Drums that talk --
The persistence of the word --
Two wordbooks --
To throw the powers of thought into wheel-work --
A nervous system for the Earth --
New wires, new logic --
Information theory --
The informational turn --
Entropy and its demons --
Life's own code --
Into the meme pool --
The sense of randomness --
Information is physical --
After the flood --
New news every day.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.