Prologue and Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis

In the prologue to "The Information," Gleick identifies 1948 as a crucial year in the history of information and computing. It was in 1948 that a group of researchers at Bell Laboratories perfected and named the transistor, a small device intended to replace bulky vacuum tubes. Also in 1948, Claude Shannon, a mathematical researcher at Bell Labs, published an article in the Bell Labs in-house journal called "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." It was this article that introduced the word "bit" into the vocabulary of communications and set the stage for what would come to be known as information theory. At the time, the telephone was the primary means of communication in the United States, but nobody had really thought about how to quantify the amount of communication that took place.

Information came to be considered as something independent of...