Claude Shannon

Claude Elwood Shannon is born in Petoskey, Michigan. A tinkerer and unicyclist, he will grow into the founder of information theory and the man who put a number on the unbreakability of secrets.

In his MIT master's thesis Shannon shows that electrical switching circuits can embody Boolean logic, the theoretical starting point of digital computing and of the machinery that would later encode and decode number groups.

Shannon publishes the paper that founds information theory, defining the bit and the limits of communication over a noisy channel, the science underlying every signal, jammed or clear, that crosses the shortwave bands.

In 'Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems' Shannon proves that a correctly used one-time pad leaks no information whatsoever, the mathematical bedrock of the numbers-station method. First written as a classified 1945 report, it is now public.

Beyond secrecy and information, Shannon builds a maze-solving mechanical mouse, a chess machine and a juggling robot. The man who proved the one-time pad unbreakable is, at heart, a tinkerer delighted by machines that think.

Shannon dies in Massachusetts after years with Alzheimer's disease, largely unaware of how completely his ideas had remade the world, including the quiet, coded corner of it that hums on 4625 kHz.