The Off-Center Wheel

At Bell Labs in the late 1940s, Claude Shannon was inventing the bit. He defined entropy. He gave channel capacity its math. He had already proved, in a 1937 master's thesis, that Boolean algebra could run through electrical switches, which is the sentence every digital chip is still living inside.

Late at night, in the gleaming corridors of Murray Hill, he rode a unicycle past the darkened offices. He juggled four balls while he rode. What the night watchmen made of this is not recorded.

He commuted to lectures on it. At home near Mystic Lakes he kept a player piano fed with music cut at random from rolls, supervised by a fully-dressed department store mannequin. Down the hall, a relay machine called THROBAC did long division in Roman numerals. On his desk sat a small wooden box: flip the switch, a lid lifted, a wooden hand emerged, switched it off, retracted.

He grumbled that his hands were too small to juggle five balls, so he wrote the theorem instead: (F+D)H = (V+D)N.

Then he built a unicycle with an off-center wheel, so he would bob up and down as he rode.

Then he learned to ride it smoothly.