Ralph Hartley graduated from University of Utah and went to Oxford in 1910 as one of the first Rhodes scholars, the same year as Elmer Davis and Edwin Hubble.

He returned to the US to work for Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of the Bell Telephone Company. He developed an oscillating circuit that was used in 1915 to communicate across the Atlantic by radio to the largest antenna in Europe, the Eiffel Tower. He was allowed only a few minutes to use the Eiffel Tower as it was an important military tool in World War I.

He joined a research group at the new Bell Telephone Laboratories in the mid-twenties. In September, 1927, at the International Congress of Telegraphy and Telephony at Lake Como in Italy he presented his most important paper, " Beyond Hartley's quantitative estimate of the possible amount of information was his deeper insight into how information communication transmits knowledge. In the section of his paper entitled "The Measurement of Information," he says

When we speak of the capacity of a system to transmit information we imply some sort of quantitative measure of information. As commonly used, information is a very elastic term, and it will first be necessary to set up for it a more specific meaning as applied to the present discussion. As a starting place for this let us consider what factors are involved in communication; whether conducted by wire, direct speech, writing, or any other method. In the first place, there must be a group of physical symbols, such as words, dots and dashes or the like, which by general agreement convey certain meanings to the parties communicating. In any given communication the sender mentally selects a particular symbol and by some bodily motion, as of his vocal mechanism, causes the attention of the receiver to be directed to that particular symbol. By successive selections a sequence of symbols is brought to the listener’s attention. At each selection there are eliminated all of the other symbols which might have been chosen. As the selections proceed more and more possible symbol sequences are eliminated, and we say that the information becomes more precise. For example, in the sentence, "Apples are red,*' the first word eliminates other kinds of fruit and all other objects in general. The second directs attention to some property or condition of apples, and the third eliminates other possible colors. It does not, however, eliminate possibilities regarding the size of apples, and this further information may be conveyed by subsequent selections.

(The Transmission of Information, Vol. 118, Part 2, December 18, 1926, page 874-875)

He saw the fundamental requirement of alternative possibilities before new information can be created, as well as before a choice can be made between possibilities by a free agent, which is the first stage in our two-stage model of free will.

This was the precursor of the great work by Claude Shannon twenty years later, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication." Shannon's work is often described as "Information Theory." Before reading Hartley's paper, he described what was being communicated as "intelligence," a term used by the other great Bell Labs engineer, Harry Nyquist, in the early 1920's..

Shannon also thought of using the word "uncertainty," very popular from Werner Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle." Uncertainty described the limits of information possible in a quantum mechanical measurement.

That Shannon settled on Hartley's term "information" is testimony to the significance of Hartley's profound physical insights.