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Vannevar Bush ( March 11 , 1890 – June 30 , 1974 ) was an American 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 . His name is pronounced ''Van-NEE-var'' as in "receiver" (). He was unrelated to the Bush Political Family . CAREER Born in Everett, Massachusetts , Bush was educated at Tufts College , graduating in 1913 . He earned a doctorate in engineering from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT) in 1917. His PhD advisor was Arthur Edwin Kennelly . During World War I he worked with the National Research Council in developing improved techniques for detecting submarines. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1919 , and was a professor there from 1923–32. He constructed a '' Differential Analyser '', an Analog Computer that could solve Differential Equation s 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 became vice-president and dean of engineering at MIT from 1932–38. In 1939 Bush accepted the prestigious appointment as president of the Carnegie Institution Of Washington , which awarded large sums annually for research. As president, Bush was able to influence the direction of research in the U.S. towards military objectives and could informally advise the government on scientific matters. In 1939 he fully moved into the political arena with his appointment as chairman of National Advisory Committee For Aeronautics . In . 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." In 1941 the NDRC was subsumed into the the National Science Foundation , in an effort to cement the ties between science, industry and the military which had been forged during the war. Bush was also a co-founder of the Defense Contractor Raytheon . 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. One of Bush's PhD students at MIT was Frederick Terman who was instrumental in the genesis of " Silicon Valley ". 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." 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 Encyclopedia s 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. 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 . Although his work has since served as a rallying point for librarianship and many social sciences, he despised certain areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences , where prominent work appeared to support radical political views. For example, he badly weakened American Anthropology when he choked off a large part of its funding in the 1930s. He was not involved in the library community, where he may have found support refining his ideas. But the memex is still an important accomplishment, because it directly inspired the development of Hypertext technology. EPONYM Vannevar Bush has an unfortunate could not be made small enough to fit in the nose of a Missile as in an ICBM . He also predicted "electronic brains" the size of the Empire State Building with a Niagara Falls -scale cooling system, although this could be considered a metaphor for systems such as Google 's entire collection of Linux servers, whose collective size and thermal emissions may very well be on the same scale. Bush warned fellow engineers and politicians of the dangers of sending humans in space. He privately, and then publicly opposed NASA 's manned space program and took the unpopular stance of attacking the moon exploration goals set forth by president John F. Kennedy at a time when the U.S. was nearly perfectly united in supporting it. His opposition was based on fiscal reasons and on his calculated judgment that human lives would be lost in what he considered to be an extremely risky adventure, from an engineering standpoint. Again, this conservative stance reinforced his reputation as a bad prophet in technological matters, when Project Apollo and the two previous programs were completed without death or injury in space. His rational warnings were largely forgotten when the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster and the Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster took 14 lives in 1986 and 2003. PERSONAL LIFE On 5 September 1916 he married Phoebe Davis in Chelsea, Massachusetts and had two sons Richard Davis Bush and John Hathaway Bush. Vannevar Bush died from pneumonia after suffering a stroke in 1974 in Belmont, Massachusetts . PUBLICATIONS
BIOGRAPHY Zachary, G. Pascal, 1999. ''Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century''. MIT Press. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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