambouriné d’Afrique (Kinshasa: Protestant d’Édition et de Diffusion, 1974), 66, quoted in Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word, 95.
♦ “I MUST HAVE BEEN GUILTY MANY A TIME”: John F. Carrington, The Talking Drums of Africa (London: Carey Kingsgate, 1949), 19.
♦ EVEN THE LIMITED DICTIONARY OF THE MISSIONARIES: Ibid., 33.
♦ “AMONG PEOPLES WHO KNOW NOTHING OF WRITING”: Robert Sutherland Rattray, “The Drum Language of West Africa: Part I,” Journal of the Royal African Society 22, no. 87 (1923): 235.
♦ FOR THE YAUNDE, THE ELEPHANT: Theodore Stern, “Drum and Whistle ‘Languages’: An Analysis of Speech Surrogates,” American Anthropologist 59 (1957): 489.
♦ “THIS COUNTERSPELL MAY SAVE YOUR SOUL”: James Merrill, “Eight Bits,” in The Inner Room (New York: Knopf, 1988), 48.
♦ A PAPER BY A BELL LABS TELEPHONE ENGINEER: Ralph V. L. Hartley, “Transmission of Information,” Bell System Technical Journal 7 (1928): 535–63.
♦ HE SAW LOKELE YOUTH PRACTICING THE DRUMS LESS AND LESS: John F. Carrington, The Talking Drums of Africa, 83.
♦ A VISITOR FROM THE UNITED STATES FOUND HIM: Israel Shenker, “Boomlay,” Time, 22 November 1954.
2. THE PERSISTENCE OF THE WORD
♦ “ODYSSEUS WEPT”: Ward Just, An Unfinished Season (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 153.
♦ “TRY TO IMAGINE”: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 31.
♦ THE PASTNESS OF THE PAST: Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 3 (1963): 304–45.
♦ “THE OTHER EMINENT CATHOLIC-ELECTRONIC PROPHET”: Frank Kermode, “Free Fall,” New York Review of Books 10, no. 5 (14 March 1968).
♦ “HORSES AS AUTOMOBILES WITHOUT WHEELS”: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 12.
♦ “LANGUAGE IN FACT BEARS THE SAME RELATIONSHIP”: Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking, 1971), 100.
♦ “FOR THIS INVENTION WILL PRODUCE FORGETFULNESS”: Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Fairfield, Iowa: First World Library, 2008), 275a.
♦ “TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF MANUSCRIPT CULTURE”: Marshall McLuhan, “Culture Without Literacy,” in Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 305.
♦ “THIS MIRACULOUS REBOUNDING OF THE VOICE”: Pliny the Elder, The Historie of the World, vol. 2, trans. Philemon Holland (London: 1601), 581.
♦ “THE WRITTEN SYMBOL EXTENDS INFINITELY”: Samuel Butler, Essays on Life, Art, and Science (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970), 198.
♦ “THERE NEVER WAS A MAN”: David Diringer and Reinhold Regensburger, The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (New York: