Our main aim in this paper is to evaluate from a critical historical-philosophical standpoint the intellectualIntellectual origins of ‘Landauer’s principlePrinciple’, a thesis formulated in 1961 by the IBM researcher Rolf Landauer[aut]Landauer, Rolf. He asserted that any physicalPhysical implementation of a logically irreversibleIrreversible operation such as erasing a bit of information leads to an entropy increase in the systemSystem computing that operation. Contrary to the popular narratives from the thermodynamicsThermodynamics of computation about the genesis of Landauer’s principle, we argue that this ideaIdeas was influenced, firstly, by Léon Brillouin’s[aut]Brillouin, Leon Negentropy principle, theoretically connecting information and entropy. Secondly, Landauer found in John von Neumann’s[aut]Neumann, John, von ideasIdeas in 1949 the path to connect informational processesProcess and thermal effects through the logical irreversibilityIrreversibility of computational operations. Interestingly, both Brillouin and von Neumann also gave general and ill-defined formulations of this ideaIdeas previous to the work of Landauer. Finally, alongside these two main intellectualIntellectual sources one should include, complementing historiographic proposals such as Wright, the influence of the potential double-well model of the IBM researcher John Swanson in developing a concrete model to apply this thesis. Finally, we defend reconceiving the intellectual genesis of Landauer’s principlePrinciple as a direct historical heir to a rich multiplicity of physical, informational, and computational trends of thought during the 1950s.