Betty once joked, “What do you give a guy like Claude for Christmas? He liked Erector Sets, and so I bought the biggest Erector Set I could find and it was 50 bucks.” Betty was the closest thing Claude had to a collaborator.

Image Courtesy of the Shannon Family.

When Betty Moore graduated from the NJ College for Women (now part of Rutgers University), she accepted a computer position at Bell Labs over numerous job offers. Computers were support staff, mostly female, who did calculations and checked computations for the mostly male mathematicians and engineers. She worked first on microwave research and later radar. Betty met Claude Shannon in the fall 1948 and they were married the following March.

Image Courtesy of the Shannon Family.

Shannon’s 1936 master’s thesis, A Symbolic Analysis Of Relay And Switching Circuits, was hugely important. In it, 21-year-old Shannon tied the work of George Boole (nineteenth century English mathematician and namesake for Boolean algebra) and telephone switching circuits. Shannon would later be among the first to recognize the Bell System as more of a computer than a network, he called it “...a really beautiful example of a highly complex machine. This is in many ways the most complex machine that man has ever attempted, and in many ways also a most reliable one.”

Betty was better at arithmetic than Claude, but she left Bell Labs after their marriage. She went on to become an accomplished weaver and even pioneered the use of computers in weaving. Here they are with the chess-playing machine Shannon built. It could play six moves of an endgame.

Image Courtesy of the Shannon Family.

The Bell System Technical Journal, July 1948.

This 1948 paper became a blueprint for the Information Age, starting with the groundbreaking idea that information itself could be quantified. Information, Shannon explained, could be measured in values of zeros and ones, also known as binary digits, or, as his colleague John Tukey christened them “bits.” He then argued that all information should be compressed – removing all redundancies. Finally, he stated that the “noise” that threatens all communication could be eliminated with mathematical codes.

One of the first examples of artificial intelligence or machine learning robotics, Theseus is a wooden mouse with copper wire whiskers. In Shannon’s words the mouse was “a demonstration device to make vivid the ability of a machine to solve, by trial and error, a problem, and remember the solution.” Like all of his major projects, Claude worked on Theseus at home in the Shannon’s Morristown living room. Betty wired the mouse and the relays beneath the maze.

The front included miniature NJ license plates! Among Shannon’s other pet projects were rocket-powered frisbees, gas-powered pogo sticks, flame-throwing trumpets, and special unicycles that made juggling easier. Shannon’s agile mind was drawn to a variety of hobbies including jazz clarinet, poetry, and chess.

MIT Museum Collection

Gift of Mary Elizabeth Shannon on behalf of the family of Claude E. Shannon.

This machine is a desk calculator that operates only in Roman numerals, both externally and internally, a joke that appealed to his playful personality. THROBAC stands for “THrifty ROman numeral BAckward-looking Computer.” He also created a chess playing machine. Machines like this one often perplexed his colleagues at Bell Labs but they satisfied Shannon’s unwavering curiosity and desire to see if and how things could be made.

MIT Museum Collection

Gift of Mary Elizabeth Shannon on behalf of the family of Claude E. Shannon