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HARTLEY, Ralph Vinton Lyon (b.1888). "Transmission of information." In Bell System Technical Journal 7 (1928): 535-63.
Details
HARTLEY, Ralph Vinton Lyon (b.1888). "Transmission of information." In Bell System Technical Journal 7 (1928): 535-63.
4o. Original blue printed wrappers; boxed.
In the first paragraph of his 1948 paper on "A mathematical theory of communication", Claude Shannon acknowledged his debt to works by Nyquist and Hartley. Hartley, a research engineer at Bell Laboratories, wanted to establish a quantitative measure to compare the capacities of various types of communications systems -- telephone, telegraph, television, etc. -- to transmit information. "Hartley distinguished between psychological and physical considerations -- that is, between meaning and information. The latter he defined as the number of possible messages, independent of whether they are meaningful. He used this definition of information to give a logarithmic law for the transmission of information in discrete messages: H = K log sn where H is the amount of information, K is a constant, n is the number of symbols in the message, s is the size of the set of symbols, and therefore sn is the number of possible symbolic sequences of the specified length n. This law included the case of telegraphy and subsumed Nyquist's earlier law..."
Hartley had arrived at many of the most important ideas of the mathematical theory of communication: the difference between information and meaning, information as a physical quantity, the logarithmic rule for transmission of information, and the concept of noise as an impediment in the transmission of information (Aspray, "The Scientific Conceptualization of Information," Annals of the History of Computing 7 (1985): 121-22). OOC 316.
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In the first paragraph of his 1948 paper on "A mathematical theory of communication", Claude Shannon acknowledged his debt to works by Nyquist and Hartley. Hartley, a research engineer at Bell Laboratories, wanted to establish a quantitative measure to compare the capacities of various types of communications systems -- telephone, telegraph, television, etc. -- to transmit information. "Hartley distinguished between psychological and physical considerations -- that is, between meaning and information. The latter he defined as the number of possible messages, independent of whether they are meaningful. He used this definition of information to give a logarithmic law for the transmission of information in discrete messages: H = K log s
Hartley had arrived at many of the most important ideas of the mathematical theory of communication: the difference between information and meaning, information as a physical quantity, the logarithmic rule for transmission of information, and the concept of noise as an impediment in the transmission of information (Aspray, "The Scientific Conceptualization of Information," Annals of the History of Computing 7 (1985): 121-22). OOC 316.
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