In the late 1940’s Claude Shannon was developing information theory and coding as a mathematical model for communication. At the same time, Richard Hamming, a colleague of Shannon’s at Bell Laboratories, found a need for error correction in his work on computers. Parity checking was already being used to detect errors in the calculations of the relay-based computers of the day, and Hamming realized that a more sophisticated pattern of parity checking allowed the correction of single errors along with the detection of double errors. The codes that Hamming devised, the single-error-correcting binary Hamming codes and their single-error-correcting, double-error-detecting extended.
