Excerpt:
Claude Shannon isn't well known to the public at large, but he is one of a handful of scientists and thinkers who made our world of instant communications possible. Born in Gaylord, Michigan in 1916, into a fairly well-educated and intellectually stimulating environment, his younger days were spent working with radio kits and morse code, an early start to a promising career. (Later, he would remember Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Gold Bug", with its simple cryptogram, as another early influence.)