Information, From Drums to Wikipedia

James Gleick begins his book with an extraordinary set piece: the drum languages of Africa. European travellers discovered these in the 1830s; messages could be transmitted at 100 miles in an hour, a speed unrivalled by any communication system in Europe. The language of the drums was based on imitating the tonal structure of the spoken language; the loss of the information carried in the vowels and consonants of the language was made up by using long fixed phrases. For example, the word “moon” was expressed in the drum languages using the tones corresponding to the phrase “the moon looks down at the earth”.