Bush, Vannevar

Electrical Engineer
1890–1974

Vannevar Bush is best known for mobilizing U.S. scientific research during World War II. In 1913, he completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at Tufts College in Massachusetts, and in 1916, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) jointly awarded him a doctorate in electrical engineering. After teaching at Tufts, he joined the electrical engineering department at MIT in 1919, where he would eventually be appointed dean in 1932.

At the time, electrical engineers were primarily concerned with the technical problems associated with delivering power over long distances. Bush, however, foresaw that in time the profession's role would be to develop increasingly sophisticated electrical devices for the home and for industry. In 1922, he was one of the founders of what became the Raytheon Corporation, a maker of electronics parts, and by the end of his career he held forty-nine electronics patents. His most famous inventions involved electromechanical computing devices, including analog computers.

By 1931, his most successful device, the Differential Analyzer, was up and running. It used a complicated system of cams and gears driven by steel shafts to generate practical solutions to complex physics and engineering problems. With the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, by 1935, he had developed the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer, the most powerful computer available until the arrival of early electronic computers in the mid-1940s. In a 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly, he proposed a device that he called the Memex, an indexed machine for cross-referencing and retrieving information that foreshadowed the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web.

During World War II, Bush was the nation's driving force behind government and military sponsorship and funding of massive science projects, which until then had been funded primarily by industry and private foundations. In 1940, he was appointed chair of the National Defense Research Committee, formed to organize scientific research of interest to the military. A year later he took the helm of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). There he used his academic, industrial, and government contacts to organize and fund American scientists and engineers in the war against the Axis powers. Because of this work, he is often referred to as the architect of the "military-industrial complex."

Under Bush, the OSRD played a lead role in two major projects. One was to enlist universities and industry in the development of microwavebased radar systems to replace the inferior long-wave radar systems developed by the Navy in the 1930s. The other was the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. He thus set in motion the scientific efforts that culminated in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 at the end of World War II.

By 1949, Bush was becoming disillusioned with the military-industrial complex he helped create. That year he published Modern Arms and Free Men, a widely read book in which he warned against the danger of the militarization of science. He died in Belmont, Massachusetts, on June 28, 1974.

Bush, Vannevar

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