The Information - James Gleick [79]
Perhaps the most extended and important influence which the telegraph is destined to exert upon the human mind is that which it will ultimately work out through its influence on language.… By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the advantage over long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the advantage over indirect, words of precise meaning the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everywhere at a disadvantage.
Boole’s influence was subtle and slow. He corresponded only briefly with Babbage; they never met. One of his champions was Lewis Carroll, who, at the very end of his life, a quarter century after Alice in Wonderland, wrote two volumes of instruction, puzzles, diagrams, and exercises in symbolic logic. Although his symbolism was impeccable, his syllogisms ran toward whimsy:
(1) Babies are illogical;
(2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile;
(3) Illogical persons are despised.
(Concl.) Babies cannot manage crocodiles.♦
The symbolic version—, i.e. —having been suitably drained of meaning, allowed the user to reach the desired conclusion without tripping over awkward intermediate propositions along the lines of “babies are despised.”
As the century turned, Bertrand Russell paid George Boole an extraordinary compliment: “Pure mathematics was discovered by Boole, in a work which he called the Laws of Thought.”♦ It has been quoted often. What makes the compliment extraordinary is the seldom quoted disparagement that follows on its heels:
He was also mistaken in supposing that he was dealing with the laws of thought: the question how people actually think was quite irrelevant to him, and if his book had really contained the laws of thought, it was curious that no one should ever have thought in such a way before.
One might almost think Russell enjoyed paradoxes.
* * *
♦ But Count Miot de Melito claimed in his memoirs that Chappe submitted his idea to the War Office with the name tachygraphe (“swift writer”) and that he, Miot, proposed télégraphe instead—which “has become, so to speak, a household word.”
6 | NEW WIRES, NEW LOGIC
(No Other Thing Is More Enswathed in the Unknown)
The perfect symmetry of the whole apparatus—the wire in the middle, the two telephones at the ends of the wire, and the two gossips at the ends of the telephones—may be very fascinating to a mere mathematician.
—James Clerk Maxwell (1878)♦
A CURIOUS CHILD IN A COUNTRY TOWN in the 1920s might naturally form an interest in the sending of messages along wires, as Claude Shannon did in Gaylord, Michigan. He saw wires every day, fencing the pastures—double strands of steel, twisted and barbed, stretched from post to post. He scrounged what parts he could and jerry-rigged his own barbed-wire telegraph, tapping messages to another boy a half mile away. He used the code devised by Samuel F. B. Morse. That suited him. He liked the very idea of codes—not just secret codes, but codes in the more general sense, words or symbols standing in for other words or symbols. He was an inventive and playful spirit. The child stayed with the man. All his life, he played games and invented games. He was a gadgeteer. The grown-up Shannon juggled and devised theories about juggling. When researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Bell Laboratories had to leap aside to let a unicycle pass, that was Shannon. He had more than his share of playfulness, and as a child he had a large portion of loneliness, too, which along with his tinkerer’s ingenuity helped motivate his barbed-wire telegraph.
Gaylord