Vannevar Bush

He was the only son of a Universalist pastor in Chelsea, Massachusetts, named for a family friend who had gone to Tufts with his father. He went to Tufts too, ran the football team as a senior, and turned in a master's thesis that doubled as a patent — a profile tracer, two bicycle wheels and a pen that drew the ground it rolled across. General Electric paid him 14 dollars a week to test equipment until a plant fire got the test men suspended. He turned down a Clark University fellowship rather than study acoustics, went to MIT instead, and when his thesis adviser demanded more work he refused and had the department chairman overrule the man. He was 26 and in a hurry to marry.

On June 12, 1940, with France falling, he carried one sheet of paper describing a National Defense Research Committee into Roosevelt's office. Roosevelt wrote OK — FDR across it in 15 minutes. Bush ran the NDRC and then the Office of Scientific Research and Development, some 2,500 contracts and 536 million dollars, out of which came radar, the proximity fuze, mass-produced penicillin, and the reorganization that handed the atomic bomb to the Army. He had already built the differential analyzer at MIT, an analog machine solving equations in 18 variables, and taught Claude Shannon, whose thesis founded digital circuit design. In July 1945 he published two things at once: the report arguing that government should pay for basic research, and an essay describing a desk called the memex, which would hold everything a person read and link it by association.

He was wrong in public and expensive ways. In September 1940 Norbert Wiener brought him a proposal for a digital computer and Bush declined to fund it, on the ground that it could not be finished before the war ended. He was right about the schedule and, his critics said, blind about the machine. He sat on the Interim Committee that advised Truman to drop the bomb on a Japanese industrial target without warning, and stood at Alamogordo on July 16, 1945 to watch the test. And he held out for a National Science Foundation answerable to scientists rather than to the president. Truman pocket-vetoed the bill on August 6, 1947, the OSRD was abolished that December with no successor, and by 1953 the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission were paying for 98 percent of American physics.

His standing drained away under Truman, and he spent the 1950s losing arguments he had been right to pick. In 1952 he led a State Department panel urging that the first hydrogen bomb test be postponed and a test ban sought instead. Nobody in Washington backed it and Ivy Mike went off on schedule. In 1954 he attacked Oppenheimer's accusers in the New York Times after the security board took his clearance. He had written in 1949 that intercontinental missiles would not be feasible for a long time to come, if ever. A stroke and then pneumonia killed him at Belmont on June 28, 1974. The memex outlasted all of it. Douglas Engelbart read the essay and went to work.

Vannevar Bush's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Profile tracer invention
  His master's thesis and his first patent, a surveying device that looked like a lawn mower 1913
• Raytheon company
  Founded as the American Appliance Company and rebuilt around a voltage-regulator tube for radios 1922
• Differential analyzer invention
  An analog computer that solved differential equations in up to 18 variables 1927
• Operational Circuit Analysis book
  The textbook Norbert Wiener steered him past the mathematics of 1929
• Science, The Endless Frontier article
  The report calling basic research the pacemaker of technological progress 1945
• As We May Think article
  Published in The Atlantic in July 1945, and the origin of the memex 1945

• 1913 aged ~23 Takes a bachelor's and a master's from Tufts in the same year His thesis was the profile tracer, and it was patented.
• April 1916 aged 26 Submits his MIT doctoral thesis and refuses his adviser's demand for more The department chairman overruled Arthur Kennelly. Bush married Phoebe Davis that August.
• July 7, 1922 aged 32 Co-founds the company that becomes Raytheon It was chartered to build silent refrigerators and changed course to sell the S-tube.
• 1927 aged ~37 Starts building the differential analyzer at MIT It won him the Franklin Institute's Louis E. Levy Medal in 1928.
• June 1938 aged 48 Forces Harry Laughlin out of the Eugenics Record Office Bush, arriving at the Carnegie Institution, regarded Laughlin as a scientific fraud. The office closed in 1944.
• June 12, 1940 aged 50 Roosevelt approves the National Defense Research Committee in 15 minutes Bush had brought a single sheet of paper. Roosevelt wrote OK — FDR on it.
• July 16, 1945 aged 55 Watches the Trinity test at Alamogordo Afterward he took his hat off to Oppenheimer.
• August 6, 1947 aged 57 Truman pocket-vetoes the National Science Foundation bill Bush wanted The OSRD was abolished that December with nothing to replace it, and the Navy filled the gap.
• June 28, 1974 aged 84 Dies of pneumonia at Belmont, Massachusetts, after a stroke

• Claude Shannon 1916–2001
  Mathematician and engineer who founded information theory, the basis of all digital communication. his graduate student
• Norbert Wiener 1894–1964
  Mathematician who founded cybernetics, influencing computing, automation, neuroscience, and theories of communication and control. refused to fund his computer
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. defended him after the 1954 hearing
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. signed his agency into existence
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. vetoed his science foundation
• Douglas Engelbart 1925–2013
  Engineer who invented the computer mouse and demonstrated interactive computing in 1968. read As We May Think and built from it