Engineering & invention · Science
Ralph Hartley
Information-transmission researcher
Who they are
Ralph Hartley developed an early quantitative approach to information transmission, published in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1928. Claude Shannon explicitly acknowledged that earlier work when introducing his 1948 theory. Hartley therefore belongs to the history of measuring communication, a foundation for understanding signals and the limits of inference from them.
His work supplies part of the technical background for separating a measurable signal from its meaning or possible sender.
Selected contributions
Selected works
Academic paper · 1928 · Published journal article
Transmission of Information
Hartley’s early treatment of information transmission is one of the predecessors acknowledged by Claude Shannon in 1948. The linked journal archive identifies the original 1928 article and offers its scan.
Reading scope & citation
Journal scan catalogue, title, R. V. L. Hartley byline, volume 7(3), pages 535–563. Scan and OCR download options were present; OCR retrieval failed. The content summary also relies on the already inspected introduction to Shannon’s paper.
In the timeline
Biography sources
- A Mathematical Theory of Communication ↗Bell System Technical Journal 27; corrected reprint hosted by MIT
- Transmission of Information ↗Bell System Technical Journal; Internet Archive journal collection