Why is Claude Shannon associated with the first published use of the term bit?
Consider a simple telephone conversation: A person (message source) speaks into a telephone receiver (encoder), which converts the sound of the spoken word into an electrical signal. This electrical signal is then transmitted over telephone lines (channel) subject to interference (noise). When the signal reaches the telephone receiver (decoder) at the other end of the line it is converted back into vocal sounds. Finally, the recipient (message receiver) hears the original message.
Claude Shannon is associated with the first published use of the term "bit" because he introduced it in his landmark 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," published in the Bell System Technical Journal.123
In this work, Shannon defined the bit as a unit for measuring information when using a logarithmic base of 2, serving as a shorthand for "binary digit". While Shannon is credited with bringing the term into general circulation, he explicitly acknowledged in the paper that the word was suggested to him by the American mathematician John W. Tukey. Tukey had previously employed "bit" in a 1947 Bell Labs memorandum as a binary counterpart to the decimal "digit".1