Here are 110 diamonds, “not one of them small,” 18 rubies, 310 emeralds, 21 sapphires, one opal, 200 solid gold rings, 30 solid gold chains, 83 gold crucifixes, five gold censers, 197 gold watches, and one monumental gold punch bowl, and they are exactly where the code said they would be. They are a pirate’s hoard, buried five feet down in the South Carolina soil, in the shadow of a gnarled tulip poplar tree. But the tale doesn’t end with the treasure; it ends with the code.
William Legrand found it on a parchment washed up from a shipwreck. For months, he sat up learning cryptanalysis by firelight to crack it. And now that the hoard is his, he’s content to leave the diamonds counted in a corner while he explains himself at great length to the young man he enlisted to dig it up.
It is simpler than it looks:
53‡‡†305))6*;4826)4‡.)4‡);806*;48†8’60))85;]8*:‡*8†83
(88)5*†;46(;88*96*?;8)*‡(;485);5*†2:*‡(;4956*2(5*-4)8’8*;
4069285);)6†8)4‡‡;1(‡9;48081;8:8‡1;48†85;4)485†528806*81
(‡9;48;(88;4(‡?34;48)4‡;161;:188;‡?;
Count how often the symbols appear and then compare them with the most common letters in the English language. Assume that the most frequent symbol is the most frequent letter: 8 means “E.” The most common word in English is “the,” so look for a repeated three-letter sequence ending in 8. The sequence ;48 recurs seven times: if it encodes “the,” we know that ; means “T” and 4 means “H.” Follow those three letters to new letters. ;(88 can only be “tree,” and so ( means “R.” Each symbol solved solves new symbols, and soon the directions to the treasure resolve out of the noise.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote sixty-five stories. This one, “The Gold-Bug,” is the only one to end with a lecture on cryptanalysis. It is Claude Shannon’s favorite.
Here is where Gaylord, Michigan, ends. The roads turn dirt and give out in potato fields. Main Street is only blocks behind. Ahead are the fields and feedlots, the Michigan apple orchards, the woods of maple, beech, birch, the lumber factory digesting the woods into planks and blocks. Barbed wire runs along the roads and between the pastures, and Claude walks the fences—one half-mile stretch of fence especially.
Claude’s stretch is electric. He charged it himself: he hooked up dry-cell batteries at each end, and spliced spare wire into any gaps to run the current unbroken. Insulation was anything at hand: leather straps, glass bottlenecks, corncobs, inner-tube pieces. Keypads at each end—one at his house on North Center Street, the other at his friend’s house half a mile away—made it a private barbed-wire telegraph. Even insulated, it is apt to be silenced for months in the ice and snow that accumulate on it, at the knuckle of Michigan’s middle finger. But when the fence thaws and Claude patches the wire, and the current runs again from house to house, he can speak again at lightspeed and, best of all, in code.
In the 1920s, when Claude was a boy, some three million farmers talked through networks like these, wherever the phone company found it unprofitable to build. It was America’s folk grid. Better networks than Claude’s carried voices along the fences, and kitchens and general stores doubled as switchboards. But the most interesting stretch of fence in Gaylord was the one that carried Claude Shannon’s information.
Where does a boy like that come from?
Reporting on the wedding of Claude Shannon’s parents, the Otsego County Times declared itself bamboozled: “Shannon-Wolf Nuptials: Wedding Took Place at Lansing on Wednesday—Date Had Been Kept a Profound Secret.” By the paper’s account, Claude Shannon Sr. had managed to get married without anyone in town being the wiser.
That Tuesday, August 24, 1909, toward the end of Shannon’s third summer in town, a sign appeared on the door of his furniture store: “IF ANYTHING IS WANTED CALL J. LEE MORFORD.” That night, Shannon Sr. took the midnight train to Lansing, to the home of the parents of his bride-to-be, Mabel Wolf. “The unconcern which Mr. Shannon displayed as he waited for the train which was nearly an hour late showed that he was perfectly satisfied that no one had gotten wind of his leaving town,” reported the paper. The following day, he married Mabel in a quiet ceremony at six o’clock. The bride wore a “wedding gown of white satin with a yoke of lace, and a net veil made with a coronet edged with seed pearls.” It seems that the groom concealed the information about the wedding only to keep the party down to a manageable size.
If the paper feigned shock at Shannon’s surprise trip to Lansing, the rest of the piece was all small-town sincerity and good wishes. “Mr. Shannon, the groom, has since his residence in this community, made many warm friendships in a business and social way,” the paper noted, “and Miss Wolf, the bride, during her many years teaching in the high school here, endeared herself to the people of this community. Mr. and Mrs. Shannon, accept the congratulations of the Times and your many friends in this community.”
That a run-of-the-mill wedding announcement constituted front-page news says much about the smallness of Gaylord, Michigan. But then, the Shannons were the kinds of people whose wedding date ought to have been common knowledge. Claude Sr. and Mabel were bright threads in Gaylord’s fabric. They were neighborly and active in the Methodist church. In downtown Gaylord, two well-known buildings were the work of Claude Sr.: the post office and the furniture showroom with the Masonic lodge tucked upstairs.
Born in 1862 in Oxford, New Jersey, Claude Elwood Shannon Sr. was a traveling salesman who arrived in town just after the turn of the century and bet on its fortunes. He put down his stake—bought out the business dealing in furniture and funerals—and lived to see it pay. “Something which should be found in every home. Nothing more sanitary. The new styles are more attractive. Come in and look over our New Line of furniture,” read a typical advertisement in the paper from “C. E. Shannon, The Furniture Man.” In Claude Jr.’s childhood, Gaylord was a town of 3,000, and Claude Sr. was a town father: school board, poor board, county fair board, undertaker, Arch Mason, Worthy Patron of the Eastern Star, the kind of Republican for whom the word staunch was invented.
His most significant stretch of employment, and the one that earned him the title of “Judge Shannon,” was the eleven years he spent as Otsego County probate judge. He settled estates and minor financial disputes, served as notary public, and played the part of local politician and worthy. His service, though modest and conducted in his spare time, was widely appreciated. In 1931, a two-column profile celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his “advent” described Mr. Shannon as “one of our most public-spirited citizens. . . . The years have told the story of a successful business career, due largely to his excellent executive ability and persistency of purpose.” Claude Jr., later on, found less to say about him: clever, distant. “He would sometimes help me with my Erector set,” he said, “but he really didn’t give me much scientific guidance.” Claude Sr. was already sixty-nine at Claude’s high school graduation; Claude was the son of his old age.
Mabel Wolf was Claude Sr.’s second wife, and she had married him at age twenty-nine, late for a woman of that era. She was eighteen years younger than her husband. Born in Lansing on September 14, 1880, she was a first-generation American. Her father emigrated from Germany to the Union army, survived the Civil War in a sharpshooters’ company, and died before he could know Mabel, his last child. Her widowed mother struggled to bring up six children alone in a strange country. Few women in rural Michigan were college graduates—Mabel Wolf was. She arrived in Gaylord with “glowing recommendations” from her professors and took up what was, at the time, the usual work for a woman of intelligence and independence: teaching.
In time, Mabel became principal of Gaylord High, serving in that post for seven years. She was, by all accounts, an active and energetic schoolteacher and administrator. She coached the school’s first-ever girls’ basketball team and raised money for uniforms and trips. But for all her success, the paper reported the following in 1932:
At a meeting of the school board it was decided not to hire any married women teachers during the coming school year due to economic conditions. It was decided that when a husband was capable of making a living it would be unfair competition to hire married women. Mrs. Mabel Shannon, Mrs. Lyons, and Mrs. Melvin Cook will be out of the school system due to this ruling.
By that point, at least, there was much in her private life to occupy her. She was a singer and musician of local note. She joined the Library Board and the Pythian Sisters, and she served a term as president of the Gaylord Study Club. When she wasn’t volunteering with the Red Cross or the PTA, she lent her contralto voice to town functions and funerals and hosted music clubs in the Shannon living room. In 1905, she landed the leading role of Queen Elizabeth in the operetta Two Queens at the local opera house.
Situated in the middle of northern Michigan’s central plateau, Gaylord took its name from an employee of the Michigan Central Railroad, which linked many such off-the-beaten-path towns to the rapidly growing hub of Chicago. Gaylord’s destiny was shaped by topography and climate perfect for growing millions of acres of forest.
The trees drew the lumber industry, and the first visitors and inhabitants were willing to contend with the climate for the rich cache of white pine and hardwoods. But the environment was austere, with subzero temperatures and thick lake-effect snow. A local history from 1856 concluded, perhaps self-servingly, that the harsh climate offered a brand of moral education: “The fact that [Northern Michigan’s] pioneers had more to struggle against in order to provide homes for themselves and the necessary accompaniments of homes developed in them a degree of aggressive energy which has remained as a distinct sectional possession . . . a splendid type of manhood and womanhood—self-reliant, strong, straight-forward, enterprising and moral.”
By the time Claude Sr. and Mabel became parents—their daughter, Catherine, was born in 1910, and Claude Jr., the baby of the family, in 1916—the pioneers had come and gone. The town’s limits and industries were well established: Gaylord would make itself known for farming and forestry, and a bit of light industry. As the railroads ramified, Gaylord found itself at the intersection of key lines. It became the county seat. Banks and businesses cropped up on Main Street, and the town’s population grew and settled around them. But Gaylord remained more village than city, its roots in the making of things: ten pins, sleighs, massive wheels for the transport of timber.
Gaylord was the kind of place in which just about any event was newsworthy. Consider the headlines and snippets from the county newspaper: “WISCONSIN GIRL KILLS WOLF WITH MOP STICK”; “A woman smoking a cigarette on the Midway caused some attention, not all of which was favorable”; “LUMBERJACK DIES OF APOPLEXY”; “VERN MATTS LOSES FINGER”; “MEETING CALLED TO DISCUSS ARTICHOKES.” And one September, a paragraph-long ode to a glorious run of fall weather, the lakes like blue mirrors by day and “splotches of silver” by night, a waxing moon bright enough to light up a printed page.
Claude was three years old when the local diner called the Sugar Bowl opened (also headline news). It was, the paper reported, “the first business on Main Street to errect [sic] an electric sign outside. Main Street was so dark in those days that the Village Band once gave an after-dark concert under the sign.”
Biographies of geniuses often open as stories of overzealous parenting. We think of Beethoven’s father, beating his son into the shape of a prodigy. Or John Stuart Mill’s father, drilling his son in Greek at the tender age of three. Or Norbert Wiener’s father, declaring to the world that he could turn anything, even a broomstick, into a genius with enough time and discipline. “Norbert always felt like that broomstick,” a contemporary later remarked.
Compared to those childhoods, Shannon’s was ordinary. There was, for instance, no indication in Claude’s earliest years of overbearing parental pressure, and if he showed any signs of early precocity, they were not memorable enough to have been written down or noted in the local press. In fact, his older sister was the family’s standout: she aced school, mastered piano, and plied her brother with homemade math puzzles. She was also reported to be “one of Gaylord’s most popular girls.” “She was a model student, which I couldn’t quite follow,” Shannon admitted. He later suggested that a tincture of sibling rivalry might have driven his initial interest in mathematics: his big sister’s talent for numbers inspired him to strive for the same.
Claude had some successes of his own in his early schooling. In 1923, at the age of seven, he won a third-grade Thanksgiving story-writing contest, for his work “A Poor Boy”:
There once was a poor boy who thought that he was not going to have a Thanksgiving dinner for he thought all his playmates would forget him.
Even if they did, one man did not forget him because he thought that he would surprise the little boy early Thanksgiving morning.
So very early on Thanksgiving morning when he awoke, he found a basket of good things at the door. It was filled with so many good things and he was very happy all the day and he never forgot the kind man.
He played the alto horn and performed in the school’s musicals. Fifty-nine years later, he still remembered his classmates’ names. He wrote to his fourth-grade teacher:
Some names that come back as through a glass darkly after a half century are Kenny Sisson, Jimmy Nelson, Richard Cork, Lyle Teeter (who committed suicide), Sam Qua, Ray Stoddard, Mary Glasgow, John Kriske, Willard Thomas (a portly boy), Helen Rogers (a portly girl), Kathleen Allen (smart girl), Helen McKinnon (a pretty girl), Mary Fitzpatrick, and of course Rodney Hutchins.
He held in his hands a copy of a black-and-white photo of the fourth-grade class of 1924–25, so reduced in the copying that it took a magnifying glass to resolve the children’s faces, and his own eight-year-old face bubbled and then flattened under the moving lens. Gaunt and shy even in those days; piercing eyes. He remembered, too, no doubt from experience, that “boys in those grades tend to fall in adolescent love with their pretty teachers.”
Reflecting on his education with the benefit of hindsight, Shannon would say that his interest in mathematics had, besides sibling rivalry, a simple source: it just came easily to him. “I think one tends to get into work that you find easy for yourself,” Shannon acknowledged. High school lasted three years for Claude; he graduated a year ahead of the other children in the photo. That said, he wasn’t at the top of the class. When a 1932 report in the newspaper recognized three students with straight A’s in his high school, Shannon was not among them.
He loved science and disliked facts. Or rather, he disliked the kind of facts that he couldn’t bring under a rule and abstract his way out of. Chemistry in particular tested his patience. It “always seems a little dull to me,” he wrote his science teacher years after; “too many isolated facts and too few general principles for my taste.”
His early gifts were as mechanical as they were mental. Claude’s field of vision, for hours at a time, was often the rudder of a model plane or the propeller shaft of a toy boat. Gaylord’s broken radios tended to pass through his hands. On April 17, 1930, thirteen-year-old Claude attended a Boy Scout rally and won “first place in the second class wig-wag signalling contest.” The object was to speak Morse code with the body, and no scout in the county spoke it as quickly or accurately as Claude. Wig-wag was Morse code by flag: a bright signaling flag (red stands out best against the sky) on a long hickory pole. The mediocre signalers took pauses to think; the best, like Claude, had something of the machine in them. Right meant dot, left meant dash, dots and dashes meant breaks in the imaginary current that meant words; he was a human telegraph.
These gifts were in the family—but perhaps they skipped a generation. It seems that Claude took after his grandfather, David Shannon Jr., the proud owner of U.S. Patent No. 407,130, a series of improvements on the washing machine, complete with a reciprocating plunger and valves for the discharge of “dirt, settlings, and foul matter.” David Shannon died in 1910, six years before his grandson’s birth. But for a boy of Claude Jr.’s mechanical bent, a certified inventor in the family tree was something to brag about.
And the grandson inherited the tinkering gene. “As a young boy, I built many things, working with mechanical stuff,” he recalled. “Erector sets and electrical equipment, built radios, things of that sort. I remember I had a radio controlled boat.” One neighbor, Shirley Hutchins Gidden, offered to the Otsego Herald Times that Shannon and her brother, Rodney Hutchins, were a conspiratorial pair. “He and my brother were always busy—all harmless projects, but very inventive.” She told a different reporter, “Claude was the brains and Rod was the instigator.” One experiment stood out: a makeshift elevator built by the two boys inside the Hutchins family barn. Shirley was the “guinea pig,” the first to take a ride on the elevator, and it says something about the quality of the boys’ handiwork (or her luck) that she lived to tell the tale to a newspaper seven decades later. It was one of many such contraptions, including a trolley in the Hutchins backyard and the private, barbed-wire telegraph. “They were always cooking up something,” said Gidden.
Predictably, Claude grew up worshipping Thomas Edison. And yet the affinity between Edison and Claude Shannon was more than happenstance. They shared an ancestor: John Ogden, a Puritan stonemason, who crossed the Atlantic from Lancashire, England, to build gristmills and dams, and with his brother raised the first permanent church in Manhattan, two miles and three centuries from the office where his descendant Claude Shannon would lay the foundations of the Information Age.
It was finished by the spring of 1644, a twin-gabled Gothic church at the island’s south tip, hard by the wall of the Dutch fort; the wood shingles on its roof were meant to turn bluish over time and rainstorms, into an imitation of costlier slate. Ogden, who planned it from quarry to weathervane, is said to have been lean, hawk-nosed, and stone stubborn; he was one of the New World’s first builders.
Most of us, Claude included, are less demanding than we might be in our choice of idols: from the universe of possible heroes, we single out the ones who already remind us of ourselves. Maybe that’s the case for Claude and his distant cousin Edison—even if it was only years after leaving Michigan for good that he discovered the link. Good fortune to learn that one’s idol is one’s family—and Claude’s fortune was better than most.