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Teach history through inventors
Accepting a prize in Japan late in life, Claude Shannon laid out how he thought history is taught wrong, at least in the United States. Most of the time goes to political leaders and wars. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, those whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion.
The same talk made the case for engineers and for encouraging more people to become them. The discoveries of science are wonderful achievements in themselves, but they would not affect the life of the common man without the intermediate efforts of engineers and inventors. Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell are the examples.
Shannon's own career stood on that bridge between theory and application, with equal joy in equations and construction.
How did Edison turn invention into industry?
In 1876 Edison opened a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, staffed by a team of researchers and machinists. There his group developed a practical incandescent bulb in 1879. His company then built the Pearl Street Station in Manhattan, which began supplying electric power in 1882.
How did Bell's telephone become Bell Labs?
Alexander Graham Bell received his telephone patent in 1876, and the Bell Telephone Company was formed in 1877. Its successor, AT&T, consolidated its research groups with those of Western Electric in 1925 to create Bell Telephone Laboratories. Shannon worked there from 1941 to 1956.
How did Maxwell's physics become radio?
James Clerk Maxwell's equations of 1865 predicted that electromagnetic waves exist. Heinrich Hertz produced and detected such waves in laboratory experiments in 1887. Guglielmo Marconi turned them into a wireless telegraph in the 1890s and sent a signal across the Atlantic in 1901.