“It was Claude Shannon who made the final synthesis, who defined the concept of information and effectively solved the problem of noise. It was Shannon who was credited with gathering the threads into a new science. But he had important predecessors at Bell Labs, two engineers who had shaped his thinking since he discovered their work as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, who were the first to consider how information might be put on a scientific footing, and whom Shannon’s landmark paper singled out as pioneers.”