Leibniz studied binary centuries before silicon needed it
Binary notation writes numbers with only two symbols—usually 0 and 1—in base two. Each digit is a bit. Thomas Harriot and later Gottfried Leibniz examined the system in early modern Europe, long before computers made bits unavoidable.
Computers favour base two because a circuit that only has to tell two states apart is simple to build and resists electrical noise. Any mechanism with two exclusive conditions can hold a bit: early machines used switches and punched holes, modern chips use two voltages and disks use magnetic polarity. Which state counts as one depends on the design, not on whether it is "on."
Two-way systems are ancient. Egyptian scribes measured grain with Horus-Eye fractions, expressing parts of a hekat as sums of halves, quarters and so on down to sixty-fourths, and their doubling method of multiplication, seen in the Rhind Papyrus of about 1650 BC, follows the binary digits of one factor. China's I Ching, from the 9th century BC, built eight trigrams and 64 hexagrams from broken and solid lines, and the Song scholar Shao Yong arranged them in an order that reads as 0 to 63. Pingala in India, around the 2nd century BC, catalogued poetic metres as patterns of light and heavy syllables. Yoruba Ifá divination uses a chain of eight seeds giving 256 signs, and Mangarevans in Polynesia mixed binary and decimal counting before 1450.
In Europe, Francis Bacon proposed in 1605 hiding letters as two-valued variations in type, noting that bells, lights or musket shots would serve as well. John Napier described a letter-based binary reckoning in 1617, and Thomas Harriot explored the system in papers he never published. Gottfried Leibniz wrote over a hundred manuscripts on it, beginning with "On the Binary Progression" in 1679 and publishing his best-known account in 1703. Through the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet he saw the I Ching as an independent parallel discovery, and he read one and zero as an image of creation out of nothing.
George Boole's 1854 algebra of logic later became the basis of circuit design. Claude Shannon's 1937 MIT thesis built Boolean logic and binary arithmetic from relays and switches, George Stibitz assembled his relay adder at his kitchen table the same year, and Konrad Zuse's Z1 of 1935–38 used binary floating-point numbers.
Source: Binary number
