amounted to little more than a few streets and stores interrupting the broad northern farmland of the Michigan peninsula.♦ Here and onward across the plains and prairie to the Rocky Mountains barbed wire had spread like a vine, begetting industrial fortunes though it was not a particularly glamorous technology amid the excitement of what was already called the Age of Electricity. Beginning in 1874, when an Illinois farmer received U. S. Patent No. 157,124 for “a new and valuable Improvement in Wire-Fences,” battles for ownership raged, ultimately reaching the Supreme Court, while the wire defined territory and closed the open range. At the peak, American farmers, ranchers, and railroads laid more than a million miles a year. Taken collectively the nation’s fence wire formed no web or network, just a broken lattice. Its purpose had been to separate, not to connect. For electricity it made a poor conductor even in dry weather. But wire was wire, and Claude Shannon was not the first to see this wide-ranging lattice as a potential communications grid. Thousands of farmers in remote places had the same idea. Unwilling to wait for the telephone companies to venture out from the cities, rural folk formed barbed-wire telephone cooperatives. They replaced metal staples with insulated fasteners. They attached dry batteries and speaking tubes and added spare wire to bridge the gaps. In the summer of 1895 The New York Times reported: “There can be no doubt that many rough-and-ready utilizations of the telephone are now being made. For instance, a number of South Dakota farmers have helped themselves to a telephone system covering eight miles of wire by supplying themselves with transmitters and making connections with the barb wire which constitutes the fence in that part of the country.” The reporter observed: “The idea is gaining ground that the day of cheap telephones for the million is at hand. Whether this impression is soundly based is an open question.”♦ Clearly people wanted the connections. Cattlemen who despised fences for making parcels of the free range now hooked up their speaking tubes to hear market quotations, weather reports, or just, crackling along the wires, the attenuated simulacrum of the human voice, a thrill in itself.
Three great waves of electrical communication crested in sequence: telegraphy, telephony, and radio. People began to feel that it was natural to possess machines dedicated to the sending and receiving of messages. These devices changed the topology—ripped the social fabric and reconnected it, added gateways and junctions where there had only been blank distance. Already at the turn of the twentieth century there was worry about unanticipated effects on social behavior. The superintendent of the line in Wisconsin fretted about young men and women “constantly sparking over the wire” between Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls. “This free use of the line for flirtation purposes has grown to an alarming extent,” he wrote, “and if it is to go on somebody must pay for it.” The Bell companies tried to discourage frivolous telephony, particularly by women and servants. A freer spirit prevailed at the farmer cooperatives, which avoided paying the telephone companies well into the 1920s. The Montana East Line Telephone Association—eight members—sent “up to the minute” news reports around its network, because the men also owned a radio.♦ Children wanted to play this game, too.
Claude Elwood Shannon, born in 1916, was given the full name of his father, a self-made businessman—furniture, undertaking, and real estate—and probate judge, already well into middle age. Claude’s grandfather, a farmer, had invented a machine for washing clothes: a waterproof tub, a wooden arm, and a plunger. Claude’s mother, Mabel Catherine Wolf, daughter of German immigrants, worked as a language teacher and sometime principal of the high school. His older sister, Catherine Wolf Shannon (the parents doled out names parsimoniously), studied mathematics and regularly entertained Claude with puzzles. They lived on Center Street a few blocks