What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier
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♦ “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.