The bit is younger than the transistor radio
A word coined almost as a joke in a 1948 paper turned out to be the unit every screen, signal, and gene sequence now runs on.
Claude Shannon needed a name for the smallest possible unit of information — a single yes-or-no, on-or-off, one-or-zero. A colleague at Bell Labs, John Tukey, had been using a shorthand for "binary digit" in internal memos: bit. Shannon borrowed it for his 1948 paper and it stuck to everything electronic that followed.
What made the paper matter wasn't the cute word. It was the claim underneath it: that information could be measured the same way you measure heat or mass, regardless of whether the message was a telegram, a photograph, or a symphony. Shannon showed that any signal, however rich, could be broken into bits and reassembled without losing what mattered — and that noisy channels have a hard, calculable ceiling on how much truth they can carry.
He reportedly wasn't sure what to call his central measure of uncertainty. John von Neumann told him to call it entropy, joking that since nobody understood entropy either, Shannon would always win the argument.
We still don't fully agree on what information is. We just agreed, seventy-eight years ago, on how to count it.