It’s been said that most of the great writers have bibliographies, not biographies. The kind of life requisite to their work leaves little behind but the words themselves. Even if we had the questionable privilege of watching them scribble for hours every day, we’d find more of who they were simply in the pages of their books. Something similar might be said of Claude Shannon in this period, working with a speed and absorption that he would not match for the rest of his life. What can we recover of who he was from what he made?
Consider some thesis topics chosen by Shannon’s contemporaries in MIT’s electrical engineering department: “Skin Effect Resistance Ratio of a Circular Loop of Wire”; “An Investigation of Two Methods of Measuring the Acceleration of Rotating Machinery”; “Three Mechanisms of Breakdown of Pyrex Glass”; “A Plan for Remodeling an Industrial Power Plant”; “A Proposal to Electrify a Section of the Boston and Maine Railroad Haverhill Division.” All of these were solidly and practically bound to the world of things. In the best tradition of engineering, they found new uses for old materials, or built physical systems to higher standards of efficiency and power.
Next to this good work, Shannon’s was different not only in degree but in kind. He was a tinkerer to the end of his life, and he worked with his hands long after he had any need to. But unlike other tinkerers, he had a way of getting behind things. He loved the objects under his hands, right up to the point when he abstracted his way past them. Switches weren’t just switches, but a metaphor for math. There had been legions of jugglers and unicycle riders in the world, but few were as compelled as Shannon would be to fit those activities to equations. Most important of all, he would abstract his way past all of human communication, to the structure and form that every message holds in common. In all these endeavors, he was distinguished less by quantitative horsepower than by his mastery of model making: the reduction of big problems to their essential core. In banishing art and ambiguity, in finding the ways in which human artifacts merely stood for mathematics, Shannon’s work at twenty-one was a window on all the work he had left.
There are passionate scientists who are almost overcome by the abundance of the world, who are gluttons for facts; and then there are those who stand a step back from the world, their apartness a condition of their work. Shannon was one of this latter kind: an abstracted man. In his twenties—his most productive years—he took his abstraction to the point of deep withdrawal and almost crippling shyness. But an abstracted man might also have it in him to be playful or funny—indeed, might be especially suited for that. To love the things around us and yet to also see them as cheap stand-ins for the real reality of numbers, theorems, and logic might, to the right temperament, give the world the appearance of a permanent joke.
“What’s your secret in remaining so carefree?” an interviewer asked Shannon toward the end of his life. Shannon answered, “I do what comes naturally, and usefulness is not my main goal. . . . I keep asking myself, How would you do this? Is it possible to make a machine do that? Can you prove this theorem?” For an abstracted man at his most content, the world isn’t there to be used, but to be played with, manipulated by hand and mind. Shannon was an atheist, and seems to have come by it naturally, without any crisis of faith; puzzling over the origins of human intelligence with the same interviewer, he said matter-of-factly, “I don’t happen to be a religious man and I don’t think it would help if I were!” And yet, in his instinct that the world we see merely stands for something else, there is an inkling that his distant Puritan ancestors might have recognized as kin.
Something in Shannon—perhaps just this withdrawn unworldliness—seemed to trigger the protective instincts of others, even from the generally unsentimental technicians of MIT. Rail-thin, small-town, transparently brilliant; a face made of angles, and an Adam’s apple too large for his neck: he must have looked like the kind of young man always on the verge of being mugged or hit by a bus. When he enrolled in a flying class in the wake of his thesis’s publication, the MIT professor teaching the course immediately marked him out as odd—odd even for Cambridge—and canvassed his colleagues for their opinions. From his extracurricular investigations, the flight instructor wrote in a letter to MIT’s president, “I am convinced that Shannon is not only unusual but is in fact a near-genious [sic] of most unusual promise.” With the president’s permission, he would ban Shannon from the cockpit: such a life wasn’t worth risking in a crash.
Two days later, the president, physicist Karl Taylor Compton, sent back a levelheaded reply: “Somehow I doubt the advisability of urging a young man to refrain from flying or arbitrarily to take the opportunity away from him, on the ground of his being intellectually superior. I doubt whether it would be good for the development of his own character and personality.”
So with the endorsement of the administration, Shannon kept flying: like any other student, he was permitted to risk the contents of his brain. He risked his in the flight school’s simple propeller crafts, blades buzzing like an overgrown wasp, and he always came down safely. A 1939 photo shows him standing beside a Piper Cub, a light two-seater popular with flight schools. He’s incongruously well dressed, his white collar well starched and his tie tightly knotted, and he addresses the camera seriously as he rests his hand on the plane’s propeller.
Those responsible for Shannon’s career were nearly as protective as those responsible for his safety. Bush described him to a colleague as “a decidedly unconventional type of youngster. . . . He is a very shy and retiring sort of individual, exceedingly modest, and who would readily be thrown off the track.” But even had it been clear that Shannon’s thesis prophesied the end of the analog computing to which his advisor had devoted a decade and a half, Bush was a teacher and engineer large-spirited enough to recognize brilliance when he saw it. As science writer William Poundstone notes, “Bush believed Shannon to be an almost universal genius, whose talents might be channeled in any direction.” More than that, Bush took it upon himself to choose the direction.
Bush was, by the late 1930s, one of the most powerful figures in American science, and Shannon was fortunate to have won him for an advocate. The year Shannon’s thesis was published, Bush impressed on him that mathematics, not electrical engineering, was the higher-prestige field, and he sponsored Shannon’s acceptance into MIT’s doctoral program for mathematics. At the same time, Bush’s influence in the engineering world won Shannon’s thesis the unfortunately named Alfred Noble Prize (unfortunately named, because this is the point at which every writer mentioning it points out that it has no relation to Alfred Nobel’s much more famous prize). Awarded by America’s engineering societies for the best paper by a scholar under thirty, the Noble meant early distinction within the field, an engraved certificate, and a $500 stipend. It also meant some modest recognition outside the field, including a brief notice—“YOUTHFUL INSTRUCTOR WINS NOBLE AWARD”—on page 8 of the New York Times. Back in Michigan, the Otsego County Herald Times hailed Shannon as a local boy made good (on the front page, naturally).
When news of the award reached Shannon, he knew whom to thank. “I have a sneaking suspicion that you have not only heard about it but had something to do with my getting it,” Shannon wrote to Bush. “If so, thanks a lot.”
Finally, Bush took it upon himself to find a suitable dissertation project for Shannon in the field of—genetics. Genetics? It was at least as plausible an object for Shannon’s talents as switches. Circuits could be taught, genes could be taught—but the analytic skill it took to find the logic beneath them seemed more likely to be inborn. Shannon had already used his “queer algebra” to great effect on relays; “another special algebra,” Bush explained to a colleague, “might conceivably handle some of the aspects of Mendelian heredity.” More to the point, it was a matter of deep conviction for Bush that specialization was the death of genius. “In these days, when there is a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or even Benjamin Franklin,” Bush said in a speech at MIT. “Men of our profession—we teachers—are bound to be impressed with the tendency of youths of strikingly capable minds to become interested in one small corner of science and uninterested in the rest of the world. . . . It is unfortunate when a brilliant and creative mind insists upon living in a modern monastic cell.”
The words predate Shannon’s arrival in Cambridge, but they could have easily expressed Bush’s ambitions for his student. And so Shannon was to leave the monastic cell of the differential analyzer (filled, like a monastery, with shifts of men keeping quiet watch at all hours) and the even smaller cell of the circuit box, to go 200 miles south to Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, and to come back with a dissertation. If any protest came from Shannon, it was not recorded.