Mediascapes: 19th C. US Railroads, Whole Earth Catalog Cover, The Searchers

A few items that I've stumbled upon over the years. Every month or two I'll throw something new and weird up here.

1970s oral history with Claude Shannon conducted by Fritz Hagemeyer.  I also have located a reel to reel oral history conducted with Shannon in the 1950s but it's in pretty bad shape. If you have interest in sharing some combo of technical and financial resources to have it restored, please get in touch.

1950s unpublished lecture by Claude Shannon on "Creative Thinking." 

1949 letter from L. Ron Hubbard to Claude Shannon. Hubbard tried to cultivate friendships with a number of leading engineers, including Shannon, Pierce, and Norbert Wiener. Other correspondence indicates that Shannon was quite taken with scientology for a period.

Erhard Schüttpelz's major work "Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven." This had been available for free download from the DFG in Germany but that link is now dead. 

Figure Below: Excerpt from contact sheets depicting David Hagelbarger and Claude Shannon at work at Bell Labs in the 1950s. The two men shared a lab and built  automata loosely based on the writings of Edgar Allen Poe. These automata later appeared in World's Fairs and were discussed by Jacques Lacan and others.