Kolmogoroff and randomness, and Charles Bennett and quantum information theory. The scope of the book can be seen by the topics treated in subsequent chapters: Samuel Morse and the development of the telegraph and telephone and the prior invention of the French optical telegraph, George Boole and logic, Vannevar Bush and the differential analyzer, Kurt Gödel and computability, Alan Turing and both computability and cryptography, Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, James Watson and Francis Crick and the genetic code, Richard Dawkins and memes, Gregory Chaitin and A.N. It is only in the fourth chapter that many readers will feel on familiar ground with lengthy and charmingly told accounts of the lives and accomplishments of Charles Babbage, Henry Briggs, John Napier, and Ada Lovelace. The Information opens with an account of the African drum language first described by English explorers and missionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries, and continues with first the development of the written word and then the evolution of English dictionaries, finishing with the development of what he describes as "the greatest word book of all," the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Even those familiar with Gleick's earlier books for the general reader- Chaos: Making a New Science, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and Isaac Newton, which were all Pulitzer Prize finalists-will be impressed by the range of topics in his present book. In this manner, in the first two pages of his prologue, James Gleick begins his comprehensive account of our present information age and the many relevant historical events leading up to it. In the same year, the July and October issues of the Bell System Technical Journal contained a 79-page article "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" by a 32-year-old employee named Claude Shannon. In April 1948, Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of a small electronic semiconductor, which the following month, following the advice of a committee, they called a transistor-a hybrid of the terms transconductance and varistor.
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