8 A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits (1938)

Electric wires connected by switches either conduct electricity or don't, depending on the inter-connection pattern and the settings of the switches. As early as 1886, the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce had recognized the relation of logical connectives to series and parallel electric circuits. But it was Claude Shannon (1916-2001) who exploited the electric interpretation of Boole's laws of thought. Shannon had tinkered with electric circuits while growing up in rural northern Michigan and had built a barbed wire telegraph to a friend's house. By the 1930s the ra­dio and telephone industries were flourishing, and Shannon studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. He encountered Boole's writings in a philosophy class, and as an MIT graduate student he made the connection between the two binary-valued systems—thus giving birth to a profoundly elegant methodology for managing complex circuit design problems.