James Gleick’s The Information – The Beginnings
[The author of this post is Sanket. Sanket heads Products and Strategy at DataWeave. When he manages to find time he plays with his daughter or reads two more pages of a book he’s been trying to finish since several months.]
James Gleick’s 2011 book The Information (ISBN: 0375423729, Pages: 527, Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) is an important book. It is an essential reading of our time—the fabled Information Age. The subtitle of the book is very apt: A History, a Theory, a Flood. As it suggests, the book traces the quest of human being towards understanding the nature of “information”, representing it (in various forms spoken word, phoneme, written symbols, electric pulses, etc.), and communicating it.
The rest of this blog post is not a review of the book (just go read the book instead of this!), but a series of thoughts and ideas formed upon reading the book. Just like the book, I am going to write them in three parts.
Talking Drums
While there are no distinct sub parts to the book, we can deem the initial chapters as The History. Gleick starts with a fascinating account of the “talking drums of Africa”. Drums speaking the numerous African tongues and dialects developed by illiterate primitives were used to communicate information over hundreds of miles within minutes, a feat unachievable by the fastest runner or the best horse in Europe.
Europeans used smoke signals that typically communicated binary (or at best a very limited number of) status messages. Whereas the drums communicated complex messages not just warnings and quick messages, but “songs, jokes, etc”. A drummer added sufficient contextual redundancy to ensure error correction (while such concepts as we know of them today did not exist at that time!). African languages being tonal, and the drums limited by conveying just the tonal element, the redundancy was essential to resolve context. For instance, if a drummer wanted to say something about a chicken (koko), he would drum: “koko, the one that does the sound kiokio”.
The Written Word
While the oral culture was wondrous in itself (Homer’s epics possibly evolved from oral transfer across generations), the invention of writing presented possibilities and difficulties, hitherto unheard of. Firstly, it had its detractors among which were influential people such as Plato. “Writing diminishes the faculty of memory among men. […]” Compare this to the qualm of our age: “Is Google making us stupid?”
Gleick argues on the basis of dialectics of earlier historians that writing was essential for the possibility of conscious thought. Plato and other Greek philosophers, while being skeptical about writing, developed logic through the faculty of writing. The oral culture lacked the comprehension of syllogisms as shown by sociological experiments.
Babylonians developed advanced mathematics for their time as indicated by their cuneiform tablets. Regardless of the initial resistance to writing, it marched on to produce the sciences, arts, and philosophy of the highest quality. The notion of “history”, leave aside “history of information”, was inconceivable without first inventing writing.
The Telegraph
Information also presented the problem of communication. Beacons, smoke signals, and the rest were all but limited by their range, both of vocabulary and distance. Then came along telegraph. Of course, the first telegraph systems were mechanical, wherein an intricate system of wooden arms was used to relay messages from one station to the next. The positions of the arms of the telegraph implied different messages. The number of states in which the telegraph could exist increased quite a bit. However, the efficacy of a mechanical system was quite limited.
When Morse developed his electrical telegraph system, he put a lot of thought into one of the primary problems of communication—that of “encoding”. That is to say, representing the spoken words into written symbols at one level; then representing the written symbol into a completely new form, that of electric pulses, the so called “dots and dashes”.
Morse and his student Veil wanted to improve the efficiency of the encoding. Veil visited the local newspaper office and found that, “there were 15000 E’s, followed by 12000 T’s, and only 200 Z’s”. He had indeed discovered a version of Zipf’s law. It is shown today that the Morse code is within 15% of the optimal representation of the English language.
It took a while to get the right intuition to develop the encoding. People thought about as many wires as there were letters in the alphabet. Then came the idea of using needles deflected by electromagnetism–again one per letter. The number of needles were reduced by Baron Schilling in Russia, first to five and then to just one. He used combinations of left and right signals to denote letters. Gauss and Weber came up with a binary code using the direction and the number of needle deflections.
Alfred Vail devised a simple spring-loaded lever which had the minimum functionality of closing and opening of a circuit. He called it a key. With the key an operator could send signals at the rate of hundreds per minute. Once the relay was invented (which occurred almost simultaneously), long distance electric telegraphy became a reality.
“A net-work of nerves of iron wire”
Even the electric telegraph was not beyond the scorn of some of the thinkers of the day. Apparently, someone assigned to assess the technology–he was a physician and scientist–was not impressed: “What can we expect of a few wretched wires?”
Regardless, newspapers immediately saw the benefits of the new technology. Numerous newspapers across the globe called themselves The Telegraph or a variant of it. News items were described as “Communicated by Electric Telegraph” (a la “Breaking News” or “Exclusive Story”). Very soon fire brigades and police stations started linking their communications. Shopkeepers started advertising their ability to take orders by telegraphs. That was perhaps the beginning of online shopping!
People, especially writers need an analogue, a way of describing new things in comparison to what they see in nature. The telegraph reminded them of spider webs, labyrinths and mazes. But perhaps for the first time the word network was used, as something that connects and encompasses, and can be used as a means of communication. “The whole net-work of wires, all quivering from end to end with signals of human intelligence.”