Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 30, 1974) was an United States 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. He was allegedly a member of the secret committee Majestic 12 investigating UFO activities.

His name was pronounced Van-NEE-var as in receiver . He was unrelated to the Bush family.

=Career=

Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Bush was educated at Tufts College, graduating in 1913. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (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 was president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1939 and in the same year appointed chair of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. In 1940, Bush became chairman of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and in 1941 director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which controlled the Manhattan Project and coordinated wartime scientific research during World War II. He recommended the creation of what would become the National Science Foundation in order to cement the ties between science, industry and the military which had been forged during the war. Bush was also a cofounder of the defense contractor Raytheon.

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 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.

=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.

As scholars like Buckland have proven, the memex was severely flawed because Bush did not understand 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 or the more detailed microfilm and electronics based selector, patented by Emmanuel Goldberg in 1931.

He despised the humanities and social sciences (he badly weakened American anthropology when he choked off a large part of its funding in the 1930s), and refused to talk to the librarians who could have helped refine his ideas. But the memex is still an important accomplishment, because it directly inspired the development of Hypertext technology.

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.

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.

=Eponym=

Vannevar Bush has an unfortunate servers, whose collective size and thermal emissions may very well be on the same scale.

=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 an the Mind s Machine . San Diego, London (...) 1991. [A reprint of all of Bush s texts regarding Memex accompanied by related Sources and Studies] hello what is this

=Publications=

*1922, Principles of Electrical Engineering . *1929, Operational Circuit Analysis . *1945, July, As We May Think , Atlantic Monthly . *1945, [http://www.nsf.gov/about/history/vbush1945.htm 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.

=External links=

*[http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html Internet Pioneers – Vannevar Bush] *[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/view.htmlpg=2tw=wn_tophead_5 The Computer at Nature s Core by David F. Channell] *[http://www.kerryr.net/pioneers/bush.htm Pioneers: Vannevar Bush (1890–1974)] *[http://www.ausbcomp.com/~bbott/wik/bushref.htm Links to Vannevar Bush References] *[http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/html/info/timeline.html Events in the Life of Vannevar Bush ] *[http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/foreseeing_the_future_the_legacy_of_vannevar_bush.php Foreseeing the Future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush by Erin Malone] *[http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier/pub/vbush/vbush.txt As We May Think – Published July 1945, The Atlantic Monthly ] *[http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1499292,00.html Observer UK article, June 2005] *[http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/papers/1990/90111300.html Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the National Medals of Science and Technology in 1990 by President George Bush using a quote from Vannevar Bush]