Vannevar Bush

Based on Wikipedia: Vannevar Bush

The Man Who Imagined the Internet Before Computers Existed

In 1945, a sixty-five-year-old engineer published an essay that would haunt computer scientists for decades. He described a device called the "memex"—a desk with translucent screens where a person could store all their books, records, and communications, then create trails of association between them, jumping from one idea to another with the press of a button. The device didn't exist. The technology to build it wouldn't exist for another fifty years. But the vision was so precise, so compelling, that when the World Wide Web finally emerged in the 1990s, its creators pointed back to that essay as prophecy.

The man who wrote it was Vannevar Bush.

That essay, "As We May Think," would be enough to secure Bush's place in history. But it was almost a footnote in his career. By the time he published it, Bush had already built one of the most important analog computers ever created, founded a company that would become a defense industry giant, and served as the most powerful science administrator in American history—the man who launched the Manhattan Project and convinced the government that scientific research was essential to national survival.

The Pastor's Son Who Couldn't Sit Still

Vannevar Bush was born in Everett, Massachusetts, on March 11, 1890, the third child and only son of a Universalist pastor. His first name came from John Vannevar, an old family friend—it's pronounced "van-NEE-var," with the emphasis on the second syllable, though almost everyone gets it wrong on first attempt.

The family moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts, when Bush was two, and he grew up in the comfortable but not wealthy circumstances of a minister's household. His father, Richard Perry Bush, had attended Tufts College, and young Vannevar would follow the same path.

At Tufts, Bush was popular—vice president of his sophomore class, president of his junior class, manager of the football team in his senior year. He joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity and started dating Phoebe Clara Davis, a woman from his hometown who would become his wife. But it was his academic work that revealed his particular genius.

Tufts had an unusual program that allowed students to earn both a bachelor's and master's degree in four years. For his master's thesis, Bush invented something he called a "profile tracer." It looked like a lawn mower, with two bicycle wheels and a pen that plotted the terrain as you pushed it along. Surveyors could use it to map elevation changes without laboriously measuring every point. It was practical. It was clever. And it was the first in what would become a long string of inventions.

A Doctorate in Record Time

After graduation in 1913, Bush took a job at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, earning fourteen dollars a week as a "test man"—someone who checked equipment for safety. He transferred to GE's plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to work on high-voltage transformers, but when a fire broke out at the plant, Bush and his colleagues were suspended.

He returned to Tufts in October 1914 to teach mathematics. The following year, he won a scholarship to pursue a doctorate at Clark University under Arthur Gordon Webster, a distinguished physicist. But Webster wanted Bush to study acoustics, which was a fashionable field at the time.

Bush refused. He quit rather than study something that didn't interest him.

This was a defining characteristic: Bush had no patience for work that bored him, no matter how prestigious or practical it might be. He enrolled instead at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he could study electrical engineering on his own terms.

What happened next demonstrates both his brilliance and his stubbornness. Spurred by the need for financial stability so he could marry Phoebe, Bush submitted his doctoral thesis in April 1916—barely a year and a half after enrolling. The thesis had the forbidding title "Oscillating-Current Circuits: An Extension of the Theory of Generalized Angular Velocities, with Applications to the Coupled Circuit and the Artificial Transmission Line."

His adviser, Arthur Edwin Kennelly, demanded more work. Bush refused. Kennelly was overruled by the department chairman, and Bush received his doctorate jointly from MIT and Harvard University. He married Phoebe that August. They would have two sons together.

Building Raytheon

Bush's career over the next decade shows a man who couldn't stay in one lane. He joined MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering in 1919, where he would eventually become a professor. But he was simultaneously involved in a dizzying array of business ventures.

The most consequential began with a simple invention: a thermostatic switch. Al Spencer, a technician at the American Radio and Research Corporation (where Bush also worked), had designed a better way to control temperature in electrical devices. Bush developed the technology on his own time, found investors, and launched the Spencer Thermostat Company.

The company prospered. It merged with General Plate Company in 1931, eventually became part of Texas Instruments, and still exists today as Sensata Technologies. But Spencer Thermostat was just practice for Bush's next venture.

In 1924, Bush teamed up with an investor named Laurence K. Marshall and a physicist named Charles G. Smith, who had invented something called the S-tube—a voltage-regulator tube that would transform the radio industry.

Here's why it mattered: early radios required two different types of batteries to operate. The S-tube eliminated that requirement, allowing radios to run on ordinary household electrical current. For the first time, families could plug a radio into the wall instead of fussing with batteries.

Marshall had already incorporated a company called the American Appliance Company, originally intended to make silent refrigerators. But when Smith's S-tube proved more promising, they pivoted. The company was renamed Raytheon—from the Greek words for "light from the gods."

The venture made Bush wealthy. More importantly, Raytheon would grow into one of America's largest defense contractors, a company that still exists today and builds everything from missiles to radar systems. Bush was there at the beginning.

The Differential Analyzer

While building companies and teaching at MIT, Bush was also working on what would become his most celebrated technical achievement: the differential analyzer.

To understand why this machine mattered, you need to understand a fundamental problem in engineering and physics. Many real-world phenomena—the motion of planets, the flow of electricity through circuits, the behavior of structures under stress—can be described by differential equations. These are mathematical expressions that relate a quantity to its rate of change.

The trouble is that differential equations are often fiendishly difficult to solve. For simple cases, mathematicians had developed standard techniques. But for complex equations with many variables, the calculations could take weeks or months of tedious hand computation. Some equations were effectively unsolvable.

Bush decided to build a machine that could solve them automatically.

The project began in 1925, when one of Bush's master's students, Herbert R. Stewart, built a device called an integraph that could solve simple first-order differential equations. Another student, Harold Hazen, proposed extending the device to handle second-order equations—the ones that appear constantly in physics and engineering but are much harder to solve.

Bush immediately grasped the implications and threw himself into the project.

The result, completed in 1927, was the differential analyzer: a room-sized assembly of shafts, gears, and electrical components that could solve differential equations with as many as eighteen independent variables. You would set up the machine by configuring its mechanical components to represent your equation, then let it run. The solution would emerge as a plotted curve.

Unlike purely mechanical calculators, the differential analyzer combined electrical and mechanical components—a hybrid approach that proved remarkably powerful. The machine worked so well that copies were built at universities around the world. Engineers at General Electric used it to solve problems in power transmission. Scientists used it to analyze everything from atomic physics to ballistics.

For this work, Bush received the Franklin Institute's Louis E. Levy Medal in 1928.

The Seeds of Digital Computing

The differential analyzer was an analog computer. It represented quantities as physical measurements—the rotation of a shaft, the position of a gear—rather than as discrete numbers. This approach had limitations: analog machines were difficult to program and their accuracy was constrained by the precision of their physical components.

But something unexpected emerged from Bush's laboratory at MIT. One of his graduate students, a young man named Claude Shannon, was working on the analyzer when he made a connection that would transform the world.

Shannon realized that the electrical switching circuits used in telephone systems could represent logical operations. More specifically, he saw that Boolean algebra—a branch of mathematics dealing with true/false logic—mapped perfectly onto electrical circuits where switches were either open or closed, on or off.

In 1937, Shannon wrote a master's thesis titled "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits." It's considered one of the most important master's theses ever written. The insight it contained—that logical operations could be implemented in electrical circuits—became the theoretical foundation for all digital computers.

Shannon went on to create information theory, the mathematical framework underlying all modern communications. He's sometimes called the father of the information age. And he developed his foundational ideas while working in Vannevar Bush's laboratory.

Rising Through MIT

Bush's technical accomplishments and business success made him a natural candidate for administrative leadership. In 1932, MIT's new president, Karl T. Compton, appointed Bush to the newly created position of vice president. That same year, Bush became dean of the MIT School of Engineering.

The relationship between Bush and Compton was not always smooth. They clashed early over Bush's extensive outside consulting work—Bush was simultaneously advising multiple companies while teaching and conducting research. Bush lost that particular battle and had to curtail some of his business activities.

But the two men built a solid professional relationship. Bush proved to be an effective administrator who could navigate both academic politics and the world of business and government. The combined salary for his positions—twelve thousand dollars plus six thousand for expenses—reflected his growing stature.

By the mid-1930s, Bush had achieved something remarkable: financial independence through his business ventures, combined with scientific prestige through his research and academic leadership. He was free to pursue whatever work he believed would make the world better.

The Memex: Imagining the Future

During the 1930s, even as he was building computers and running MIT, Bush was developing an idea that wouldn't fully make sense for another sixty years.

He called it the memex, short for "memory extender." In his conception, it was a desk with translucent screens on its surface, capable of storing an entire library of books, records, photographs, and correspondence on microfilm. The user could retrieve any item instantly and, crucially, could create "trails" of association between documents—personal pathways linking related ideas across different sources.

Bush was not the first to imagine such a device. An inventor named Emanuel Goldberg had demonstrated a "Statistical Machine" in 1928 that could search through microfilm records. But Bush's vision was more ambitious. He wasn't just imagining a better filing system; he was imagining a new way of thinking.

The human mind, Bush observed, works by association. One thought triggers another in a web of connections that doesn't follow the alphabetical order of an index or the rigid categories of a library. Why couldn't a machine work the same way?

In 1945, Bush published his ideas in an essay titled "As We May Think" in The Atlantic magazine. The essay described the memex in loving detail: how you would insert new documents, how you would create trails by tapping a code while viewing two related items, how you could share your trails with others.

The memex was never built. The technology of microfilm was too clumsy, too slow, too limited to realize Bush's vision. But the essay became one of the most influential documents in the history of computing. Doug Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse and pioneered interactive computing, read it as a young man and later said it changed his life. Ted Nelson, who coined the term "hypertext," explicitly cited Bush's influence. Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web, acknowledged the same intellectual debt.

Bush had imagined the architecture of the internet before digital computers existed.

The Carnegie Institution

In May 1938, Bush accepted what seemed like a capstone appointment: president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, one of America's most prestigious research organizations. Founded with an endowment of thirty-three million dollars—enormous for the time—the Carnegie Institution funded research across eight major laboratories and exercised considerable influence over American science.

Bush became president on January 1, 1939, at a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars. The position placed him at the intersection of science and policy, able to advise the government informally on scientific matters while directing significant research funds.

He immediately confronted several problems. The institution had financial difficulties despite its large endowment. Its board chairman, Cameron Forbes, clashed with Bush over leadership. And Bush inherited an embarrassing situation: the Eugenics Record Office, headed by Harry H. Laughlin.

Eugenics—the idea that human populations could be "improved" through selective breeding—had been popular in American scientific circles in the early twentieth century. The Eugenics Record Office had collected family histories and promoted eugenic policies, including forced sterilization laws that had been upheld by the Supreme Court.

By 1938, eugenics was increasingly discredited, particularly as Nazi Germany demonstrated where such ideas could lead. Bush considered Laughlin a scientific fraud and moved quickly to remove him. He requested a review of Laughlin's work, offered him an annuity to retire, and when a senator tried to get Laughlin reinstated, Bush informed the trustees that any investigation would show Laughlin "to be physically incapable of directing an office, and an investigation of his scientific standing would be equally conclusive."

The Eugenics Record Office was renamed, defunded, and closed completely in 1944.

Bush was less diplomatic about other areas he considered unproductive. He gutted the Carnegie Institution's archaeology program, setting back the field in America for years. He slashed funding for Isis, a journal dedicated to the history of science. "I have a great reservation about these studies," he later explained, "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."

It was a harsh judgment, and not entirely fair. But it reflected Bush's relentless focus on practical science—on work that would produce tangible results.

The Coming War

In August 1938, just as Bush was preparing to take over the Carnegie Institution, he received another appointment: membership on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, known as NACA. This was the predecessor organization to NASA, responsible for coordinating aeronautical research in the United States.

The timing was significant. Europe was sliding toward war. Germany had annexed Austria in March 1938 and would seize Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland in September. American military leaders were beginning to worry about preparedness.

NACA's chairman, Joseph Sweetman Ames, became ill soon after Bush joined, and Bush had to act in his place. In December 1938, NACA requested eleven million dollars to establish a new aeronautical research laboratory in Sunnyvale, California—chosen for its proximity to major aviation companies on the West Coast.

The military supported the request. The Army Air Corps chief, Major General Henry H. Arnold, and the Navy's head of aeronautics, Rear Admiral Arthur B. Cook, were planning to spend two hundred twenty-five million dollars on new aircraft the following year. They wanted the research capability to support that investment.

But Congress was skeptical. Bush appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee on April 5, 1939—his first time testifying before Congress. The senators were not swayed by his arguments. It took extensive additional lobbying before funding for the new facility was approved.

The experience taught Bush something important: scientists needed better mechanisms to communicate with government, and government needed better ways to harness scientific expertise. As war approached, that lesson would prove crucial.

Science Goes to War

On June 12, 1940, Bush met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Oval Office. It was a brief meeting—just fifteen minutes—but it changed the course of the war.

Bush came with a one-page proposal for a new organization that would coordinate scientific research for national defense. He had grown frustrated watching scientific advice bounce between committees and agencies without clear authority. The military services had their own research programs but often failed to communicate with civilian scientists. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany was conquering Europe with technologies—advanced tanks, aircraft, and tactics—that reflected sophisticated military research.

Roosevelt approved the proposal on the spot, scrawling "OK—FDR" on the document. Bush was appointed chairman of the new National Defense Research Committee, or NDRC.

The organization grew quickly. By 1941, it was reorganized and expanded into the Office of Scientific Research and Development, or OSRD, with Bush as director. Almost all wartime military research and development in the United States would flow through OSRD—a staggering consolidation of scientific effort.

Bush coordinated the activities of approximately six thousand leading American scientists. His organization worked on radar, the proximity fuze, amphibious vehicles, medical treatments for battlefield wounds, and dozens of other technologies. But the most consequential project was one that began with a letter from Albert Einstein.

The Manhattan Project

In August 1939, Einstein had written to Roosevelt warning that Nazi Germany might develop an atomic bomb and urging the United States to begin its own research. A small program had started, but by 1941 it had produced few results and seemed to be going nowhere.

Bush changed that. Working with his NDRC colleague James B. Conant, president of Harvard, Bush pushed for a dramatic expansion of atomic research. In October 1941, he presented Roosevelt with a report arguing that an atomic bomb was feasible and that the United States should pursue it with maximum urgency.

Roosevelt agreed. The project that became known as the Manhattan Project was transferred to military control in 1942, but Bush remained centrally involved in its oversight. He ensured that it received top priority from the highest levels of government—that it got the resources, the personnel, and the attention it needed.

The decision to build the atomic bomb remains one of the most consequential in human history. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 killed over a hundred thousand people and ushered in the nuclear age. Bush supported both the development and the use of the weapons, though like many scientists involved, he later expressed ambivalence about the consequences.

The Endless Frontier

As the war drew to a close, Bush turned his attention to what would come next. In November 1944, President Roosevelt asked him to prepare a report on how the lessons of wartime science could be applied in peacetime.

Bush's response, delivered in July 1945, was titled "Science, The Endless Frontier." It became one of the most influential policy documents in American history.

The central argument was simple but revolutionary: basic scientific research—the kind that has no immediate practical application—is essential to national security and economic prosperity. During the war, scientists had delivered radar, penicillin, and the atomic bomb by applying knowledge that had been built up over decades of peacetime research. If that research had not been done, the wartime applications would have been impossible.

The report called for a new government agency to fund basic research in universities and research institutions. It took five years of political wrangling, but in 1950, Congress created the National Science Foundation—an organization that still exists today and has funded countless scientific breakthroughs, from the development of the internet to the discovery of gravitational waves.

Bush's argument for government support of basic research became the foundation of American science policy for the next half-century. The model he championed—federal funding flowing to universities, where researchers pursue questions driven by scientific curiosity rather than immediate practical need—transformed American science into the most productive research enterprise in human history.

The First Presidential Science Advisor

During the war, Bush had been, in effect, the first presidential science advisor—though the position didn't formally exist. He met regularly with Roosevelt and, after Roosevelt's death in April 1945, with Harry Truman. He advised on everything from weapons development to postwar science policy.

This role gave him enormous influence, but also enormous responsibility. Bush was a gatekeeper: he decided which scientific projects received government support and which didn't. He championed some technologies and dismissed others. Not all of his judgments proved correct.

Most famously, Bush was skeptical of rockets and guided missiles. He believed that intercontinental ballistic missiles were impractical—too expensive, too inaccurate, too vulnerable. History would prove him wrong. By the 1960s, missiles were the primary delivery system for nuclear weapons.

But Bush's successes far outweighed his failures. He created the institutional framework through which American science would flourish for decades. He demonstrated that scientists and government could work together effectively. And he articulated a vision of science as a public good that shaped American policy for generations.

Legacy

Vannevar Bush died on June 28, 1974, at the age of eighty-four. By then, digital computers had surpassed anything his differential analyzer could accomplish. The internet was beginning to take shape. The memex he had imagined three decades earlier was becoming reality in forms he could barely have anticipated.

His legacy is complex. He helped create the atomic bomb, a weapon that still threatens human civilization. He championed a model of science funding that some critics argue has become too focused on basic research at the expense of practical application. He dismissed entire fields—archaeology, the history of science—as unworthy of support.

But he also helped win a world war against fascism. He created institutions that funded decades of scientific progress. He mentored students like Claude Shannon who transformed the world. And he imagined, with remarkable precision, technologies that wouldn't exist for half a century.

In "As We May Think," Bush wrote about the challenge of managing humanity's accumulated knowledge—the need for tools that could help us find connections, trace paths through the vast territory of human thought. "The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate," he observed, "and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."

He devoted his life to building better tools for navigating that maze. The tools we use today—computers, the internet, search engines, hypertext—owe something to his vision. He was an engineer who could see the future, and a builder who helped make it real.