Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory

?My first thinking about [information theory],? Shannon said, ?was how you best improve information transmission over a noisy channel. This was a specific problem, where you?re thinking about a telegraph system or a telephone system. But when you get to thinking about that, you begin to generalize in your head about all these broader applications.? Asked whether at any point he had a ?Eureka!?-style flash of insight, Shannon deflected the simplistic question with, ?I would have, but I didn?t know how to spell the word.?