A’s in math and science and Latin, scattered B’s in the rest: the sixteen-year-old high school graduate sent his record off to the University of Michigan, along with an application that was three pages of fill-in-the-blanks, the spelling errors casually crossed out.
8. Have you earned any money during your high-school course?
Yes.
How?
Peddeling papers and deleivering telegrams.
The same year he applied to Michigan, his sister graduated from it. Claude was admitted as well, and Ann Arbor was the biggest swarm of humanity he had ever seen.
One hundred and ninety-five miles southeast of Gaylord, Ann Arbor was a city of steep hills and valleys, interrupted by the muddy banks and low gradient of the slow-flowing Huron River. The Huron sealed Ann Arbor’s fate as a mill town: sawmills and flour mills punctuated the river banks and powered the economy. Immigrants poured in, most from Germany, but also Greece, Italy, Russia, and Poland. Their ethnic ties ran deep, and churches reinforced the affiliations of caste and clan. By the beginning of the twentieth century, half of Ann Arbor’s population was either foreign-born or born to immigrant parents.
It was a population that suffused the city with an irrepressible optimism. On the threshold of a century that would see the Depression and two world wars, a 1901 issue of the Ann Arbor Argus Democrat was moved to declare that “the century to come is undoubtedly destined to be the richest and best that man has experienced.” After the stock market crashed in October 1929, the Ann Arbor Daily News covered the brief recoveries in stock prices rather than report on the devastating declines. Even in December 1929—after more than $30 billion in wealth had evaporated, banks had called in loans, and manufacturing had cratered—Ann Arbor’s mayor, Edward Staebler, remained unfailingly buoyant, assuring locals that the economy would recover and that the city would weather the storm.
In the presidential contest of 1932, Ann Arbor defied the state of Michigan. Franklin Roosevelt had won Michigan and forty-one other states in an electoral landslide—but Ann Arbor remained a steadfast Herbert Hoover stronghold. Editorials in the Daily News promised recovery and urged voters not to lay the blame for the economy’s troubles at President Hoover’s feet. His fellow Republicans held on to local offices in Ann Arbor, one of the few places where the president’s coattails did more good than harm.
The University of Michigan copied its town’s calm confidence. “I am not at all discouraged,” university president A. G. Ruthven said in 1931. “I must admit that the curtailment of our resources has permitted me to make certain changes in the organization which I believe will be of lasting benefit.” Yet, by the time Claude Shannon arrived at the university in the fall of 1932, that unflinching positivity had run its course. The financial collapse had forced the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s largest employer and its economic engine, to shave enrollments, halt production on long-planned buildings, and cut pay by 10 percent.
Still, Shannon’s timing was fortuitous. Had he arrived a decade or two earlier, he would not have been the beneficiary of the transformation of the university’s engineering program during the early years of the twentieth century.
Under the leadership of Dean Mortimer Cooley, an unusually enterprising university administrator, the College of Engineering’s “enrollments . . . grew from less than 30 to more than 2,000, the faculty from three instructors teaching several courses to more than 160 professors and staff teaching hundreds of courses, and a temporary shop of 1,720 square feet to over 500,000 square feet of well equipped buildings.” The number of engineering students surpassed even the number of students in medicine and law. When it threatened to exceed the enrollment of the university’s largest school, the Literary College, Dean Cooley grew excited, and “with his characteristic chuckle, exclaimed [to Professor Harvey Goulding], ‘By Jove, Goulding, we’ll pass them yet.’ ” Urbane, well-traveled, and politically savvy, Cooley had first come to the University of Michigan on a Navy billet, as Professor of Steam Engineering and Iron Shipbuilding. Four years later, the Navy allowed him to resign his commission, and the university offered him a proper professorship.
In 1895, the then-dean of the engineering school, Charles Greene, had been asked to create plans for a new building to house the school’s growing student body. Greene’s request—$50,000 for a small, U-shaped structure—was granted. He died before he could carry out the construction, and Cooley succeeded him as dean. Asked to judge his predecessor’s plans and funding needs, Cooley replied, “Gentlemen, if you could but see the other engineering colleges with which we are forced to compete, you would not hesitate for one moment to appropriate a quarter of a million dollars.” Something about Cooley’s understated certainty swayed the board, and his request was swiftly approved.
A public exhibition in 1913 showcased the spoils of the expansion, as close as a university has probably come to something like a world’s fair. Ten thousand people came to tour the facilities and take in the latest technological marvels. Electrical engineers sent messages over a primitive wireless system. Mechanical engineers “surprised their visitors by sawing wood with a piece of paper running at 20,000 revolutions per minute, freezing flowers in liquid air, and showing a bottle supported only by two narrow wires from which a full stream of water flowed—a mystery solved by few.” Two full torpedoes, two large cannons, and “a complete electric railway with a block signal system” rounded out the demonstrations. “For the average student as well as for the casual visitor, the Engineering corner of the Campus held mysteries almost as profound as the deeper mysteries of the Medical School,” observed one writer.
Cooley’s project to expand the engineering college changed the university’s core educational program, as well. Eight years before Shannon was born, the college began teaching courses in the theory of wireless telegraphy and telephony, meeting the growing commercial need for engineers trained in wireless transmission. Engineering’s rising profile began to draw the attention of deans in other quarters of the university, and disciplinary lines began to blur. By the time Shannon began his dual degrees in mathematics and engineering, a generation later, the two curricula had largely merged into one.
That appealed to Shannon, who admitted that his choice of a dual degree wasn’t part of a grand design for his career; it was simply adolescent indecision. “I wasn’t really quite sure which I liked best,” he recalled. Earning two degrees instead of one wasn’t particularly onerous: “It was quite easy to do because so much of the curriculum was overlapping. I think you needed two extra courses and some summer school to get degrees in both fields,” said Shannon. Those studies gave him his first taste of communication engineering, which he found “especially to my liking” for its blend of practice and theory—because it was “the most mathematical, I would say, of the engineering sciences.”
Though the dual degree was common enough, Shannon’s variety of indecision, which he never entirely outgrew, would prove crucial to his later work. Someone content to build things might have been happy with a single degree in engineering; someone drawn more to theory might have been satisfied with studying math alone. Shannon, mathematically and mechanically inclined, could not make up his mind, but the result left him trained in two fields that would prove essential to his later successes.
He joined Radio Club, Math Club, even the gymnastics team. Shannon’s records of leadership during this time are two. One is his stint as secretary of the Math Club. “A feature of all meetings,” a journal recorded, “was a list of mathematical problems placed on the board and discussed informally after the regular program. A demonstration of mathematical instruments in the department’s collection made an interesting program.” The other was news enough that the hometown paper saw fit to print it as an item of note: “Claude Shannon has been made a non-commissioned officer in the Reserve Officers Training Corps at the University of Michigan.”
In the Engineering Buildings, where Claude spent the bulk of his time, his classmates tried the strength of shatterproof windshield glass, worked to muffle milk-skimming machines, floated model battleships on a sunless indoor model sea. But the real life on campus was outside the classroom.
In the spring of 1934, Claude’s sophomore year, an unusually misanthropic editor got a hold of the yearbook’s anonymous comedy section and turned it into an account of student life narrated by an escaped mental patient convinced he’s an anthropologist:
Breakfast at the dining hall: “The stories of last week-ends parties assume a fundamental sameness . . . ‘We went to ______’s (dance hall, night club, apartment, or fraternity) and had______highballs,______beers and______shots of______. After the party______got sick and______and I had to carry him all the way from______to______.’ ”
Someone spills his glass of orange juice on a coed’s lap, and everyone laughs for five minutes, until they forget what they’re laughing about and go silent again. “It is very quiet now. . . . The business of laughing seems to have taken something out of every one.” Breakfast breaks up at eleven and they spend the rest of the morning going through the motions of hilarity.
Yearbook blurbs on the big men on campus were usually a string of mild in-jokes, but there was some acid to them in the spring of 1934. There is the track star who each night “removes his legs (they being in some wise attached to his body) and places them in a gold and glass case for all and sundry to admire.” The student politician, “parading down State street with seven stooges at his heels, well fortified from contradiction or blasphemy.” The newspaper editor, “wistfully pounding a typewriter in the secrecy of his cupboard office, attempting to veil the fact that he has nothing to veil.”
Claude, by contrast, was a small man on campus. But he and the editor may have had a hunch in common: the introverted suspicion that they are surrounded by animate machines, detachable parts and all, all surface and funny motions. It takes a cynic or an engineer to discover “the business of laughing.” Later on, a girlfriend remembered Claude’s own laugh: “He laughed in small explosions as though he were coughing, and had never quite learned how to be merry.” It was his own funny motion of diaphragm and throat.
In the spring of Shannon’s sophomore year, a stroke ended his father’s life. For fifteen months Claude Sr. had fought illnesses and lived confined at home, his seventy-one years catching up with him. In the days after his death, the town of Gaylord shut down in his honor. The funeral was at the Shannon home at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon; the pallbearers, Claude Sr.’s business associates, were august. By Wednesday, Claude was on his way back to the university.
Soon after his father’s death, something broke between Claude and his mother. His sister was grown and gone, the town father was in the ground, and Claude and Mabel were alone together for the first time. It ended disastrously. It seems the rupture was caused, absurdly enough, by a plate of cookies: she saved the good cookies for guests and offered Claude only the burned ones. Whatever the cause, Claude spent his remaining school vacations at an uncle’s. He and his mother would barely interact for the rest of his life.
He completed his time as a student, distinguishing himself enough to earn admission as a senior to both the Phi Kappa Phi and Sigma Xi honor societies. In the spring of 1934, at the age of seventeen, Claude Shannon claimed his first publication credit, on page 191 of the American Mathematical Monthly. He had worked out the solution to a math puzzle and landed a spot in the “Problems and Solutions” section. The editors of the section welcomed “problems believed to be new, and demanding no tools beyond those ordinarily furnished in the first two years of college mathematics.” The problem Shannon solved had appeared in the previous fall:
E 58 [1933, 491]. Proposed by R. M. Sutton, Haverford College, Pa.
In the following division of a three-place number into a five-place number each digit has been replaced by a code letter. Assuming only that the remainder, Y, is not zero, reconstruct the problem and show that the solution is unique.
Coming as it did in the back of the journal, after the weightier work of math papers and book reviews, Shannon’s six-part solution to the problem was nothing notable—except for the fact that it existed at all, a sign that his childhood fascination with codebreaking was starting to pay adult dividends. Buoyed, we imagine, by this first success, Shannon again submitted a solution and was again published in the Monthly’s back pages, in January 1935, in answer to this problem:
E 100 [1934, 390]. Proposed by G. R. Livingston, State Teachers College, San Diego, California.
In two concentric circles, locate parallel chords in the outer circle which are tangent to the inner circle, by the use of compasses only, finding the ends of the chords and their points of tangency.
Modest as they are, these early efforts are a window into the education of Claude Shannon. We can infer from them that the college-aged Shannon understood the value of appearing in a professional public forum, one that would earn the scrutiny of mathematicians his age and the attention of those older than him. That he was reading such a journal at all hints at more than the usual attention paid to academic matters; that his solutions were selected points to more than the usual talent. Above all, his first publications tell us something about his growing ambition: taking time out from the usual burdens of classes and college life to study these problems, work out the answers, and prepare them for publication suggests that he already envisioned something other for himself than the family furniture business.
His something other would begin, in earnest, with a typed postcard tacked to an engineering bulletin board. It was an invitation to come east and help build a mechanical brain. Shannon noticed it in the spring of 1936, just as he was considering what was to come after his undergraduate days were over. The job—master’s student and assistant on the differential analyzer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—was tailor-made for a young man who could find equal joy in equations and construction, thinking and building. “I pushed hard for that job and got it. That was one of the luckiest things of my life,” Shannon said later. Luck may have played a role, but the application’s acceptance was also a testament to the keen eye of a figure who would shape the rest of Shannon’s life and the course of American science: Vannevar Bush.