Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 30, 1974) was an American engineer and science administrator, known for his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and idea of the memex—seen as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web. His name is pronounced Van-NEE-var as in "receiver" (). He was unrelated to the Bush political family.

Career

Born in Everett, Massachusetts, Bush was educated at Tufts College, graduating in 1913. He earned a doctorate in engineering from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1917. His PhD advisor was Arthur Edwin Kennelly. During World War I he worked with the National Research Council in developing improved techniques for detecting submarines. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1919, and was a professor there from 1923–32. He constructed a Differential Analyser, an analog computer that could solve differential equations with as many as 18 independent variables. An offshoot of the work at MIT was the birth of digital circuit design theory by one of Bush's graduate students, Claude Shannon. Bush became vice-president and dean of engineering at MIT from 1932–38.

In 1939 Bush accepted the prestigious appointment as president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which awarded large sums annually for research. As president, Bush was able to influence the direction of research in the U.S. towards military objectives and could informally advise the government on scientific matters. In 1939 he fully moved into the political arena with his appointment as chairman of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

In 1940, Bush became chairman of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Bush had pressed for the creation of the NDRC because he had seen during World War I the lack of cooperation between civilian scientists and the military. Bush managed to get a meeting with the President on 12 June, 1940 and took a single sheet of paper describing the proposed agency. Roosevelt approved it in ten minutes. Government officials then complained that Bush was making a grab for power, by-passing them. Bush later agreed: "That, in fact, is exactly what it was." This co-ordination of scientific effort was instrumental in the Allies winning the Second World War. Alfred Loomis said that "Of the men whose death in the summer of 1940 would have been the greatest calamity for America, the President is first, and Dr. Bush would be second or third."

In 1941 the NDRC was subsumed into the Office of Scientific Research and Development with Bush as director, which controlled the Manhattan Project and which also coordinated wartime scientific research during World War II. In July 1945, his report Science, The Endless Frontier recommended the creation of what would become in 1950 the National Science Foundation, in an effort to cement the ties between science, industry and the military which had been forged during the war. Bush was also a co-founder of the defense contractor Raytheon.

In 1943, he received the AIEE's Edison Medal 'For his contribution to the advancement of electrical engineering, particularly through the development of new applications of mathematics to engineering problems, and for his eminent service to the nation in guiding the war research program.' The Vannevar Bush Award was created by the National Science Foundation in 1980 to honor contributions to public service.

One of Bush's PhD students at MIT was Frederick Terman who was instrumental in the genesis of "Silicon Valley".

The Memex

He introduced the concept of what he called the memex in the 1930s, a microfilm-based "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility."

After thinking about the potential of augmented memory for several years, Bush set out his thoughts at length in the essay "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. In the article, Bush predicted that "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." A few months later (10 September 1945) Life magazine published a condensed version of "As We May Think," accompanied by several illustrations showing the possible appearance of a memex machine and its companion devices. This version of the essay was subsequently read by both Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, and inspired them to independently formulate the various ideas that became hypertext.

As scholars like Buckland have proven, the memex was severely flawed because Bush did not understand either information science or microfilm very well. Also, Bush never bothered to do much research on previous systems. He was ignorant of the microfilm-based workstation proposed by Leonard Townsend in 1938, as well as the more detailed microfilm- and electronics-based selector patented by Emmanuel Goldberg in 1931.

Although his work has since served as a rallying point for librarianship and many social sciences, he despised certain areas of the humanities and social sciences, where prominent work appeared to support radical political views. For example, he badly weakened American anthropology when he choked off a large part of its funding in the 1930s. He was not involved in the library community, where he might have found support refining his ideas. But the memex is still an important accomplishment, because it directly inspired the development of hypertext technology.

Eponym

Vannevar Bush has an unfortunate eponym "vannevar", owing to his habit of overestimating technological challenges. ^* He asserted that a nuclear weapon could not be made small enough to fit in the nose of a missile as in an ICBM. In his book "Modern Arms and Free Men", published in 1949, he originally predicted that it would be ten more years before the USSR developed nuclear weapons. The book was on the press when the West detected the first Soviet nuclear test in late August 1949. The presses were duly stopped, and that prediction was erased from the published version.

He also predicted "electronic brains" the size of the Empire State Building with a Niagara Falls–scale cooling system. (This does not look quite so farfetched if Google's entire collection of servers is considered as a single "brain", although it still falls well short of Bush's prediction.)

Bush warned fellow engineers and politicians of the dangers of sending humans in space. He privately, and then publicly, opposed NASA's manned space program and took the unpopular stance of attacking the moon exploration goals set forth by president John F. Kennedy at a time when the U.S. was nearly perfectly united in supporting it. His opposition was based on fiscal reasons and on his calculated judgment that human lives would be lost in what he considered to be an extremely risky adventure, from an engineering standpoint. Again, this conservative stance reinforced his reputation as a bad prophet in technological matters, when Project Apollo and the two previous programs were completed without death or injury in space (although three astronauts died on the ground in the disastrous Apollo 1 fire). His rational warnings were largely ignored then, and were mostly forgotten by the time the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters took 7 lives each in 1986 and 2003, respectively.

Personal life

On 5 September 1916 he married Phoebe Davis in Chelsea, Massachusetts and had two sons Richard Davis Bush and John Hathaway Bush. Vannevar Bush died from pneumonia after suffering a stroke in 1974 in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Publications

1922, Principles of Electrical Engineering.
1929, Operational Circuit Analysis.
1945, July, "As We May Think", Atlantic Monthly.
1945, Science: The Endless Frontier, a report to president Roosevelt outlining his proposal for post-war U.S. science and technology policy
1946, Endless Horizons, a collection of papers and addresses.
1949, "Modern Arms and Free Men", a discussion of the role of science in preserving democratic institutions.
1967, Science Is Not Enough, essays.
1970, "Pieces of the Action", an examination of science and the state.

Biography

Zachary, G. Pascal, 1999. Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century. MIT Press.

External links

References

Buckland, Michael K. "Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, And Vannevar Bush's Memex". Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43, no. 4 (May 1992): 284–294
Nyce, James M.; Kahn, Paul (eds.) "From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine". San Diego, London (...) 1991. reprint of all of Bush's texts regarding Memex accompanied by related Sources and Studies

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