Vannevar Bush
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- Differential analyzer, memex, OSRD
- Nationality
- American
The man who built mechanical integrators, ran American wartime research and in 1945 described a reading machine that was never built and is cited in every history of hypertext.
Bush built the differential analyzer at MIT from 1931 — an analogue machine of rotating shafts and discs that solved differential equations by physically performing them. His graduate student Claude Shannon was put in charge of the machine's relay circuits and out of that work wrote the 1937 thesis tying Boolean algebra to switching diagrams. Bush thus had both the analogue and the digital branch in his own lab, and backed the wrong one.
During the war he ran the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which organised radar, the proximity fuze and eventually the Manhattan Project. His report Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) argued that the government should fund basic research in peacetime and laid the groundwork for the NSF — probably his longest-lived construction.
In July 1945 The Atlantic Monthly published his essay As We May Think, which described the memex. The odd part is that he remained uninterested in digital machines throughout: his future was microfilm, photocells and electromechanics, not vacuum tubes and stored programs.