cut forward three centuries and claude shannon i'm arguing was doing the same thing with the word information. he had in his head not just shannon the other engineers the idea that they were dealing with something real, they were dealing with it when they sent it up and down telephone wires and wasn't just words and characters no a typewriter uses characters, a scribe wright's words. when you talking to a telephone, you are speaking in words, but what exactly has gone up and down the telephone wires? shannon who knew that there was electricity but it wasn't satisfactory to say we are dealing with electricity either. there was something else, not electricity or words or characters. what was it? well, we know the answer. the answer wasn't obvious. shannon was in the first person to start using the word information. and the information wasn't the only word shannon used. sometimes people would talk about intelligence. there's an early letter he writes to one of his teachers he's around needed to work on a formulation having to do with the transmission of intelligence well, wrong word. the point i

claude shannon was doing the exact same thing. he had in his head, not just shannon, but other californians, the idea that they were dealing with something real. they were dealing with it and send it up and down. and it wasn't exactly words, and it wasn't exactly characters. now, a typewriter uses characters. ascribe rightwards. when you talk into a telephone you are speaking in words, but what exactly is going up and down the telephone wires? shannon knew that it was electricity, but it wasn't really satisfactory to say we are dealing with electricity. there was something else, not electricity, not words, not characters. >> what was it? >> well, we know the answer. the answer was not obvious. shannon was not the first person to start using the word information. information was not the only word the shannon used. sometimes people would talk about intelligence. there is an early letter where he writes to one of his teachers trying to work on a general mathematical formulation of ideas having to do with the transmission of intelligen

but there was a theoretical problem how secure this was and that was assigned to claude shannon to figure out if this could be broken. in the course of that he wrote an entire, our average mathematical theory of cryptography which was immediately classified as top secret and not published four years until after his mathematical theory of communication. now we can see och they had a lot in common and shannon was thinking about converting information from one form to another from a public form to a private cayden and secret form by for communication and if converted not for the purpose of concealment but for the purpose of the efficiently sending it over the channel but yet the problem was similar. >> it is about communication. there was a moment during the war another during a cryptographer in england travel to the united states by would never vote is available when and visited bell labs and would have lunch with shannon. be there one was allowed to talk about the secret project. so while one and cracked the german code which was incredibly important. >> host: tell us about the enigma code