Comment by zengid

There's an nice anecdote from James Gleick's book _The_Information_ about Claude Shannon making a telegraph on a barbwire fence:

> "A curious child in a country town in the 1920s might naturally form an interest in the sending of messages along wires, as Claud Shannon did in Gaylord, Michigan. He saw wires every day, fencing the pastures--double strands of steel, twisted and barbed, structed from post to post. He scrounged what parts he could and jerry-rigged his own barbed-wire telegraph, tapping messages to another boy a half mile away. He used the code devised by Samuel F.B. Mores. That suited him. He like the very idea of codes--not just secret codes, but codes in the more general sense, words or symbols standing in for other words or symbols. He was an inventive and playful spirit. The child stayed with the man. All his life, he played games and invented games. He was a gadgeteer. The grown-up Shannon juggled and devised theories about juggling. When researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Bell Laboratories had to leap aside to let a unicycle pass, that was Shannon. He had more than his share of playfulness, and as a child he had a large portion of loneness, too, which along with his tinkerer's ingenuity helped motivate his barbed-wire telegraph."

[Page 168 from my uncorrected galleys copy of the book]