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Vannevar Bush ( /væˈniːvɑr/ van-NEE-var; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator known for his work on analog computers, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founder of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer analogous to the structure of the World Wide Web. He is credited with inspiring the creation of the New Media.

For his master's thesis, Bush invented and patented a "profile tracer", a device based on two bicycle wheels that mapped the terrain over which it traveled. It was the first of a string of inventions. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1919. He founded the company now known as Raytheon in 1922. Starting in 1927, Bush constructed a differential analyzer, an analog computer with some digital components that could solve differential equations with as many as 18 independent variables. An offshoot of the work at MIT was the beginning of digital circuit design theory. Bush became Vice President of MIT and Dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932.

Bush was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1938, and soon became its chairman. As Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), and later Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), Bush coordinated the activities of some six–thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. Bush was a well-known policymaker and public intellectual during World War II, when he was in effect the first presidential science advisor. As head of NDRC and OSRD, he initiated the Manhattan Project, and was a driving force behind it receiving the top priority from the highest levels of government. In his report to the President Science, The Endless Frontier, Bush called for an expansion of government support for science, and he pressed for the creation of the Legislation to create the National Science Foundation.

In July 1945, Bush published As We May Think in the Atlantic Monthly. 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".

Early life and work

Vannevar Bush was born in Everett, Massachusetts on March 11, 1890, the third child and only son of Perry Bush, the local Universalist pastor, and his wife Emma Linwood née Paine. He was named after John Vannevar, an old friend of the family who had attended Tufts College with Perry. The family moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1892, and Bush graduated from Chelsea High School in 1909. Bush attended Tufts College, like his father before him. A popular student, he was vice president of his sophomore class, and president of his junior class. During his senior year, he managed the football team. He became a member of the fraternity Alpha Tau Omega, and dated Phoebe Clara Davis, who also came from Chelsea. Tufts allowed students to gain a master's degree in four years simultaneously with a bachelor's degree, so Bush took this route. For his master's thesis, he invented and patented a "profile tracer", a device for assisting surveyors. It was based on two bicycle wheels, and had a pen that plotted the terrain over which it traveled. It was the first of a string of inventions. On graduation in 1913 he therefore received both bachelor of science and master of science degrees.

After graduation, Bush worked at General Electric (GE) in Schenectady, New York, for $14 a week. As a "test man", his job was to test the equipment in order to ensure that it was safe. He transferred to GE's plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to work on high voltage transformers, but Bush and the other test men were suspended as punishment after a fire broke out at the plant. Bush returned to Tufts in October 1914 to teach mathematics for $300 a term. This was increased to $400 per term in February 1915. He spent the summer break in 1915 working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as an electrical inspector. Bush was awarded a $1,500 scholarship to study at Clark University as a doctoral student of Arthur Gordon Webster, but Webster wanted Bush to study acoustics. Bush preferred to quit rather than study a subject he was not interested in. He then enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) electrical engineering program. Spurred by the need for enough financial security to marry, Bush finished his thesis, entitled Oscillating-Current Circuits: An Extension of the Theory of Generalized Angular Velocities, with Applications to the Coupled Circuit and the Artificial Transmission Line, in April 1916. He married Phoebe in August. Their marriage produced two sons: Richard Davis Bush and John Hathaway Bush. He received his doctorate in engineering from MIT and Harvard University jointly in 1917, after a dispute with his adviser Arthur Edwin Kennelly, who tried to demand more work from him.

Bush accepted a job with Tufts, where he became involved with the American Radio and Research Corporation (AMRAD), which began broadcasting music from the campus on March 8, 1916. The station owner, Harold Power hired Bush to run the company's laboratory, at a salary greater than that which Bush drew from Tufts. During World War I Bush worked with the National Research Council, attempting to develop a means of detecting submarines magnetically. Bush's device worked as designed, but only worked from a wooden ship, not a metal one like a destroyer, and attempts, at the U.S. Navy's insistence, to get it to work on a metal ship failed.

Meccano differential analyser in use at the Cambridge University Mathematics Laboratory, c. 1937. Douglas Hartree, who visited Bush in his laboratory in 1933, built it based it upon Bush's design.

Bush left Tufts, but not AMRAD, in 1919, and joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT, where he worked under Dugald C. Jackson. Bush wrote an introductory textbook, Principles of Electrical Engineering, in 1922. AMRAD had prospered during the war through being awarded large military contracts, but these were soon cancelled when the war ended. Bush attempted to reverse the company's fortunes by developing a thermostatic switch invented by Al Spencer, an AMRAD technician, on his own time. Bush failed to interest AMRAD's management in the device, but they told him that they had no objection to it being sold. Bush found backers including Laurence K. Marshall and Richard S. Aldrich to create a company called Spencer Thermostat, which hired Bush as a consultant. The new company soon had revenues in excess of a million dollars. In 1924, Bush and Marshall teamed up with physicist Charles G. Smith, who had invented a device called the S-tube. This enabled radios, which had previously required two different types of batteries, to operate from mains power. Marshall raised $25,000 to set up the American Appliance Company on July 7, 1922, to market the invention, with Bush and Smith among its five directors. Bush made a lot of money from the venture. The company, now known as Raytheon, ultimately became a large electronics company and defense contractor.

Starting in 1927, Bush constructed a differential analyser, an analog computer that could solve differential equations with as many as 18 independent variables. This arose from work done by one of Bush's masters students, Herbert R. Stewart, who, at Bush's suggestion, created a device for solving first-order differential equations known as the product integraph in 1925. Another student, Harold Hazen, then proposed extending the device to handle second-order differential equations, which are more difficult to solve, but more common in physics, and Bush immediately recognized the potential of such an invention. Under Bush's supervision, Hazen was able to construct the differential analyzer, a table-like array of shafts and pens that mechanically simulated and plotted the desired equation. Unlike earlier designs that were purely mechanical, it had both electrical and mechanical components. Among the engineers who used the differential analyzer was Edith Clarke from General Electric, who used it to solve problems relating to electric power transmission. For its development, Bush was awarded the Franklin Institute's Louis E. Levy Medal in 1928.

An offshoot of the work at MIT was the beginning of digital circuit design theory by one of Bush's graduate students, Claude Shannon. In 1935, Bush was approached by OP-20-G, which was searching for a electronic device to aid in codebreaking. Bush was paid a $10,000 fee to design a device called a Rapid Analytical Machine (RAM). The project went over budget and was not delivered until 1938, and was found to be unreliable in service. Nonetheless, it was an important step on the road to creating such a device.

The reform of the administration of MIT began in 1930 with the appointment of Karl T. Compton as president. Bush and Compton soon clashed over the issue of limiting the amount of outside consultancy professors were allowed to do, a battle Bush quickly lost; but the two men soon built a solid professional relationship. Compton appointed Bush to the newly-created post of vice president in 1932. That year Bush also became the dean of the MIT School of Engineering. The two positions came with a salary of $12,000 plus $6,000 for expenses per annum.

World War II period

A 1940 meeting at Berkeley with (from left to right) Ernest O. Lawrence, Arthur H. Compton, Bush, James B. Conant, Karl T. Compton, and Alfred L. Loomis

Carnegie Institute

In May 1938, Bush accepted a prestigious appointment as president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW), which, with an endowment of $33 million, annually spent $1.5 million in research, most of which was carried out at its eight major laboratories. Bush became its president on 1 January 1939, with an annual salary of $25,000. Bush was now able to influence research policy in the United States at the highest level, and could informally advise the government on scientific matters. Bush soon discovered that the CIW had serious financial problems, and he had to ask the Carnegie Corporation for additional funding.

Bush clashed with Cameron Forbes, CIW's chairman of the board, over who was in charge, and with his predecessor, John Merriam, who continued to offer unwanted advice. A major embarrassment to both was Harry H. Laughlin, the head of the Eugenics Record Office. Merriam had attempted to curtail Laughlin's activities without success, but Bush made it a priority to remove a man he regarded as a scientific fraud. One of his first acts was to ask for a review of Laughlin's work. In June 1938 he asked Laughlin to retire, offering an annuity, which Laughlin reluctantly accepted. The Eugenics Record Office was renamed the Genetics Record Office, its funding was drastically cut, and it was closed completely in 1944. When Senator Robert Reynolds attempted to get Laughlin reinstated, Bush stuck to his guns, informing the trustees that an inquiry into Laughlin would "show him to be physically incapable of directing an office, and an investigation of his scientific standing would be equally conclusive."

Bush wanted the institute to concentrate on hard science. He gutted Carnegie's archeology program, setting the field back many years in the United States. He saw little value in the humanities and social sciences, and slashed funding for Isis. He later explained that "I have a great reservation about these studies where somebody goes out and interviews a bunch of people and reads a lot of stuff and writes a book and puts it on a shelf and nobody ever reads it."

NACA

On August 23, 1938, Bush was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Because of the illness of its chairman, Joseph Sweetman Ames, Bush, as vice chairman, soon had to act in his place. In December 1938, NACA asked for $11 million to establish a new aeronautical research laboratory at Sunnyvale, California to supplement the existing Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. The California location was chosen due to the proximity to some of the largest aviation corporations. This was supported by the Chief of the United States Army Air Corps, Major General Henry H. Arnold, and by the head of the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics, Rear Admiral Arthur B. Cook, who between them were planning to spend $225 million on new aircraft in the year ahead. However, Congress was not convinced of its value. Bush had to appear before the Senate Appropriations Committee on April 5, 1939. It was a frustrating experience for Bush, who had never appeared before Congress before, and the Senators were not swayed by his arguments. Further lobbying was required before funding for the new center, now known as the Ames Research Center, was finally approved. By this time, war had broken out in Europe, and the inferiority of American aircraft engines was apparent, so NACA asked for funds for a third center in Ohio, now known as the Glenn Research Center. Following Ames' retirement in October 1939, Bush became Chairman of NACA, with George J. Mead as his deputy. Bush remained a member of NACA through 1948.

NDRC

During World War I, Bush had become aware of the poor cooperation among civilian scientists and the military. Concerned about the lack of coordination in scientific research and the requirements of defense mobilization, Bush proposed a general directive agency in the federal government, which he often discussed with his colleagues Karl T. Compton; James B. Conant, the President of Harvard University; and Frank B. Jewett, President of the National Academy of Sciences and chairman of the Board of Directors of Bell Laboratories.Bush had the secretary of NACA began prepare a draft of the proposed National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), as Bush called it, to be presented to Congress. But after the Germans invaded France, Bush decided speed was important and approached President Franklin D. Roosevelt directly. Through Frederic Delano, he 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 15 minutes, writing "OK - FDR" on the sheet.

NDRC was functioning, with Bush as chairman, even before the agency was made official by order of the Council of National Defense on June 27, 1940. Funding came from President's emergency funds, so the organization functioned financially on a hand to mouth basis. Bush appointed four leading scientists to NRDC: Conant, Compton, Jewitt and Richard C. Tolman, dean of the graduate school at Caltech. Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen, Sr. and Brigadier General George V. Strong represented the military. That the civilians already knew each other well enabled the organization to hit the ground running. The NRDC established itself at the Administration Building, Carnegie Institution of Washington. Each member committee was assigned an area of responsibility. Tolman was responsible for armor and ordnance; Conant for chemicals and explosives; Jewitt for communications and transportation; Compton for controls and instrumentation, including radar; and Conway Peyton Coe, the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, for patents and inventions. Bush handled coordination, and a small number of projects which reported to him directly, such as the S-1 Uranium Committee. Compton's deputy, 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."

Bush was fond of saying that "if he made any important contribution to the war effort at all, it would be to get the Army and Navy to tell each other what they were doing." Bush established a cordial relationship with the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, and his assistant Harvey H. Bundy, who made it his mission to swiftly resolve any instances of military intransigence that Bush found frustrating. Bundy found Bush "impatient" and "vain", but "one of the most important, able men I ever knew". Bush's relationship with the Navy was more turbulent. Bowen, the Director of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), saw the NDRC as a bureaucratic rival intent on supplanting rather than supplementing the activities of the NRL, and recommended that the NDRC be abolished. A series of bureaucratic battles saw Bowen come off second best, with the NRL being placed under the Bureau of Ships, and an unsatisfactory fitness report being placed in his personnel file by the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox. However, Bowen would try again after the war.

On August 31, 1940, Bush met with Henry Tizard, and arranged a series of meetings between the NDRC and the Tizard Mission. At one such meeting hosted by Loomis at the Wardman Park Hotel on September 19, 1940, the Americans described the microwave research done by Loomis and Compton earlier that year. The Americans had an experimental 10 cm wavelength short wave radar but had to admit that it had not enough transmitter power and they were at a dead end. Taffy Bowen and John Cockcroft of the Tizard Mission then revealed the cavity magnetron, a device far in advance of anything the Americans had ever seen, with an amazing power output of around 10 KW at 10 cm. If it could be mass produced and installed in aircraft, it would enable them to spot the periscope of a surfaced submarine at night. To exploit the invention, Bush decided to create a special laboratory. The NDRC allocated the new laboratory a budget of $455,000 for its first year. Loomis suggested that it be run by the Carnegie Institution, but Bush convinced him that it would best be run by MIT. The Radiation Laboratory, as it came to be known, tested its airborne radar from an Army B-18 on March 27, 1940. By mid-1941, it had developed SCR-584 radar, a mobile radar fire control system for antiaircraft guns.

OSRD

On 28 June 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8807, which created the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), with Bush as its director. Conant succeeded him as Chairman of NDRC, which was subsumed into the OSRD. The OSRD received funding from Congress, and was therefore on a firmer financial footing than NDRC had been. The OSRD had the resources and the authority to develop and produce weapons and technologies with or without the military. Furthermore, the OSRD had a broader mandate than NDRC, moving into more areas, such as medical research. It contributed to many advances in medicine, including the mass production of penicillin and sulfa drugs. The OSRD grew to 850 full time employees, and produced between 30,000 and 35,000 reports. It was involved in some 2,500 contracts, worth in excess of $536 million.

Bush's method of management at OSRD was to direct overall policy while delegating supervision of divisions to qualified colleagues and letting them do their jobs without interference. He attempted to interpret the mandate of OSRD as narrowly as possible to avoid overtaxing his office and to prevent duplicating the efforts of other agencies. Bush would often ask: "Will it help to win a war; this war?" Other problems were obtaining adequate funds from the President and Congress and determining apportionment of research among government, academic, and industrial facilities. However, his most difficult problems, and also greatest successes, were keeping the confidence of the military, which distrusted the ability of civilians to observe security regulations and devise practical solutions, and opposing conscription of young scientists into the armed forces. This became especially difficult as the Army's manpower crisis really began to bite in 1944. In all, OSRD requested deferments for some 9,725 employees of OSRD contractors, of which all but 63 were granted. The New York Times in its obituary described him as "a master craftsman at steering around obstacles, whether they were technical or political or bull-headed generals and admirals."

Proximity Fuze

Cut away diagram of the proximity fuze Mark 53

In August 1940, NDRC began work on a proximity fuze, a fuze inside an artillery shell that would explode when it came close to the target. A radar set had to be miniaturized to fit inside a shell, and its glass vacuum tubes had to withstand the 20,000 g force of being fired from a gun, and then 500 rotations per second in flight. A special Section T of NDRC was created, chaired by Dr. Merle Tuve of CIW, with Commander William S. Parsons as special assistant to Bush and liaison between NDRC and the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance. In April 1942, Bush placed Section T directly under OSRD, with Parsons in charge. The research effort remained under Tuve but moved to the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), where Parsons was BuOrd's representative. In August 1942, a live firing test was conducted with the newly commissioned cruiser USS Cleveland. Three pilotless drones were shot down in succession.

To preserve the secret of the weapon, its use was initially permitted only over water, where a dud round could not fall into enemy hands. However in late 1943, the Army obtained permission for it to be used over land. They proved particularly effective against the V-1 flying bomb over England, and later Antwerp, in 1944. A version was also developed that could be used with howitzers against ground targets. Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1944 to press for its use, arguing that the Germans would be unable to copy and produce it before the war was over. Eventually, agreed to authorize its use from December 25. In response to the German Ardennes Offensive on December 16, 1944, its immediate use authorized, and the fuze went in to action with deadly effect. By the end of 1944, VT fuzes were coming off the production lines at the rate of 40,000 per day.

The German V-1 flying bomb demonstrated a serious omission in OSRD's portfolio: guided missiles. While the OSRD had some success developing unguided rockets, it had nothing comparable to the V-1, the V-2 or the Henschel Hs 293 air-to-ship gliding guided bomb. Although United States trailed the Germans and Japanese in several areas, this represented an entire field that had been left to the enemy. Bush did not seek the advice of Dr. Robert H. Goddard, who was regarded as a loner and a crank. Before the war, Bush had gone on the record as saying that "I don't understand how a serious scientist or engineer can play around with rockets." By May 1944 he was forced to travel to London to warn General Dwight Eisenhower of the danger posed by the V-1 and V-2.

Manhattan Project

Bush played a critical role in persuading the United States government to undertake a crash program to create an atomic bomb. When the NDRC was formed, the Committee on Uranium was placed under it, reporting directly to Bush as the Uranium Committee. Bush reorganized the committee, strengthening its scientific component by adding Tuve, George B. Pegram, Jesse W. Beams, Ross Gunn and Harold Urey. When OSRD was formed in June 1941, the Uranium Committee was again placed directly under Bush. For security reasons, its name was soon changed to the S-1 Section.

Roosevelt, Bush and Vice President Henry A. Wallace met on October 9, 1941, to discuss the project. Bush briefed Roosevelt on the Tube Alloys, the British atomic bomb project, and its Maud Committee, which had concluded that an atomic bomb was feasible, and on the German nuclear energy project, about which little was known. Roosevelt approved an expedited the atomic program. To control it, he created a Top Policy Group consisting of himself—although he never attended a meeting—Wallace, Bush, Conant, Stimson and the Chief of Staff of the Army, General George Marshall. On Bush's advice, Roosevelt chose the Army to run the project rather than the Navy, although the Navy had shown far more interest in the field, and was already conducting research into atomic energy for powering ships. Bush's negative experiences with the Navy had convinced him that it would not listen to his advice, and could not handle large-scale construction projects.

Bush sent a report to Roosevelt in March 1942. In it he outlined work by Robert Oppenheimer on the nuclear cross section of uranium-235. Oppenheimer's calculations, which Bush had checked by George Kistiakowsky, estimated that the critical mass of a sphere of uranium-235 in the range of 2.5 to 5 kilograms, with a destructive power of around 2,000 tons of TNT. Moreover, it appeared that plutonium might be even more fissile. After conferring with Brigadier General Lucius D. Clay about the construction requirements, Bush drew up a submission for $85 million in fiscal year 1943 for four pilot plants, which he forwarded to Roosevelt on June 17, 1942. With the Army on board, Bush moved to streamline OSRD's oversight of the project, replacing the S-1 Section with a new S-1 Executive Committee.

Bush soon became dissatisfied with the dilatory way the project was being run, with dithering over the selection of sites for the pilot plants. He was particularly disturbed at the AA-3 priority that had been allocated to it, which would delay completion of the pilot plants by three months. Bush complained to Bundy and Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson. Major General Brehon B. Somervell, the commander of the Army's Services of Supply, appointed Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves as project director in September. Within days of taking over, Groves approved the proposed site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and obtained a AAA priority. At a meeting in Stimson's office on September 23 attended by Bundy, Bush, Conant, Groves, Marshall Somervell and Stimson, Bush put forward his proposal that the project be steered by a small committee answerable to the Top Policy Group. The meeting agreed, creating a Military Policy Committee chaired by Bush, with Somervell's Chief of Staff, Brigadier General Wilhelm D. Styer representing the Army, and Rear Admiral William R. Purnell representing the Navy.

Bush advocated cooperation with the United Kingdom at the meeting with Roosevelt on October 9, 1941, and he began to correspond with his British counterpart, Sir John Anderson. But by October 1942, Conant and Bush agreed that a joint project would pose security risks and be more complicated to manage. Roosevelt approved a Military Policy Committee recommendation that information given the British should be limited to technologies that they were actively working on, and not extend to post-war developments. In July 1943, on a visit to London to learn about British progress on antisubmarine technology, Bush, Stimson and Bundy met with Anderson, Lord Cherwell and Winston Churchill at 10 Downing Street. Churchill forcefully pressed for a renewal of interchange, while Bush defended current policy. Only when he returned to Washington did he discover that Roosevelt had agreed with the British. The Quebec Agreement merged the two atomic bomb projects, creating a Combined Policy Committee on which Stimson, Bush and Conant were the United States representatives.

Bush appeared on the cover of Time magazine on April 12, 1944. He toured the Western Front in October 1944, and spoke to ordnance but no senior commander would meet with him. He did meet with the Alsos Mission, who assured him that there was no danger from the German project, an assessment which Bush conveyed to Lieutenant General Bedell Smith. In May 1945, Bush became part of the Interim Committee, formed to advise the new president, Harry S. Truman on nuclear weapons. The Interim Committee advised that the atomic bomb be used against an industrial target in Japan as soon as possible and without warning. Bush was present at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on July 16, 1945 for Trinity nuclear test, the first detonation of an atomic bomb. Afterwards, Bush took his hat off to Oppenheimer in tribute.

Of the war, Bush said in As We May Think: "This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership."

Post-war years

Memex concept

Bush introduced the concept of what he called the memex (possibly derived from "memory extension") during the 1930s, which he imagined as 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. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." He wanted the memex to behave like the "intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain"; essentially, causing the proposed device to be similar to the functions of a human brain. It was also important that it could be easily accessible "a future device for individual use... a sort of mechanized private file and library" in the shape of a desk. The important feature of the memex is that it ties two pieces together. Any item can lead to another immediately. Bush explains how the human mind works differently than traditional storage paradigms. For example, data is often stored alphabetically, and to retrieve it one must trace it down from subclass to subclass. The brain, Bush explains, works by association rather than index, and with the brain being one of the "awe-inspiring" phenomena in nature, one should learn from it.

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, which was published 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 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.

Michael Buckland, a library scientist, regards the memex as severely flawed and blames it on a limited understanding by Bush of both information science and microfilm. Bush did not refer in his popular essay to the microfilm-based workstation proposed by Leonard Townsend during 1938, or the microfilm- and electronics-based selector described in more detail and patented by Emanuel Goldberg during 1931. Shortly after As We May Think was published, Douglas Engelbart came across Bush's piece, and, with the concepts of Bush's visions in mind, commenced work that would later lead to the invention of the mouse. Ted Nelson, who coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia", was also greatly influenced by Bush's essay.

Due to the linear fashion of the memex machine, the term Bushian has been coined to express the linearity of HTML structure and text. The Bushian philosophy of digital media is more focused on using facts to build something creative that will better our world. Bush sees art as a tool to help with that process. Instead of using emotion as a base, the Bushian view uses reason and logic. His goal is to untangle the labyrinth-shaped book and mold it into something linear and reasonable. Bush is constantly in search of a shortcut to the end of the trial. The Bushian concept of linearity is the opposite of Borgesian, a term coined to express the non-linear philosophy of Jorge Luis Borges. In As We May Think, Nelson wrote, "writing is a process of making the tree of thought into a picket fence".

National Science Foundation

OSRD continued to function actively until some time after the end of hostilities, but by 1946 and 1947 it had been reduced to a minimal staff charged with finishing work remaining from the war period. Bush was calling for its closure even before the war had ended. During the war OSRD had let contracts as it had seen fit. Just eight contractors had accounted for half of OSRD's spending, and the largest of them was MIT, with its obvious ties to Bush and his close associates. Efforts to obtain legislation exempting OSRD from the usual government conflict of interest regulations failed, leaving Bush and other OSRD principals open to prosecution.

Bush and many others had hoped that with the dissolution of OSRD, an equivalent peacetime government research and development agency would replace it. Bush felt that basic research was important national survival for both military and commercial reasons, requiring continued government support for science and technology. Technical superiority could be a deterrent to future enemy aggression. During July 1945, in his report to the President Science, The Endless Frontier, Bush wrote that basic research was: "the pacemaker of technological progress" and "New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science!"

Bush (left) with Truman (center) and Conant (right).

During July 1945, the Kilgore bill was introduced in Congress proposing a single science administrator appointed and removable by the President, with emphasis on applied research, and a patent clause favoring a government monopoly. In contrast, the competing Magnuson bill was similar to Bush's proposal to vest control in a panel of top scientists and civilian administrators with the executive director appointed by them, to emphasize basic research, and to protect private patent rights. A compromise Kilgore–Magnuson bill of February 1946 passed the Senate but expired in the House because Bush favored a competing bill that was a virtual duplicate of the original Magnuson bill. During February 1947, a Senate bill was introduced to create the National Science Foundation to replace OSRD, favoring most of the features advocated by Bush, including the controversial administration by an autonomous scientific board. It passed the Senate and the House, but was pocket vetoed by Truman on August 6 on the grounds that the administrative officers were not properly responsible to either the President or Congress. The OSRD was abolished on 31 December 1947, without a successor organisation.

Without a National Science Foundation, the military stepped in to fill the gap, particularly the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The war had accustomed many scientists to working without the budgetary constraints imposed by pre-war universities. Bush helped create the Joint Research and Development Board (JRDB) of the Army and Navy, of which he was chairman. With passage of the National Security Act in 1947, the JRDB became the Research and Development Board (RDB). Its role was to promote research through the military until a bill creating the National Science Foundation finally became law. By 1953, the Department of Defense was spending $1.6 billion a year on research; physicists were spending 70 per cent of their time defense related research, and 98 per cent of the money spent on physics came from either the Department of Defense or the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which took over from the Manhattan Project on 1 January 1947. Legislation to create the National Science Foundation finally passed through Congress and was signed into law by Truman in 1950.

The authority that Bush had as chairman of the RDB was much different from the power and influence he enjoyed as director of OSRD and the agency he hoped to create postwar almost independent of the Executive branch and Congress. He was never happy with the position and resigned as chairman of the RDB after a year, but remained on the oversight committee. He continued to be sceptical about rockets and missiles, writing in his 1949 book Modern Arms and Free Men that intercontinental ballistic missiles would not be technically feasible "for a long time to come... if ever".

Later life

With Truman as president, cronies like John R. Steelman, who was appointed Chairman of President's Scientific Research Board in October 1946, came to prominence. While Bush remained a revered figure, his authority, both among scientists and politicians, suffered a rapid decline. However, he still remained a public authority figure. During September 1949, Bush was appointed to head a scientific panel that included Oppenheimer to review the evidence that the Soviet Union had tested its first atomic bomb. The panel concluded that it had, and this finding was relayed to Truman, who made the public announcement. Bush was outraged when the Oppenheimer security hearing stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance in 1954, and issued a strident attack on Oppenheimer's accusers in the New York Times. Alfred Friendly summed up the feeling of many scientists in declaring that Bush had become "the Grand Old Man of American science".

Bush continued to serve on NACA through 1948 and expressed annoyance with aircraft companies for delaying development of a turbojet engine because of the huge expense of research and development plus retooling from older piston engines. Bush was similarly disappointed with the automobile industry, which showed no interest in his proposals for more fuel efficient engines. General Motors told him that "even if it were a better engine, [General Motors] would not be interested in it." Bush likewise deplored trends in advertising. "Madison Avenue believes," he said, "that if you tell the public something absurd, but do it enough times, the public will ultimately register it in its stock of accepted verities."

From 1947 to 1962 Bush was on the board of directors of American Telephone and Telegraph. He retired as President of the Carnegie Institution and returned to Massachusetts in 1955, but remained a director of Metals and Controls Corporation from 1952 to 1959, and of Merck & Co. from 1949 to 1962. He served as its Chairman of the Board of Merck from 1957 to 1962. He was a trustee of Tufts College from 1943 to 1962, of Johns Hopkins University from 1943 to 1955, of the Carnegie Corporation of New York from 1939 to 1950, the Carnegie Institution of Washington from 1958 to 1974, and the George Putnam Fund of Boston from 1956 to 1972, and was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution from 1943 to 1955.

Bush received the AIEE's Edison Medal in 1943, "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." In 1945 Bush was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. In 1949, he received the IRI Medal from the Industrial Research Institute for recognition of his contribution to the leadership of R&D. President Truman awarded Bush the Medal of Merit with bronze oak leaf cluster in 1948, President Lyndon Johnson awarded him the National Medal of Science in 1963, and President Richard Nixon presented him with the Atomic Pioneers Award from the Atomic Energy Commission in February 1970. Bush also received foreign awards from Britain, which made him a Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1948, and France, where he was made an Officer of the French Legion of Honor in 1955.

Bush died in Belmont, Massachusetts at age 84 from pneumonia after suffering a stroke during 1974. His wife had died in 1969, but he was survived by his sons Richard, now a surgeon, and John, now President of Millipore Corporation, his six grandchildren and his sister Edith. He was buried at South Dennis Cemetery in South Dennis, Massachusetts after a private funeral service. MIT later held a public memorial, at which Jerome Wiesner declared that "No American has had greater influence in the growth of science and technology than Vannevar Bush". The National Science Foundation created the Vannevar Bush Award in 1980 to honor his contributions to public service. His papers are in the Library of Congress.

Bibliography

• Timbie, W. H.; Bush, Vannevar (1922). New York: J. Wiley & Sons.. OCLC 854652. 
• Bush, Vannevar; Wiener, Norbert (1929). Operational Circuit Analysis. New York: J. Wiley & Sons.. OCLC 2167931. 
• Bush, Vannevar (1945). Science, the Endless Frontier: a Report to the President. Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. OCLC 1594001. http://www.nsf.gov/about/history/vbush1945.htm. Retrieved 25 May 2012. 
• Bush, Vannevar (1946). Endless horizons. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press. OCLC 1152058. 
• Bush, Vannevar (1949). Modern Arms and Free Men: a Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy.. New York: Simon and Schuster. OCLC 568075. 
• Bush, Vannevar (1967). Science Is Not Enough. New York: Morrow. OCLC 520108. 
• Bush, Vannevar (1970). Pieces of the action. New York: Morrow. OCLC 93366. 

• For a complete list of his published papers, see Wiesner (1979), pp. 107-117.

Notes

References

External links

• Vannevar Bush papers, 1901-1974
• MIT Museum.
• 1995 MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium – Complete Video Archive
• The Vannevar Bush Index at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum
• Annotated bibliography for Vannevar Bush from the Alsos Digital Library
• YouTube video demonstrating the ideas behind the Memex system
• Pictures of Vannevar Bush from the Tufts Digital Library

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