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♦ MY MIND WANDERS AROUND: Robert Price, “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,” IEEE Communications Magazine 22 (1984): 126.
♦ TRANSISTOR … BIT: The committee got transistor from John R. Pierce; Shannon got bit from John W. Tukey.
♦ SHANNON SUPPOSEDLY BELONGED: Interview, Mary Elizabeth Shannon, 25 July 2006.
♦ BY 1948 MORE THAN 125 MILLION: Statistical Abstract of the United States 1950. More exactly: 3,186 radio and television broadcasting stations, 15,000 newspapers and periodicals, 500 million books and pamphlets, and 40 billion pieces of mail.
♦ CAMPBELL’S SOLUTION: George A. Campbell, “On Loaded Lines in Telephonic Transmission,” Philosophical Magazine 5 (1903): 313.
♦ “THEORIES PERMIT CONSCIOUSNESS TO ‘JUMP OVER ITS OWN SHADOW’ ”: Hermann Weyl, “The Current Epistemological Situation in Mathematics” (1925), quoted in John L. Bell, “Hermann Weyl on Intuition and the Continuum,” Philosophia Mathematica 8, no. 3 (2000): 261.
♦ “SHANNON WANTS TO FEED NOT JUST DATA”: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Vintage, 1992), 251.
♦ “OFF AND ON … I HAVE BEEN WORKING”: Letter, Shannon to Vannevar Bush, 16 February 1939, in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 455.
♦ “NOWE USED FOR AN ELEGANT WORDE”: Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named The Governour (1531), III: xxiv.
♦ “MAN THE FOOD-GATHERER REAPPEARS”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 302.
♦ “WHAT LIES AT THE HEART OF EVERY LIVING THING”: Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 112.
♦ “THE INFORMATION CIRCLE BECOMES THE UNIT OF LIFE”: Werner R. Loewenstein, The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xvi.
♦ “EVERY IT—EVERY PARTICLE, EVERY FIELD OF FORCE”: John Archibald Wheeler, “It from Bit,” in At Home in the Universe (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 296.
♦ “THE BIT COUNT OF THE COSMOS”: John Archibald Wheeler, “The Search for Links,” in Anthony J. G. Hey, ed., Feynman and Computation (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002), 321.
♦ “NO MORE THAN 10120 OPS”: Seth Lloyd, “Computational Capacity of the Universe,” Physical Review Letters 88, no. 23 (2002).
♦ “TOMORROW … WE WILL HAVE LEARNED TO UNDERSTAND”: John Archibald Wheeler, “It from Bit,” 298.
♦ “IT IS HARD TO PICTURE THE WORLD BEFORE SHANNON”: John R. Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 19, no. 1 (1973): 4.
♦ “NUMBERS TOO, CHIEFEST OF SCIENCES”: Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. H. Smyth, 460–61.
♦ “THE INVENTION OF PRINTING, THOUGH INGENIOUS”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Andrew Crooke, 1660), ch. 4.
1. DRUMS THAT TALK
♦ “ACROSS THE DARK CONTINENT SOUND”: Irma Wassall, “Black Drums,” Phylon Quarterly 4 (1943): 38.
♦ “MAKE YOUR FEET COME BACK”: Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 105.
♦ IN 1730 FRANCIS MOORE SAILED EASTWARD: Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London: J. Knox, 1767).
♦ “SUDDENLY HE BECAME TOTALLY ABSTRACTED”: William Allen and Thomas R. H. Thompson, A Narrative of the Expedition to the River Niger in 1841, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1848), 393.
♦ A MISSIONARY, ROGER T. CLARKE: Roger T. Clarke, “The Drum Language of the Tumba People,” American Journal of Sociology 40, no. 1 (1934): 34–48.
♦ “VERY OFTEN ARRIVING BEFORE THE MESSENGERS”: G. Suetonius Tranquillus, The Lives of the Caesars, trans. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 87.
♦ “YET WHO SO SWIFT COULD SPEED THE MESSAGE”: Aeschylus, Agamemnon, trans. Charles W. Eliot, 335.
♦ A GERMAN HISTORIAN, RICHARD HENNIG: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1995), 17.
♦ A “CONCEIT … WHISPERED THOROW THE WORLD”: Thomas Browne, Pseudoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries Into Very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths, 3rd ed. (London: Nath. Ekins, 1658), 59.
♦ IN ITALY A MAN TRIED TO SELL GALILEO: Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1967), 95.
♦ “A SYSTEM OF SIGNS FOR LETTERS”: Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 2, ed. Edward Lind Morse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 12.
♦ “THE DICTIONARY OR VOCABULARY CONSISTS OF WORDS”: U. S. Patent 1647, 20 June 1840, 6.
♦ “THE SUPERIORITY OF THE ALPHABETIC MODE”: Samuel F. B. Morse, letter to Leonard D. Gale, in Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 2, 65.
♦ “WHEN THE CIRCUIT WAS CLOSED A LONGER TIME”: Ibid., 64.
♦ “THE CLERKS WHO ATTEND AT THE RECORDING INSTRUMENT”: “The Atlantic Telegraph,” The New York Times, 7 August 1858.
♦ IN SEARCH OF DATA ON THE LETTERS’ RELATIVE FREQUENCIES: Morse claimed that this was he, and their partisans differ. Cf. Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 2, 68; George P. Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1992), 24; Franklin Leonard Pope, “The American Inventors of the Telegraph,” Century Illustrated Magazine (April 1888): 934; Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Knopf, 2003), 167.
♦ LONG AFTERWARD, INFORMATION THEORISTS CALCULATED: John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1980), 25.
♦ “ONLY A FEW DAYS AGO I READ IN THE TIMES”: Robert Sutherland Rattray, “The Drum Language of West Africa: Part II,” Journal of the Royal African Society 22, no. 88 (1923): 302.
♦ “HE IS NOT REALLY A EUROPEAN”: John F. Carrington, La Voix des tambours: comment comprendre le langage tambouriné d’Afrique (Kinshasa: Protestant d’Édition et de Diffusion, 1974), 66, quoted in Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word, 95.
♦ “I MUST HAVE BEEN GUILTY MANY A TIME”: John F. Carrington, The Talking Drums of Africa (London: Carey Kingsgate, 1949), 19.
♦ EVEN THE LIMITED DICTIONARY OF THE MISSIONARIES: Ibid., 33.
♦ “AMONG PEOPLES WHO KNOW NOTHING OF WRITING”: Robert Sutherland Rattray, “The Drum Language of West Africa: Part I,” Journal of the Royal African Society 22, no. 87 (1923): 235.
♦ FOR THE YAUNDE, THE ELEPHANT: Theodore Stern, “Drum and Whistle ‘Languages’: An Analysis of Speech Surrogates,” American Anthropologist 59 (1957): 489.
♦ “THIS COUNTERSPELL MAY SAVE YOUR SOUL”: James Merrill, “Eight Bits,” in The Inner Room (New York: Knopf, 1988), 48.
♦ A PAPER BY A BELL LABS TELEPHONE ENGINEER: Ralph V. L. Hartley, “Transmission of Information,” Bell System Technical Journal 7 (1928): 535–63.
♦ HE SAW LOKELE YOUTH PRACTICING THE DRUMS LESS AND LESS: John F. Carrington, The Talking Drums of Africa, 83.
♦ A VISITOR FROM THE UNITED STATES FOUND HIM: Israel Shenker, “Boomlay,” Time, 22 November 1954.
2. THE PERSISTENCE OF THE WORD
♦ “ODYSSEUS WEPT”: Ward Just, An Unfinished Season (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 153.
♦ “TRY TO IMAGINE”: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 31.
♦ THE PASTNESS OF THE PAST: Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 3 (1963): 304–45.
♦ “THE OTHER EMINENT CATHOLIC-ELECTRONIC PROPHET”: Frank Kermode, “Free Fall,” New York Review of Books 10, no. 5 (14 March 1968).
♦ “HORSES AS AUTOMOBILES WITHOUT WHEELS”: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 12.
♦ “LANGUAGE IN FACT BEARS THE SAME RELATIONSHIP”: Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking, 1971), 100.
♦ “FOR THIS INVENTION WILL PRODUCE FORGETFULNESS”: Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Fairfield, Iowa: First World Library, 2008), 275a.
♦ “TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF MANUSCRIPT CULTURE”: Marshall McLuhan, “Culture Without Literacy,” in Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 305.
♦ “THIS MIRACULOUS REBOUNDING OF THE VOICE”: Pliny the Elder, The Historie of the World, vol. 2, trans. Philemon Holland (London: 1601), 581.
♦ “THE WRITTEN SYMBOL EXTENDS INFINITELY”: Samuel Butler, Essays on Life, Art, and Science (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970), 198.
♦ “THERE NEVER WAS A MAN”: David Diringer and Reinhold Regensburger, The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), 166.
♦ “IT WAS SOMETHING LIKE A THUNDER-CLAP”: “The Alphabetization of Homer,” in Eric Alfred Havelock and Jackson P. Hershbell, Communication Arts in the Ancient World (New York: Hastings House, 1978), 3.
♦ “HAPPENS, UP TO THE PRESENT DAY”: Aristotle, Poetics, trans. William Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 1447b.
♦ HAVELOCK DESCRIBED IT AS CULTURAL WARFARE: Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 300–301.
♦ “A BEGINNING IS THAT WHICH ITSELF DOES NOT FOLLOW”: Aristotle, Poetics, 1450b.
♦ “THE MULTITUDE CANNOT ACCEPT”: Republic, 6.493e. Cf. in Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 282.
♦ “LOSE THEMSELVES AND WANDER”: Republic, 6.484b.
♦ “TRYING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY”: Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 282.
♦ LOGIC DESCENDED FROM THE WRITTEN WORD: Not everyone agrees with all this. A counterargument: John Halverson, “Goody and the Implosion of the Literacy Thesis,” Man 27, no. 2 (1992): 301–17.
♦ IF IT IS POSSIBLE FOR NO MAN TO BE A HORSE: Aristotle, Prior Analytics, trans. A. J. Jenkinson, 1:3.
♦ “WE KNOW THAT FORMAL LOGIC”: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 49.
♦ FIELDWORK OF THE RUSSIAN PSYCHOLOGIST: A. R. Luria, Cognitive Development, Its Cultural and Social Foundations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 86.
♦ “BASICALLY THE PEASANT WAS RIGHT”: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 53.
♦ “IN THE INFANCY OF LOGIC”: Benjamin Jowett, introduction to Plato’s Theaetetus (Teddington, U.K.: Echo Library, 2006), 7.
♦ “WHEN A WHITE HORSE IS NOT A HORSE”: Gongsun Long, “When a White Horse Is Not a Horse,” trans. by A. C. Graham, in P. J. Ivanhoe et al., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing, 2005), 363–66. Also A. C. Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 178.
♦ “WRITING, LIKE A THEATER CURTAIN GOING UP”: Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 177.
♦ “TO THE ASSYRIANS, THE CHALDEANS, AND EGYPTIANS”: Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, 3rd ed. (London: 1722), 5.
♦ “THIS PROCESS OF CONQUEST AND INFLUENCE”: Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 198.
♦ TO FORM LARGE NUMBERS, THE BABYLONIANS: Donald E. Knuth, “Ancient Babylonian Algorithms,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 15, no. 7 (1972): 671–77.
♦ “IT WAS ASSUMED THAT THE BABYLONIANS”: Asger Aaboe, Episodes from the Early History of Mathematics (New York: L. W. Singer, 1963), 5.
♦ “OUR TASK CAN THEREFORE PROPERLY BE COMPARED”: Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, 2nd ed. (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1957), 30 and 40–46.
♦ “A CISTERN. THE HEIGHT IS 3,20”: Donald E. Knuth, “Ancient Babylonian Algorithms,” 672.
♦ “FUNDAMENTALLY LETTERS ARE SHAPES”: John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, I:13, quoted and translated by M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England, 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 202.
♦ “OH! ALL YE WHO SHALL HAVE HEARD”: Ibid.
♦ “I CANNOT HELP FEELING”: Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 275d.
♦ “WE ARE IN OUR CENTURY ‘WINDING THE TAPE BACKWARD’ ”: Marshall McLuhan, “Media and Cultural Change,” in Essential McLuhan, 92.
♦ “THE LARGER THE NUMBER OF SENSES INVOLVED”: Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan, 3.
♦ “ACOUSTIC SPACE IS ORGANIC”: Playboy interview, March 1969, in Essential McLuhan, 240.
♦ “MEN LIVED UPON GROSS EXPERIENCE”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall, and Civill, (1651; repr., London: George Routledge and Sons, 1886), 299.
♦ “MOST LITERATE PERSONS, WHEN YOU SAY”: Walter J. Ong, “This Side of Oral Culture and of Print,” Lincoln Lecture (1973), 2.
♦ “IT IS DEMORALIZING TO REMIND ONESELF”: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 14.
3. TWO WORDBOOKS
♦ “IN SUCH BUSIE, AND ACTIVE TIMES”: Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, 3rd ed. (London: 1722), 42.
♦ A BOOK IN 1604 WITH A RAMBLING TITLE: Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall (London: Edmund Weaver, 1604) may be found in the Bodleian Library; in a facsimile edition, Robert A. Peters, ed. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966); online via the University of Toronto Library; and, most satisfyingly, reprinted as John Simpson, ed., The First English Dictionary, 1604: Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007).
♦ A SINGLE 1591 PAMPHLET: Robert Greene, A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (1591; repr., Gloucester, U.K.: Dodo Press, 2008); Albert C. Baugh, A History of the English Language, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957), 252.
♦ “IT WERE A THING VERIE PRAISEWORTHIE”: Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie Which Entreateth Chefelie of the Right Writing of Our English Tung (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1582).
♦ “SOME MEN SEEK SO FAR FOR OUTLANDISH ENGLISH”: John Simpson, ed., The First English Dictionary, 41.
♦ “NOT CONFORMING HIMSELF”: John Strype, Historical Collections of the Life and Acts of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Aylmer (London: 1701), 129, quoted in John Simpson, ed., The First English Dictionary, 10.
♦ HE COPIED THE REMARKS ABOUT INKHORN TERMS: Gertrude E. Noyes, “The First English Dictionary, Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall,” Modern Language Notes 58, no. 8 (1943): 600.
♦ “SO MORE KNOWLEDGE WILL BE BROUGHT INTO THIS LAND”: Edmund Coote, The English Schoole-maister (London: Ralph Jackson & Robert Dexter, 1596), 2.
♦ “FOR EXAMPLE I INTEND TO DISCUSS AMO”: Lloyd W. Daly, Contributions to a History of Alphabeticization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Brussels: Latomus, 1967), 73.
♦ NOT UNTIL 1613 WAS THE FIRST ALPHABETICAL CATALOGUE: William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1598–1867 (London: Rivingtons, 1868), 39.
♦ “LET ME MENTION THAT THE WORDS OR NAMES”: Gottfried Leibniz, Unvorgreifliche Gedanken, quoted and translated by Werner Hüllen, English Dictionaries 800–1700: The Topical Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 16n.
♦ “SAYWHAT, CORRUPTLY CALLED A DEFINITION”: Ralph Lever, The Arte of Reason (London: H. Bynneman, 1573).
♦ “DEFINITION … BEING NOTHING BUT MAKING ANOTHER UNDERSTAND”: John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ch. 3, sect. 10.
♦ “SO LONG AS MEN WERE IN FACT OBLIGED”: Galileo, letter to Mark Welser, 4 May 1612, trans. Stillman Drake, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 92.
♦ “I DO NOT DEFINE TIME, SPACE, PLACE, AND MOTION”: Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, trans. Andrew Motte (Scholium) 6.
♦ JOHN BULLOKAR, OTHERWISE LEFT AS FAINT A MARK: Jonathon Green, Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (New York: Holt, 1996), 181.
♦ “WE REALLY DON’T LIKE BEING PUSHED”: Interview, John Simpson, 13 September 2006.
♦ “DICTIONARY, A MALEVOLENT LITERARY DEVICE”: Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (New York: Dover, 1993), 25.
♦ “IN GIVING EXPLANATIONS I ALREADY HAVE TO USE LANGUAGE”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 47.
♦ “THE ENGLISH DICTIONARY, LIKE THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION”: James A. H. Murray, “The Evolution of English Lexicography,” Romanes Lecture (1900).
♦ W. H. AUDEN DECLARED: Peter Gilliver et al., The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 82.
♦ ANTHONY BURGESS WHINGED: Anthony Burgess, “OED +,” in But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? Homage to Qwert Yuiop and Other Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 139. He could not let go, either. In a later essay, “Ameringlish,” he complained again.
♦ “EVERY FORM IN WHICH A WORD”: “Writing the OED: Spellings,” Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/about/writing/spellings.html (accessed 6 April 2007).
♦ “WHICH, WHILE IT WAS EMPLOYED IN THE CULTIVATION”: Samuel Johnson, preface to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
♦ WE POSSESS NOW A MORE COMPLETE DICTIONARY: John Simpson, ed., The First English Dictionary, 24.
♦ “WHAT I SHALL HEREAFTER CALL MONDEGREENS”: “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1954, 48.
♦ “THE INTERESTING THING ABOUT MONDEGREENS”: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 183.
4. TO THROW THE POWERS OF THOUGHT INTO WHEEL-WORK
♦ The original writings of Charles Babbage and, to a lesser extent, Ada Lovelace are increasingly accessible. The comprehensive, thousand-dollar, eleven-volume edition, The Works of Charles Babbage, edited by Martin Campbell-Kelly, was published in 1989. Online, the full texts of Babbage’s Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), and The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1838) can now be found in editions scanned from libraries by Google’s book program. Not yet available there (as of 2010), but also useful, is his son’s volume, Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to Them (1889). As interest grew during the era of computing, much of the useful material in these books was reprinted in collections; most valuable are Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, edited by Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison (1961); and Anthony Hyman’s Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (1989). Other manuscripts were published in J. M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (1978). The notes that follow refer to one or more of these sources, depending on what seems most useful for the reader. The translation and astounding “notes” on L. F. Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” by Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, have been made available online at http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html thanks to John Walker; they are also reproduced in the Morrisons’ collection. As for the Lovelace letters and papers, they are in the British Library, the Bodleian, and elsewhere, but many have been published by Betty Alexandra Toole in Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers (1992 and 1998); where possible I try to cite the published versions.
♦ “LIGHT ALMOST SOLAR HAS BEEN EXTRACTED”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), 300; reprinted in Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage, ed. Anthony Hyman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 200.
♦ THE TIMES OBITUARIST: “The Late Mr. Charles Babbage, F.R.S.,” The Times (London), 23 October 1871. Babbage’s crusade against organ-grinders and hurdy-gurdies was not in vain; a new law against street music in 1864 was known as Babbage’s Act. Cf. Stephanie Pain, “Mr. Babbage and the Buskers,” New Scientist 179, no. 2408 (2003): 42.
♦ “HE SHOWED A GREAT DESIRE TO INQUIRE”: N. S. Dodge, “Charles Babbage,” Smithsonian Annual Report of 1873, 162–97, reprinted in Annals of the History of Computing 22, no. 4 (October–December 2000), 20.
♦ NOT “THE MANUAL LABOR OF ROWING”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), 37.
♦ “ ‘THE TALL GENTLEMAN IN THE CORNER’ ”: Ibid., 385–86.
♦ “THOSE WHO ENJOY LEISURE”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), v.
♦ HE COMPUTED THE COST OF EACH PHASE: Ibid., 146.
♦ “AT THE EXPENSE OF THE NATION”: Henry Prevost Babbage, ed., Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to Them; Their History and Construction (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1889), 52.
♦ “ON TWO OCCASIONS I HAVE BEEN ASKED”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 67.
♦ TABLE OF CONSTANTS OF THE CLASS MAMMALIA: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings, ed. Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), xxiii.
♦ “LO! THE RAPTURED ARITHMETICIAN!”: Élie de Joncourt, De Natura Et Praeclaro Usu Simplicissimae Speciei Numerorum Trigonalium (Hagae Comitum: Husson, 1762), quoted in Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 54.
♦ “TO ASTROLOGERS, LAND-MEASURERS, MEASURERS OF TAPESTRY”: Quoted in Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 468.
♦ THIRTY-FOUR MEN AND ONE WOMAN: Mary Croarken, “Mary Edwards: Computing for a Living in 18th-Century England,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25, no. 4 (2003): 9–15; and—with fascinating detective work—Mary Croarken, “Tabulating the Heavens: Computing the Nautical Almanac in 18th-Century England,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25, no. 3 (2003): 48–61.
♦ “LOGARITHMES ARE NUMBERS INVENTED”: Henry Briggs, Logarithmicall Arithmetike: Or Tables of Logarithmes for Absolute Numbers from an Unite to 100000 (London: George Miller, 1631), 1.
♦ “TAKE AWAY ALL THE DIFFICULTIE”: John Napier, “Dedicatorie,” in A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithmes, trans. Edward Wright (London: Nicholas Okes, 1616), 3.
♦ “NAPER, LORD OF MARKINSTON, HATH SET”: Henry Briggs to James Ussher, 10 March 1615, quoted by Graham Jagger in Martin Campbell-Kelly et al., eds., The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 56.
♦ A QUARTER HOUR OF SILENCE: “SPENT, EACH BEHOLDING OTHER”: William Lilly, Mr. William Lilly’s History of His Life and Times, from the Year 1602 to 1681 (London: Charles Baldwyn, 1715), 236.
♦ POLE STARRE, GIRDLE OF ANDROMEDA, WHALES BELLIE: Henry Briggs, Logarithmicall Arithmetike, 52.
♦ “IT MAY BE HERE ALSO NOTED THAT THE USE OF A 100 POUND”: Ibid., 11.
♦ “A SCOTTISH BARON HAS APPEARED ON THE SCENE”: Ole I. Franksen, “Introducing ‘Mr. Babbage’s Secret,’ ” APL Quote Quad 15, no. 1 (1984): 14.
♦ THE MAJORITY OF HUMAN COMPUTATION: Michael Williams, A History of Computing Technology (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1997), 105.
♦ “IT IS NOT FITTING FOR A PROFESSOR”: Michael Mästlin, quoted in Ole I. Franksen, “Introducing ‘Mr. Babbage’s Secret,’ ” 14.
♦ “THIS LADY ATTITUDINIZED”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 17.
♦ INSTALLED IT ON A PEDESTAL: Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Dancer,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds., Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 58.
♦ FROM A SPECIALTY BOOKSELLER: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 26–27.
♦ “A SIN AGAINST THE MEMORY OF NEWTON”: W. W. Rouse Ball, A History of the Study of Mathematics at Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), 117.
♦ “THE DOTS OF NEWTON, THE D’S OF LEIBNITZ”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 23.
♦ “TO THINK AND REASON IN A NEW LANGUAGE”: Ibid., 31.
♦ “A NEW KIND OF AN INSTRUMENT INCREASING THE POWERS OF REASON”: C. Gerhardt, ed., Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, vol. 7 (Berlin: Olms, 1890), 12, quoted by Kurt Gödel in “Russell’s Mathematical Logic” (1944), in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 2, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 140.
♦ “BY THE APPARENT IMPOSSIBILITY OF ARRANGING SIGNS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 25.
♦ “THE DOT-AGE OF THE UNIVERSITY”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 25.
♦ “WE HAVE NOW TO RE-IMPORT THE EXOTIC”: Charles Babbage, Memoirs of the Analytical Society, preface (1813), in Anthony Hyman, ed., Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15–16.
♦ “THE BROWS OF MANY A CAMBRIDGE MODERATOR”: Agnes M. Clerke, The Herschels and Modern Astronomy (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 144.
♦ “EVERY MEMBER SHALL COMMUNICATE HIS ADDRESS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 34.
♦ “I AM THINKING THAT ALL THESE TABLES”: Ibid., 42.
♦ “WHETHER, WHEN THE NUMBERS”: Ibid., 41.
♦ “WE MAY GIVE FINAL PRAISE”: “Machina arithmetica in qua non additio tantum et subtractio sed et multipicatio nullo, divisio vero paene nullo animi labore peragantur,” trans. M. Kormes, 1685, in D. E. Smith, A Source Book in Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), 173.
♦ “INTOLERABLE LABOUR AND FATIGUING MONOTONY”: Charles Babbage, A Letter to Sir Humphry Davy on the Application of Machinery to the Purpose of Calculating and Printing Mathematical Tables (London: J. Booth & Baldwain, Cradock & Joy, 1822), 1.
♦ “I WILL YET VENTURE TO PREDICT”: Babbage to David Brewster, 6 November 1822, in Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed., The Works of Charles Babbage (New York: New York University Press, 1989) 2:43.
♦ “CONFUSION IS WORSE CONFOUNDED”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engine,” Edinburgh Review 59, no. 120 (1834), 282; and Edward Everett, “The Uses of Astronomy,” in Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1870), 447.
♦ 250 SETS OF LOGARITHMIC TABLES: Martin Campbell-Kelly, “Charles Babbage’s Table of Logarithms (1827),” Annals of the History of Computing 10 (1988): 159–69.
♦ “WOULD AFFORD A CURIOUS SUBJECT OF METAPHYSICAL SPECULATION”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 282.
♦ “IF PAPA FAIL TO INFORM HIM”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 52.
♦ “IF THIS COULD BE ACCOMPLISHED”: Ibid., 60–62.
♦ “IT IS SCARCELY TOO MUCH TO ASSERT”: Babbage to John Herschel, 10 August 1814, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 31.
♦ “IT IS WITH NO INCONSIDERABLE DEGREE OF RELUCTANCE”: David Brewster to Charles Babbage, 3 July 1821, quoted in J. M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 94.
♦ “LOGARITHMIC TABLES AS CHEAP AS POTATOES”: Babbage to John Herschel, 27 June 1823, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 53.
♦ “PROPOSITION TO REDUCE ARITHMETIC TO THE DOMINION OF MECHANISM”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 264.
♦ “THE QUESTION IS SET TO THE INSTRUMENT”: “Address of Presenting the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society to Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 219.
♦ LARDNER’S OWN EXPLANATION OF “CARRYING”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 288–300.
♦ IN 1826 HE PROUDLY REPORTED TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY: Charles Babbage, “On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116, no. 3 (1826): 250–65.
♦ “I NEED HARDLY POINT OUT TO YOU THAT THIS CALCULATION”: Quoted in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, xxiii. The Morrisons point out that Tennyson apparently did change “minute” to “moment” in editions after 1850.
♦ “THE PROS AND CONS IN PARALLEL COLUMNS”: Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877), quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 129.
♦ “IF YOU SPEAK TO HIM OF A MACHINE FOR PEELING A POTATO”: Quoted in Doron Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001), 132.
♦ “I THINK IT LIKELY HE LIVES IN A SORT OF DREAM”: Quoted in ibid., 38.
♦ FOR A GUINEA, SHE COULD SIT: Advertisement in The Builder, 31 December 1842, http://www.victorianlondon.org/photography/adverts.htm (accessed 7 March 2006).
♦ “THE CHILD OF LOVE,…—THOUGH BORN IN BITTERNESS”: Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” canto 3, 118.
♦ “IS THE GIRL IMAGINATIVE?”: Byron to Augusta Leigh, 12 October 1823, in Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 9 (London: John Murray, 1973–94), 47.
♦ “I AM GOING TO BEGIN MY PAPER WINGS”: Ada to Lady Byron, 3 February 1828, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age (Mill Valley, Calif.: Strawberry Press, 1998), 25.
♦ “MISS STAMP DESIRES ME TO SAY”: Ada to Lady Byron, 2 April 1828, ibid., 27.
♦ “WHEN I AM WEAK”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 20 February 1835, ibid., 55.
♦ AN “OLD MONKEY”: Ibid., 33.
♦ “WHILE OTHER VISITORS GAZED”: Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 89.
♦ “I DO NOT CONSIDER THAT I KNOW”: Ada to Dr. William King, 24 March 1834, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 45.
♦ “GEM OF ALL MECHANISM”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 8 July 1834, ibid., 46.
♦ “PUNCHES HOLES IN A SET OF PASTEBOARD CARDS”: “Of the Analytical Engine,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 55.
♦ “HOW THE MACHINE COULD PERFORM THE ACT OF JUDGMENT”: Ibid., 65.
♦ “I AM AT PRESENT A CONDEMNED SLAVE”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 22 June 1837, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 70.
♦ “THE ONLY OTHER PERSON WAS A MIDDLE-AGED GENTLEMAN”: Ada to Lady Byron, 26 June 1838, ibid., 78.
♦ “I HAVE A PECULIAR WAY OF LEARNING”: Ada to Babbage, November 1839, ibid., 82.
♦ “YOU KNOW I AM BY NATURE A BIT OF A PHILOSOPHER”: Ada to Babbage, 16 February 1840, ibid., 83.
♦ “AN ORIGINAL MATHEMATICAL INVESTIGATOR”: Augustus De Morgan to Lady Byron, quoted in Betty Alexandra Toole, “Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, an Analyst and Metaphysician,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 3 (1996), 7.
♦ “I HAVE DONE IT BY TRYING”: Ada to Babbage, 16 February 1840, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 83.
♦ “OF CERTAIN SPRITES & FAIRIES”: Ada to Augustus De Morgan, 3 February 1841, ibid., 99.
♦ “WE TALK MUCH OF IMAGINATION”: Untitled essay, 5 January 1841, ibid., 94.
♦ “I HAVE ON MY MIND MOST STRONGLY”: Ada to Woronzow Greig, 15 January 1841, ibid., 98.
♦ “WHAT A MOUNTAIN I HAVE TO CLIMB”: Ada to Lady Byron, 6 February 1841, ibid., 101.
♦ “IT WILL ENABLE OUR CLERKS TO PLUNDER US”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 113. He added: “possibly we might send lightning to outstrip the culprit …”
♦ “THE DISCOVERY OF THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE”: Quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 185.
♦ “NOTIONS SUR LA MACHINE ANALYTIQUE”: Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, no. 82 (October 1842).
♦ NOT TO “PROCLAIM WHO HAS WRITTEN IT”: Ada to Babbage, 4 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 145.
♦ “ANY PROCESS WHICH ALTERS THE MUTUAL RELATION”: Note A (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 247.
♦ “THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE DOES NOT OCCUPY COMMON GROUND”: Ibid., 252.
♦ “THE ENGINE EATING ITS OWN TAIL”: H. Babbage, “The Analytical Engine,” paper read at Bath, 12 September 1888, in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 331.
♦ “WE EASILY PERCEIVE THAT SINCE EVERY SUCCESSIVE FUNCTION”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.”
♦ “THAT BRAIN OF MINE”: Ada to Babbage, 5 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 147.
♦ “HOW MULTIFARIOUS AND HOW MUTUALLY COMPLICATED”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.”
♦ “I AM IN MUCH DISMAY”: Ada to Babbage, 13 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 149.
♦ “I FIND THAT MY PLANS & IDEAS”: Ada to Babbage, 22 July 1843, ibid., 150.
♦ “I DO NOT THINK YOU POSSESS HALF MY FORETHOUGHT”: Ada to Babbage, 30 July 1843, ibid., 157.
♦ “IT WOULD BE LIKE USING THE STEAM HAMMER”: H. P. Babbage, “The Analytical Engine,” 333.
♦ “WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE CALCULATING MACHINE”: “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” in The Prose Tales of Edgar Allan Poe: Third Series (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1889), 230.
♦ “STEAM IS AN APT SCHOLAR”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), 143.
♦ “WHAT A SATIRE IS THAT MACHINE”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 11.
♦ “ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING OF ARTS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 235.
♦ “EVERY SHOWER THAT FALLS”: “On the Age of Strata, as Inferred from the Rings of Trees Embedded in Them,” from Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (London: John Murray, 1837), in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 368.
♦ “ADMITTING IT TO BE POSSIBLE BETWEEN LONDON AND LIVERPOOL”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 10.
♦ “ENCLOSED IN SMALL CYLINDERS ALONG WIRES”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 447.
♦ “A COACH AND APPARATUS”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 273.
♦ “ZENITH-LIGHT SIGNALS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 460.
♦ “THIS LED TO A NEW THEORY OF STORMS”: Ibid., 301.
♦ “A DIFFERENT SENSE OF ANACHRONISM”: Jenny Uglow, “Possibility,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, Cultural Babbage, 20.
♦ “IF, UNWARNED BY MY EXAMPLE”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 450.
♦ “THEY SAY THAT ‘COMING EVENTS’ ”: Ada to Lady Byron, 10 August 1851, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 287.
♦ “MY BEING IN TIME AN AUTOCRAT”: Ada to Lady Byron, 29 October 1851, ibid., 291.
5. A NERVOUS SYSTEM FOR THE EARTH
♦ “IS IT A FACT—OR HAVE I DREAMT IT”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1851), 283.
♦ THREE CLERKS IN A SMALL ROOM: They managed the traffic “easily, and not very continuously.” “Central Telegraph Stations,” Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers 4 (1875): 106.
♦ “WHO WOULD THINK THAT BEHIND THIS NARROW FOREHEAD”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” Quarterly Review 95 (1854): 118–64.
♦ HE WAS NEITHER THE FIRST NOR THE LAST: Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” British Journal of the History of Science 33 (2000): 455–75.
♦ ALFRED SMEE: Quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain,’ ” 471.
♦ “THE DOCTOR CAME AND LOOKED”: “Edison’s Baby,” The New York Times, 27 October 1878, 5.
♦ “THE TIME IS CLOSE AT HAND”: “The Future of the Telephone,” Scientific American, 10 January 1880.
♦ “ELECTRICITY IS THE POETRY OF SCIENCE”: Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph: Including Its Rise and Progress in the United States (New York: Putnam, 1852), v.
♦ “AN INVISIBLE, INTANGIBLE, IMPONDERABLE AGENT”: William Robert Grove, quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain,’” 463.
♦ “THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IS NOT AGREED”: Dionysus Lardner, The Electric Telegraph, revised and rewritten by Edward B. Bright (London: James Walton, 1867), 6.
♦ “WE ARE NOT TO CONCEIVE OF THE ELECTRICITY”: “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 47 (August 1873), 337.
♦ “BOTH OF THEM ARE POWERFUL”: “The Electric Telegraph,” The New York Times, 11 November 1852.
♦ “CANST THOU SEND LIGHTNINGS”: Job 38:35; Dionysus Lardner, The Electric Telegraph.
♦ COUNT MIOT DE MELITO CLAIMED: Memoirs of Count Miot de Melito, vol. 1, trans. Cashel Hoey and John Lillie (London: Sampson Low, 1881), 44n.
♦ MEANWHILE THE CHAPPES MANAGED: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1995), 52 ff.
♦ “THE DAY WILL COME”: “Lettre sur une nouveau télégraphe,” quoted in Jacques Attali and Yves Stourdze, “The Birth of the Telephone and the Economic Crisis: The Slow Death of Monologue in French Society,” in Ithiel de Sola Poolin, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 97.
♦ “CITIZEN CHAPPE OFFERS AN INGENIOUS METHOD”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 59.
♦ ONE DEPUTY NAMED A PANTHEON: Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, 17 August 1794, quoted in ibid., 64.
♦ CHAPPE ONCE CLAIMED: Taliaferro P. Shaffner, The Telegraph Manual: A Complete History and Description of the Semaphoric, Electric and Magnetic Telegraphs of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, Ancient and Modern (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1859), 42.
♦ “THEY HAVE PROBABLY NEVER PERFORMED EXPERIMENTS”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 81.
♦ “IF YOU’LL ONLY JUST PROMISE”: Charles Dibdin, “The Telegraph,” in The Songs of Charles Dibdin, Chronologically Arranged, vol. 2 (London: G. H. Davidson, 1863), 69.
♦ “THESE STATIONS ARE NOW SILENT”: Taliaferro P. Shaffner, The Telegraph Manual, 31.
♦ “ANYTHING THAT COULD BE THE SUBJECT”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 56.
♦ “ANYONE PERFORMING UNAUTHORIZED TRANSMISSIONS”: Ibid., 91.
♦ “WHAT CAN ONE EXPECT”: Ibid., 93.
♦ “OTHER BODIES THAT CAN BE AS EASILY ATTRACTED”: J. J. Fahie, A History of Electric Telegraphy to the Year 1837 (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1884), 90.
♦ “THIS SECONDARY OBJECT, THE ALARUM”: E. A. Marland, Early Electrical Communication (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1964), 37.
♦ HARRISON GRAY DYER TRIED SENDING SIGNALS: “An attempt made by Dyer to introduce his telegraph to general use encountered intense prejudice, and, becoming frightened at some of the manifestations of this feeling, he left the country.” Chauncey M. Depew, One Hundred Years of American Commerce (New York: D. O. Haynes, 1895), 126.
♦ “IT MUST BE EVIDENT TO THE MOST COMMON OBSERVER”: John Pickering, Lecture on Telegraphic Language (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1833), 11.
♦ “TELEGRAPHY IS AN ELEMENT OF POWER AND ORDER”: Quoted in Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 200.
♦ “IF THERE ARE NOW ESSENTIAL ADVANTAGES”: John Pickering, Lecture on Telegraphic Language, 26.
♦ “A SINGLE LETTER MAY BE INDICATED”: Davy manuscript, quoted in J. J. Fahie, A History of Electric Telegraphy to the Year 1837, 351.
♦ “I WORKED OUT EVERY POSSIBLE PERMUTATION”: William Fothergill Cooke, The Electric Telegraph: Was it Invented By Professor Wheatstone? (London: W. H.Smith & Son, 1857), 27.
♦ “SUPPOSE THE MESSAGE TO BE SENT”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph: With the Reports of Congress, and a Description of All Telegraphs Known, Employing Electricity Or Galvanism (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1847), 178.
♦ “THE WORDY BATTLES WAGED”: Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 21.
♦ “THE MAILS IN OUR COUNTRY ARE TOO SLOW”: Recalled by R. W. Habersham, Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals.
♦ “IT WOULD NOT BE DIFFICULT”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 70.
♦ “SEND A MESSENGER TO MR HARRIS”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” 128.
♦ AT THE STROKE OF THE NEW YEAR: Laurence Turnbull, The Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, With an Historical Account of Its Rise, Progress, and Present Condition (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1853), 87.
♦ “IN THE GARB OF A KWAKER”: “The Trial of John Tawell for the Murder of Sarah Hart by Poison, at the Aylesbury Spring Assizes, before Mr. Baron Parks, on March 12th 1845,” in William Otter Woodall, A Collection of Reports of Celebrated Trials (London: Shaw & Sons, 1873).
♦ “IN CONVEYING THE MOVES, THE ELECTRICITY TRAVELLED”: John Timbs, Stories of Inventors and Discoverers in Science and the Useful Arts (London: Kent, 1860), 335.
♦ “WHEN YOU CONSIDER THAT BUSINESS IS EXTREMELY DULL”: Quoted in Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (New York: Berkley, 1998), 55.
♦ ALEXANDER JONES SENT HIS FIRST STORY: Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph, 121.
♦ “THE FIRST INSTALMENT OF THE INTELLIGENCE”: Charles Maybury Archer, ed., The London Anecdotes: The Electric Telegraph, vol. 1 (London: David Bogue, 1848), 85.
♦ “THE RAPID AND INDISPENSABLE CARRIER”: Littell’s Living Age 6, no. 63 (26 July 1845): 194.
♦ “SWIFTER THAN A ROCKET COULD FLY”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” 138.
♦ “ALL IDEA OF CONNECTING EUROPE WITH AMERICA”: Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph, 6.
♦ “A RESULT SO PRACTICAL, YET SO INCONCEIVABLE”: “The Atlantic Telegraph,” The New York Times, 6 August 1858, 1.
♦ DERBY, VERY DULL: Charles Maybury Archer, The London Anecdotes, 51.
♦ “THE PHENOMENA OF THE ATMOSPHERE”: Ibid., 73.
♦ “ENABLES US TO SEND COMMUNICATIONS”: George B. Prescott, History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), 5.
♦ “FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES”: The New York Times, 7 August 1858, 1.
♦ “DISTANCE AND TIME HAVE BEEN SO CHANGED”: Quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain,’” 463.
♦ LIEUTENANT CHARLES WILKES: Charles Wilkes to S. F. B. Morse, 13 June 1844, in Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 60.
♦ “PROFESSOR MORSE’S TELEGRAPH IS NOT ONLY AN ERA”: Quoted in Adam Frank, “Valdemar’s Tongue, Poe’s Telegraphy,” ELH 72 (2005): 637.
♦ “WHAT MIGHT NOT BE GATHERED SOME DAY”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” 133.
♦ “MUCH IMPORTANT INFORMATION … CONSISTING OF MESSAGES”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, viii.
♦ THE GIVING, PRINTING, STAMPING, OR OTHERWISE TRANSMITTING: Agreement between Cooke and Wheatstone, 1843, in William Fothergill Cooke, The Electric Telegraph, 46.
♦ “THE DIFFICULTY OF FORMING A CLEAR CONCEPTION”: “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 336.
♦ “TELEGRAPHIC COMPANIES ARE RUNNING A RACE”: Andrew Wynter, Subtle Brains and Lissom Fingers: Being Some of the Chisel-Marks of Our Industrial and Scientific Progress (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1863), 363.
♦ “THEY STRING AN INSTRUMENT AGAINST THE SKY”: Robert Frost, “The Line-Gang,” 1920.
♦ “A NET-WORK OF NERVES OF IRON WIRE”: Littell’s Living Age 6, no. 63 (26 July 1845): 194.
♦ “THE WHOLE NET-WORK OF WIRES”: “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 333.
♦ “THE TIME IS NOT DISTANT”: Andrew Wynter, Subtle Brains and Lissom Fingers, 371.
♦ “THE TELEGRAPHIC STYLE BANISHES”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” 132.
♦ “WE EARLY INVENTED A SHORT-HAND”: Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph, 123.
♦ “THE GREAT ADVANTAGE”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 46.
♦ THE SECRET CORRESPONDING VOCABULARY: Francis O. J. Smith, THE SECRET CORRESPONDING VOCABULARY; Adapted for Use to Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph: And Also in Conducting Written Correspondence, Transmitted by the Mails, or Otherwise (Portland, Maine: Thurston, Ilsley, 1845).
♦ THE A B C UNIVERSAL COMMERCIAL ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH CODE: Examples from William Clauson-Thue, THE A B C UNIVERSAL COMMERCIAL ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH CODE, 4th ed. (London: Eden Fisher, 1880).
♦ “IT HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO THE AUTHOR’S KNOWLEDGE”: Ibid., iv.
♦ “TO GUARD AGAINST MISTAKES OR DELAYS”: Primrose v. Western Union Tel. Co., 154 U.S. 1 (1894); “Not Liable for Errors in Ciphers,” The New York Times, 27 May 1894, 1.
♦ AN ANONYMOUS LITTLE BOOK: Later reprinted, with the author identified, as John Wilkins, Mercury: Or the Secret and Swift Messenger. Shewing, How a Man May With Privacy and Speed Communicate His Thoughts to a Friend At Any Distance, 3rd ed. (London: John Nicholson, 1708).
♦ “HE WAS A VERY INGENIOUS MAN”: John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Richard Barber (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1982), 324.
♦ “HOW A MAN MAY WITH THE GREATEST SWIFTNESS”: John Wilkins, Mercury: Or the Secret and Swift Messenger, 62.
♦ “WHATEVER IS CAPABLE OF A COMPETENT DIFFERENCE”: Ibid., 69.
♦ THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE DILETTANTES: David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 189.
♦ “WE CAN SCARCELY IMAGINE A TIME”: “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” Graham’s Magazine, July 1841; Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1277.
♦ “THE SOUL IS A CYPHER”: The Literati of New York (1846), in Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, 1172.
♦ A BRIDGE BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THE OCCULT: Cf. William F. Friedman, “Edgar Allan Poe, Cryptographer,” American Literature 8, no. 3 (1936): 266–80; Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (New York: Knopf, 1926).
♦ A “KEY-ALPHABET” AND A “MESSAGE-ALPHABET”: Lewis Carroll, “The Telegraph-Cipher,” printed card 8 x 12 cm., Berol Collection, New York University Library.
♦ “ONE OF THE MOST SINGULAR CHARACTERISTICS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), 235.
♦ POLYALPHABETIC CIPHER KNOWN AS THE VIGENÈRE: Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 63 ff.
♦ “THE VARIOUS PARTS OF THE MACHINERY”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” Edinburgh Review 59, no. 120 (1834): 315–17.
♦ “NAME OF EVERYTHING WHICH IS BOTH X AND Y”: De Morgan to Boole, 28 November 1847, in G. C. Smith, ed., The Boole–De Morgan Correspondence 1842–1864 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 25.
♦ “NOW SOME ZS ARE NOT XS”: De Morgan to Boole, draft, not sent, ibid., 27.
♦ “IT IS SIMPLY A FACT”: quoted by Samuel Neil, “The Late George Boole, LL.D., D.C.L.” (1865), in James Gasser, ed., A Boole Anthology: Recent and Classical Studies in the Logic of George Boole (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 16.
♦ “THE RESPECTIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE SYMBOLS 0 AND 1”: George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London: Walton & Maberly, 1854), 34.
♦ “THAT LANGUAGE IS AN INSTRUMENT OF HUMAN REASON”: Ibid., 24–25.
♦ “UNCLEAN BEASTS ARE ALL”: Ibid., 69.
♦ “A WORD IS A TOOL FOR THINKING”: “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 359.
♦ “BABIES ARE ILLOGICAL”: Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic: Part I, Elementary (London: Macmillan, 1896), 112 and 131. And cf. Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 74.
♦ “PURE MATHEMATICS WAS DISCOVERED BY BOOLE”: Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (1918; reprinted Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004), 57.
6. NEW WIRES, NEW LOGIC
♦ “THE PERFECT SYMMETRY OF THE WHOLE APPARATUS”: James Clerk Maxwell, “The Telephone,” Rede Lecture, Cambridge 1878, “illustrated with the aid of Mr. Gower’s telephonic harp,” in W. D. Niven, ed., The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890; repr. New York: Dover, 1965), 750.
♦ GAYLORD AMOUNTED TO LITTLE MORE: “Small enough that if you walked a couple of blocks, you’d be in the countryside.” Shannon interview with Anthony Liversidge, Omni (August 1987), in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), xx.
♦ “THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT”: “In the World of Electricity,” The New York Times, 14 July 1895, 28.
♦ THE MONTANA EAST LINE TELEPHONE ASSOCIATION: David B. Sicilia, “How the West Was Wired,” Inc., 15 June 1997.
♦ “THE GOLD-BUG”: 1843; Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 71.
♦ “CIRCUMSTANCES, AND A CERTAIN BIAS OF MIND”: Ibid., 90.
♦ “ ‘THINKING MACHINE’ DOES HIGHER MATHEMATICS”: The New York Times, 21 October 1927.
♦ “A MATHEMATICIAN IS NOT A MAN”: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic (July 1945).
♦ UTTERLY CAPTIVATED BY THIS “COMPUTER”: Shannon to Rudolf E. Kalman, 12 June 1987, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
♦ “AUTOMATICALLY ADD TWO NUMBERS”: Claude Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57 (1938): 38–50.
♦ HIS “QUEER ALGEBRA”: Vannevar Bush to Barbara Burks, 5 January 1938, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
♦ “AN ALGEBRA FOR THEORETICAL GENETICS”: Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 892.
♦ EVALUATION FORTY YEARS LATER: Ibid., 921.
♦ “OFF AND ON I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON AN ANALYSIS”: Claude Shannon to Vannevar Bush, 16 February 1939, in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 455.
♦ “A CERTAIN SCRIPT OF LANGUAGE”: Leibniz to Jean Galloys, December 1678, in Martin Davis, The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (New York: Norton, 2000), 16.
♦ “HIGHLY ABSTRACT PROCESSES AND IDEAS”: Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 2.
♦ “EPIMENIDES THE CRETAN SAID”: Bertrand Russell, “Mathematical Logic Based on the Theory of Types,” American Journal of Mathematics 30, no. 3 (July 1908): 222.
♦ “IT WAS IN THE AIR”: Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 109.
♦ “HENCE THE NAMES OF SOME INTEGERS”: Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, vol. 1, 61.
♦ DOES THE BARBER SHAVE HIMSELF: “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (1910), in Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901–1950 (London: Routledge, 1956), 261.
♦ “LOOKED AT FROM THE OUTSIDE”: Kurt Gödel, “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I” (1931), in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 1, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 146.
♦ “A SCIENCE PRIOR TO ALL OTHERS”: Kurt Gödel, “Russell’s Mathematical Logic” (1944), in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 2, 119.
♦ “ONE CAN PROVE ANY THEOREM”: Kurt Gödel, “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I” (1931), 145.
♦ “CONTRARY TO APPEARANCES, SUCH A PROPOSITION”: Ibid., 151 n15.
♦ “AMAZING FACT”—“THAT OUR LOGICAL INTUITIONS”: Kurt Gödel, “Russell’s Mathematical Logic” (1944), 124.
♦ “A SUDDEN THUNDERBOLT FROM THE BLUEST OF SKIES”: Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, 166.
♦ “THE IMPORTANT POINT”: John von Neumann, “Tribute to Dr. Gödel” (1951), quoted in Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Weiner (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 133.
♦ “IT MADE ME GLAD”: Russell to Leon Henkin, 1 April 1963.
♦ “MATHEMATICS CANNOT BE INCOMPLETE”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), 158.
♦ “RUSSELL EVIDENTLY MISINTERPRETS MY RESULT”: Gödel to Abraham Robinson, 2 July 1973, in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 5, 201.
♦ HIS NAME WAS RECODED BY THE TELEPHONE COMPANY: Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (New York: Atlas, 2005), 207.
♦ “YOUR BIO-MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS”: Hermann Weyl to Claude Shannon, 11 April 1940, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
♦ “PROJECT 7”: David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 289.
♦ “APPLYING CORRECTIONS TO THE GUN CONTROL”: Vannevar Bush, “Report of the National Defense Research Committee for the First Year of Operation, June 27, 1940, to June 28, 1941,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, 19.
♦ “THERE IS AN OBVIOUS ANALOGY”: R. B. Blackman, H. W. Bode, and Claude E. Shannon, “Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems,” Summary Technical Report of Division 7, National Defense Research Committee, vol. 1, Gunfire Control (Washington D.C.: 1946), 71–159 and 166–67; David A. Mindell, “Automation’s Finest Hour: Bell Labs and Automatic Control in World War II,” IEEE Control Systems 15 (December 1995): 72–80.
♦ “BELL SEEMS TO BE SPENDING ALL HIS ENERGIES”: Elisha Gray to A. L. Hayes, October 1875, quoted in Michael E. Gorman, Transforming Nature: Ethics, Invention and Discovery (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1998), 165.
♦ “I CAN SCARCE BELIEVE THAT A MAN”: Albert Bigelow Paine, In One Man’s Life: Being Chapters from the Personal & Business Career of Theodore N. Vail (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921), 114.
♦ “I FANCY THE DESCRIPTIONS WE GET”: Marion May Dilts, The Telephone in a Changing World (New York: Longmans, Green, 1941), 11.
♦ “NO MATTER TO WHAT EXTENT A MAN”: “The Telephone Unmasked,” The New York Times, 13 October 1877, 4.
♦ “THE SPEAKER TALKS TO THE TRANSMITTER”: The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. W. D. Niven, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890; repr. New York: Dover, 1965), 744.
♦ “WHAT THE TELEGRAPH ACCOMPLISHED IN YEARS”: Scientific American, 10 January 1880.
♦ “INSTANTANEOUS COMMUNICATION ACROSS SPACE”: Telephones: 1907, Special Reports, Bureau of the Census, 74.
♦ “IT MAY SOUND RIDICULOUS TO SAY THAT BELL”: Quoted in Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 140.
♦ “AFFECTATIONS OF THE SAME SUBSTANCE”: J. Clerk Maxwell, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 155 (1865): 459.
♦ THE FIRST TELEPHONE OPERATORS: Michèle Martin, “Hello, Central?”: Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1991), 55.
♦ “THEY ARE STEADIER, DO NOT DRINK BEER”: Proceedings of the National Telephone Exchange Association, 1881, in Frederick Leland Rhodes, Beginnings of Telephony (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929), 154.
♦ “THE ACTION OF STRETCHING HER ARMS”: Quoted in Peter Young, Person to Person: The International Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge: Granta, 1991), 65.
♦ “THE TELEPHONE REMAINS THE ACME”: Herbert N. Casson, The History of the Telephone (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 296.
♦ “ANY TWO OF THAT LARGE NUMBER”: John Vaughn, “The Thirtieth Anniversary of a Great Invention,” Scribner’s 40 (1906): 371.
♦ A MONSTER OF 2 MILLION SOLDERED PARTS: G. E. Schindler, Jr., ed., A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Switching Technology 1925–1975 (Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1982).
♦ “FOR THE MATHEMATICIAN, AN ARGUMENT”: T. C. Fry, “Industrial Mathematics,” Bell System Technical Journal 20 (July 1941): 255.
♦ “THERE WAS SPUTTERING AND BUBBLING”: Bell Canada Archives, quoted in Michèle Martin, “Hello, Central?” 23.
♦ “SPEED OF TRANSMISSION OF INTELLIGENCE”: H. Nyquist, “Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed,” Bell System Technical Journal 3 (April 1924): 332.
♦ “INFORMATION IS A VERY ELASTIC TERM”: R. V. L. Hartley, “Transmission of Information,” Bell System Technical Journal 7 (July 1928): 536.
♦ “FOR EXAMPLE, IN THE SENTENCE, ‘APPLES ARE RED’ ”: Ibid.
♦ “BY THE SPEED OF TRANSMISSION OF INTELLIGENCE IS MEANT”: H. Nyquist, “Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed,” 333.
♦ “THE CAPACITY OF A SYSTEM TO TRANSMIT”: R. V. L. Hartley, “Transmission of Information,” 537.
