Information: The History, The Theory, The Flood by Jaes Gleick

THe book opens with the history of communicating information. The first chapter is about 'drum talk', which is a drum language used in a part of the Democratic Republic of Congo where the spoken language is Kele. European explorers had been aware for a long time that the irregular rhythms of African drums were carrying mysterious messages through the jungle. Explorers would arrive at villages where no European had been before and find that the village elders were already prepared to meet them. What they were slow to understand was why. In 1938, John Carrington became the first European to get why. Kele is a tonal language with two sharply distinct tones. Each syllable is either low or high. The drum language is spoken by a pair of drums with the same two tones. Each Kele word is spoken by the drums as a sequence of low and high beats. In passing from human Kele to drum language, all the information contained in vowels and consonants is lost. In a European language, the consonants and vowels contain all the information, and if this information were dropped there would be nothing left. But in a tonal language like Kele, some information is carried in the tones and survives the transition from human speaker to drums. They needed to add additional 'nonsense' words to make the meaning of the drumming clear, but it was essentially mimicking spoken language.
The second historical example is from France, when Claude Chappe developed a coded communication that could be viewed through telescopes--which came into being right around the time of the French Revolution. Chappe was a patriot who developed coded communications that were viewed through telescopes.
The book then segues into modern history, which begins with Samuel Morse, who made it possible to communicate almosttantaniously over long distances-=-at a time when it had taken days if not weeks to do so. Unlike Chappel, Morse was not interested in secrecy--his was the communication of business and he was wildly successful.
The theory refers to the work of Claude Shannon, the father of the science of information theory. In 1945 Shannon wrote a paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography,” which was stamped SECRET and never saw the light of day. He published in 1948 an expurgated version of the 1945 paper with the title “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The 1948 version appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal, the house journal of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and became an instant classic, at a time when the greatest leaps forward in communication were happening in the Bell Labs. It is the founding document for the modern science of information. After Shannon, the technology of information raced ahead, with electronic computers, digital cameras, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. Which is the 'flood' part of the book. All three sections are equally good, but the first two sections were less known to me. Excellent read.