claude elwood shannon1.txt

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Claude Elwood Shannon was born in Petoskey, Michigan, on Sunday, April 30, 1916. His father, Claude Sr. (1862-1934), a descendant of early New Jersey settlers, was a businessman and, for a period, Judge of Probate. His mother, Mabel Wolf Shannon (1880-1945), daughter of German immigrants, was a language teacher and for a number of years Principal of Gaylord High School, in Gaylord, Michigan. 
The first sixteen years of Shannon's life were spent in Gaylord, where he attended the Public School, graduating from Gaylord High School in 1932. As a boy, Shannon showed an inclination toward things mechanical. His best subjects in school were science and mathematics, and at home he constructed such devices as model planes, a radio-controlled model boat and a telegraph system to a friend's house half a mile away. The telegraph made opportunistic use of two barbed wires around a nearby pasture. He earned spending money from a paper route and delivering telegrams, as well as repairing radios for a local department store. His childhood hero was Edison, who he later learned was a distant cousin. Both were descendants of John Ogden, an important colonial leader and the ancestor of many distinguished people. Shannon's recent hero list, without deleting Edison, includes more academic types such as Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Von Neumann.