This is defined by Shannon not as the result of counting the number of zeros and ones used to store a particular message, but as a the amount of information actually contained in that message.
Shannon did important work on early computers and on code breaking (he cooperated with his British contemporary Alan Turing during the Second World War) but most importantly of all, he was the inventor of the ‘bit’ as the basic unit of information. The true hero of both the book, “father of information theory” Claude Shannon (1916-2001), makes his first appearance about halfway through. But all throughout the book, the technology is made subordinate to information itself, which is implicitly treated as a philosophical concept. I think it is thus right that James Gleick opens his truly fascinating book on Information (“ The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood“) with a chapter on these drums.Īfter talking drums, Gleick goes on to discuss early alphabetically-ordered dictionaries (a concept unique to languages that actually use alphabets), Charles Babbage’s analog computers, the mechanical and electrical telegraphs (that allowed information to be transfered faster than humans even for people who didn’t know how to use talking drums) and the telephone. Whatever is lost in the lack of consonants and vowels is made up for by making the words longer, not dissimilar to how we sometimes say ‘Alpha’ or ‘Bravo’ instead of ‘A’ and ‘B’, or how digital storage often contains extra bits to allow possible errors to be detected and corrected.įew would argue that talking drums are part of IT, yet they are a technology to transmit information. But while the telegraph requires human language to be encoded into ‘dots’ and ‘dashes’ (and spaces - Morse code isn’t binary), the drums actually do talk: the high and low pitches of the drums correspond to high and low tones in the language. Long before Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph, people in West-Africa could send messages over long distances using ‘talking drums’.
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