If you ever use that World Wide Web thing, you should give a tip of your hat to Vannevar Bush, who was born March 11 1890. He was an engineer, inventor, and writer, and evidently an extremely capable administrator in both government and the private sector. Although he didn’t invent it, exactly, he wrote the famous essay As We May Think in which he laid out the idea of hypertext, and the people who DID invent it said they read it and it guided their thinking. But back to Bush.
He was born in Everettt, Massachusetts, and the family — Bush had two older sisters — moved to a nearby town when he was just 2. That was where Bush grew up, graduated high school, and attended Tufts College, where his father had also studied. He was popular and successful in college; was president of his class during his third year, and managed the football team in his fourth and final year. At the time, you could take an extra course load at Tufts and earn a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in just four years, which Bush did. For his master’s thesis, he invented a mechanical device for surveyors that could plot terrain.
After graduation he got a job at General Electric testing transformers, primarily for safety. When a fire broke out in the plant, evidently he and the other testers were blamed and they were all laid off. So he went back to Tufts to teach math. He was offered a grant to attend Clark University, but it stipulated that he would study acoustics. He wasn’t interested and turned it down. Instead he enrolled in MIT to study electrical engineering. He received his doctorate jointly from MIT and Harvard, and pretty soon after that got married.
During the 1920s Bush worked for the American Radio and Research Corporation (AMRAD) and came up with a string of inventions, including a thermostatic switch — which AMRAD wasn’t interested in. They told him he could keep it, so he left and started a company to market the switch. It still exists, as Sensata Technologies. After that he worked on some electronic components and started a new company you may have heard of: Raytheon. His next invention was a “differential analyzer,” which was a mechanical analog computer useful in designing electrical power transmission systems.
Bush had gotten quite wealthy from founding Raytheon, and he quit the business world in the early 1930s to become the dean of the MIT school of engineering. From there he became president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which evaluated scientific proposals, funding the best ones. When he joined, they funded all areas of science, but Bush refocused the organization away from humanities and social sciences, saying “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.” During the same period he came up with the memex concept, which was a theoretical device that would link information by what we would now call hypertext. The memex wasn’t a computer, though; it used microfilm.
During World War II Bush became the director of the government’s new Office of Scientific Research and Development. The “Uranium Committee” reported directly to him, so above Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves, Bush was the top organizer of the Manhattan Project.
In 1945 he published As We May Think in The Atlantic magazine. It was pretty popular, and among the people who read it were Douglas Englebart and Ted Nelson, who together came up with things like the mouse, the graphic user interface, and the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia.” He served on both government panels and the boards of universities and technology companies well into the 1960s. At his funeral in 1974, one speaker said “No American has had greater influence in the growth of science and technology than Vannevar Bush.”
