Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"

During July and October 1948 Claude Shannon of MIT and Bell Labs published his Mathematical Theory of Communication. The theory determined how much information could be sent per unit of time in a system with a given, limited amount of transmission power. In this work Shannon also introduced the term "bit" into the literature, and provided its current meaning in the context of information.  Shannon attributed the origin of this word usage to John W. Tukey, who had written a Bell Labs memo on January 9, 1947 in which Tukey contracted "binary digit" to simply "bit".