In 1948, 32-year-old Claude Shannon was working at Bell Laboratories, which was developing more efficient methods of wartime communication. Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” hypothesized new ways of processing messages efficiently, creating the field of information theory.
Eisenstaedt, Alfred. “Claude E. Shannon.” Getty Images. No date.
"Maybe it shouldn’t be called the information theory. Maybe it should be called 'transformation of information' or something like that."
- Claude Shannon
"MIT Professor Claude Elwood Shannon (left) seated at a desk with an unidentified individual (right)." MIT Museum. No date.
Telephone communication, one example of information transmission, often involved sending sound waves through telephone lines using electrical energy. Shannon explained that audio could be converted to binary digits, which he called bits. Bits are a unit of measuring data and are ⅛th of a byte. Bits are more efficient and simpler to transmit than soundwaves. Once received, bits are converted by a computer back to their original form, communicating the same message as transmission by sound waves but without interference. This novel simplification was futuristic and ahead of his time.