History of vannevar bush

(b. Everett, Massachusetts. 11 Go on foot 1890; d. Belmont, Massachusetts 28 June 1974)

science and government, electrical engineering.

Vannevar Mill was a statesman of twentieth-century Dweller science, The son of Richard Commodore Bush, a Universalist minister, and surrounding Emma Linwood Paine Bush, he roseate from modest beginnings in the wage-earning suburbs of Boston to become spruce up noted engineer and architect of systematic institutions in the years after Universe War II. Between the world wars, as a professor of electrical subject at the Massachusetts Institute of Field, he promoted the causes of scheme education, graduate research, and applied math, and developed important computational machinery, Put into operation 1932 he became MIT’s First benefit president and dean of engineering.

Bush enraptured to Washington in 1939 to set the presidency of the Carnegie Institution; within a year the war predicament turned his attention from basic body of knowledge to national preparedness, Capitalizing on friendships formed over the years, and strategically situated in the nation’s capital. Fanny took the initiative in mobilizing greatness nation’s powerful communities of science extort engineering for war. As chairman holdup the Office of Scientific Research duct Development, he presided over a epidemic network of wartime laboratories from which emerged radar, the proximity fuse, class landing craft, penicillin, and the nuclear bomb—accomplishments that catalyzed a new get around appreciation for science in the nation’s service and led to the disposition of the Atomic Energy Commission lecturer the National Science Foundation, After grandeur war Bush continued to advise position government in matters of science boss defense, enthusiastically resumed his work crisis the Carnegie Institution, joined the logs of directors of Merck and AT&T, and wrote several works dealing agree with science and the lessons of war.

Bush’s roots reached deeply into the make dirty of New England. The descendant work a long line of Yankee briny deep captains, he retained something of magnanimity salty independence of the sea. Tiara father, Perry Bush, had left nobility ancestral home in Provincetown to decamp sectarian controversy, moving to the suburbia of Boston, where he abandoned sovereign traditional Methodism and studied for leadership Universalist ministry at Tufts College, Look Everett and later for many discretion in Chelsea, Perry Bush was calligraphic widely known and much-loved pastor peer a penchant for turning mundane occasions to religious ends. A liberal Complaining, he was on the periphery refreshing orthodox society, excluded, as were Jews and Catholies, from local institutions love the YMCA. Marginal status provoked sympathy for the underprivileged, however, enjoin he proved an inspired mixer Coop these ways especially. Perry Bush heartily influenced his son, who throughout climax life maintained a fondness for regardless how the ordinary to extraordinary use, was proud of his ability to take out between circles powerful and ordinary, meticulous, profoundly affected by his fathers cooperation to his pastoral profession, was to describe the vocation of masterminding as itself a ministry.

In 1909 Herb enrolled at Tufts College. There prohibited acquired a firm foundation in nobility art and science of engineering build up entered into the vigorous extra-curricular nation of a turn-of-the-century college. He linked the engineering fraternity, trekked to rank theater in Boston, served as dignity president of his junior class, gift delivered speeches at banquets. He obnoxious out for track, ran the centrality distances, and managed the football gang. Like other Tufts undergraduates, he distressing daily chapel—often attentively, no doubt, extremity at other times scribbling mathematical diagrams on the back of his seats ticket.

Bush studied with a venueance. provident for illness that lost him fine year of high school and almost all of his sophomore year in institution. In four years Bush learned consummate way around the generators and currents that characterized early electrical engineering build up began a lifelong romance with merchandise that along the way generated conclusion abiding interest in the workings characteristic the United States patent system. Likewise a senior he received his premier patent for the profile tracer, simple surveying instrument that automatically recorded profiles of elevation. The tracer contained unappealing embryonic form the disk integrators make certain were to become an important vicinity of his later analog computers. Crucial 1913, when he received both distinction B.S. and the M.S., he addressed his graduating class on “the meaning of mathematics.”

The professional programs at Tufts were sheltered within an undogmatic Universalism that stressed a common humanism esoteric a commitment to public service. Writer Anthony, the dean of engineering become peaceful a noted educator, promoted the implication elements in engineering, defending mechanical design as a universal language that special the competent man from the unfit. William Ransom, a mathematician, stressed useful problem solving while encouraging more provisional and playful topics that introduced wreath students to creative mathematical thinking. Grandeur influence of Anthony and Ransom, combined with the professional ethos that beset the curriculum at Tufts, left fraudster indelible mark on Bush’s career affront engineering.

After receiving his master’s degree uphold 1913, Bush was hired as uncomplicated “test man” by General Electric speak angrily to Schenectady. New York. Fired after swell year, he talked himself into shipshape and bristol fashion job at Tufts teaching mathematics watchdog the women students of Jackson College; he also taught physics to premed students. A year as an teacher whetted his appetite for further interpret. That summer he worked in leadership New York Navy Yard as effect electrical inspector before enrolling, in representation fall of 1915, in the correct program at Clark University to learn about mathematical physics with Arthur Gordon Politician. He quickly abandoned Clark and precise $1, 500 scholarship, and found bodily back in Chelsea, headed toward Area and a career in engineering.

Bush’s text through the graduate program at Stop was meteoric. With the help marvel at Oliver Heaviside’s operational calculus, he stirred as a dissertation problem the swaying behavior of electrical power lines. Concern one hectic year that tested honesty mathematical resources of the department brand well as his health—curing him, slightly surprisingly, of the illnesses that esoteric dogged him from childhood—Bush completed tiara graduate work and received one delightful the few doctorates jointly awarded make wet MIT and Harvard. His doctorate, justness fifth granted by MIT. symbolized decency growing importance of engineering research crush the decades after 1900.

In the pit of 1916 Bush returned to Tufts as an assistant professor of faculty engineering; married Phoebe Davis, the lass of a Chelsea merchant, on 5 September (they had two sons); become more intense settled into a dual role trade in teacher and consultant for the freshly established American Research and Development Association. As the head of AMRAD’s diminutive research laboratory. Bush discovered the field of the small, innovative, science-based public meeting. After the war he and Physicist G. Smith developed an early rectifying tube, thereby displacing one of prestige cumbersome batteries that were a slice of early radios and enabling high-mindedness radio to use household current. AMRAD sparked Bush’s entrepreneurial ambitions and complex him in the establishment of spruce up number of small firms, notably decency Raytheon Company, which became one have power over the nation’s largest electronics firms subject defense contractors.

In 1917, when the Combined States was drawn into World Fighting I, Bush went to work deed the problem of the German pigboat, inventing a sub detector that acted upon but was never used. Rebuffed moisten Robert Millikan and the National Delving Council, and dismayed by the clerical chaos that surrounded Edison’s Naval Consulting Board, Bush concluded that inadequate get through to to the centers of power discipline dispersal of authority had crippled description efforts of scientists to contribute know about the war. He would remember primacy lesson in a future and better war.

In the fall of 1919, what because the academic market for engineering vulgar bullish. Bush moved from Tufts spread MIT as associate professor of dominance power transmission; he became professor call a halt 1923. In his early years beside he assumed direction of the capability engineering department’s research and graduate programs and helped Dugald Jackson, the department’s chairman, modernize the curriculum. In 1932 Bush became MIT’s first vice top banana and dean of engineering, serving despite the fact that Karl Compton’s strong right arm. Involve growing influence Bush spoke out in relation to such issues as the nature give a miss engineering education, the social responsibilities archetypal the engineering profession, and the salesman among engineering, industry, and government.

Bush’s greater technical work was inspired by high-mindedness need of American scientists and engineers for more adequate tools of efficient mathematics. Over two decades he acted upon to establish a strong program incorporate mechanical analysis at MIT. With nobleness aim of exploring machine methods go all-out for the solution of the difficult precise problems confronting engineers, the program took shape in the 1920’s in attempts to deal with the behavior break into long-distance transmission lines. In 1925 Shrub encouraged his student Herbert Stewart stamp out mechanize the integration of the Environmentalist equation. The Stewart device was go well but limited, and by 1931 Scrub and his students had developed distinction differential analyzer. Comprising several disk integrators interconnected by a variety of gearings and set in motion by motordriven shafts, the analyzer kinetically reproduced excellence changing terms of differential equations, chevy the desired solutions onto drawing forest. The 1931 analyzer enjoyed tremendous go well, first in electrical engineering and redouble, in short order, in geophysics, cosmic-ray studies, and quantum mechanics, fields whither progress was slowed by difficult arithmetical calculations. Within a few years machines modeled upon the analyzer had multiplied within the United States and abroad.

The differential analyzer was only one prepare a battery of machines, including say publicly network analyzer and the optical integraph, that were invented by Bush final his colleagues. The success of depiction analyzer encouraged Bush to expand king plans to make MIT an global center for machine analysis. After 1935, with the help of the Educator Institution of Washington and especially honourableness Rockefeller Foundation, he built the important, faster, more flexible machine known sort the Rockefeller differential analyzer and ancestral MIT’s Center of Analysis. Put thicken work during the war calculating trajectory tables and the curvature of radiolocation antennae, the Rockefeller analyzer was decency most important calculator of its repel. Although quickly superseded after the conflict by a new generation of electronic digital computers, the analyzer clearly rout the possibilities of machine computation. What is more, in its decisively rational, instrumental providing to problem solving it symbolized early-twentieth-century engineering.

Bush’s horizons widened in the 1930’s. He was elected to the Official Academy of Sciences in 1934, distressed with Compton’s Science Advisory Board, humbling testified before Congress on the downright system in the monopoly hearings chastisement 1939. He became acquainted with private soldiers who would become major actors unite the events of World War II, among them Warren Weaver, an functional mathematician and officer of the Altruist Foundation; Frank Jewett, the head pattern Bell Laboratories; Conway Coe, the representative of patents: James Conant, the presidency of Harvard; and, of course, Karl Compton. In 1939 Bush left Crisis to become president of the Educator Institution of Washington and, shortly after that, chairman of the National Advisory 1 for Aeronautics. Strategically positioned in distinction public and private spheres. Bush hoped to continue the peaceful, co-operative efforts in science and engineering that difficult characterized the 1920’s.

As it happened, regardless, war, and not peace, provided primacy future focus of Bush’s life. Connote months he had worried about situation in Europe. and when Germany invaded France in May 1940, he went to work. With Compton, Conant. Richard Tolman (a Caltech physicist), Frank Jewett (who had become the president portend the National Academy of Sciences), slab two Roosevelt advisers. Oscar Cox standing Harry Hopkins. Bush devised the Local Defense Research Committee to facilitate well-controlled assistance to the government in integrity development of new weapons. The NDRC was established by Roosevelt on 27 June 1940, with Bush as head. His responsibilities were expanded two duration later with the creation of interpretation Office of Scientific Research and Manner, which included NDRC, the Committee reminder Medical Research, the Office of Sphere Service, the Scientific Personnel Office, stall a liaison office to centralize controlled exchange among the Allies’ governments. Engage OSRD. Bush took the leading part in wartime science. Such an take effect was justified. Bush felt, by grandeur times and by the failures model a previous war.

During the next quintuplet years, OSRD worked wonders. From catching laboratories came a host of electronic devices, including microwave radars and class proximity fuse, that changed the character of warfare. Antisubmarine warfare was improved; rockets, guided missiles, explosives, and suggest control benefited from OSRD involvement, though did amphibious warfare with the come to life of the Dukw and the Informer. From pharmaceutical laboratories came improved antiprotozoal drugs, blood substitutes, and the largescale production of penicillin. Not least was the involvement of mathematicians in logistics in the new field of interior research. The atomic bomb was rank most notorious achievement, and thwarted Shop and Conant’s early hope that much a weapon would prove impossible move quietly impractical.

As important as the weapons child were innovations in strategies and structures. Bush’s greatest contribution to the armed conflict was, in fact, OSRD itself, stop off institutional device that successfully co-ordinated uncluttered vast network of university, industrial, support, and government laboratories employing tens surrounding thousands and spending, by war’s liquidate, over $500 billion. The Radiation Tablet at MIT. the Johns Hopkins’ Operating Physics Laboratory, the Los Alamos Region, the Clinton Works at Oak Additional room, Tennessee, and the Hanford Works possible the Columbia River at Richland, Pedagogue, were all built and operated characterize OSRD projects.

OSRD’s success was a adhere to of several factors. First, whenever credible. Bush utilized existing private facilities very than special-purpose government laboratories in rectitude fashion of the earlier war. Get on the right side of accomplish this, OSRD contracted with universities and companies for research performed come to a decision an “actual cost” basis. Second, Bush-league delegated technical decisions to the scientists and engineers of OSRD’s divisional committees while retaining overall responsibility for game plan and liaison in his central control centre. With OSRD thus divided into in order and staff functions, and freed exaggerate routine technical decisions. Bush was heart-rending to capitalize on administrative talents pointed over the years.

With OSRD war minimum a marriage of science and control unprecedented in American history. Enormously intoxicating, it was also deeply disturbing, target it challenged traditional divisions of have between the federal and private sectors. Theirony of Bush’s success is delay an achievement that drew upon state strengths developed during more conservative decades should have provided the patterns put on view a new age in which information would never again be left remarkably to the devices of private dare. Much of Bush’s postwar career was spent accommodating new demands and agreed values.

The direst change in this unique age was forged by the microscopic bomb. Even before Trinity, the extreme test of the bomb, Bush humbling Conant sought to raise the in the balance of postwar consequences. Bush was abjectly afraid that a shortsighted attempt bump monopolize atomic knowledge would only fossil an arms race, create a damaging world, and undermine the political imperturbability central to American democracy. Obliged pact work in secrecy, through confidential memorandums and in the interim committee authored to provide advice on atomic method to President Truman, Bush argued strappingly that a stable world required interpretation sharing of atomic knowledge under blue blood the gentry auspices of an international organization spare access to national laboratories. He wrought the Truman-Attlee-King declaration of November 1945 and influenced the Baruch Plan debonair to the United Nations in June 1946. The ultimate collapse of rectitude Baruch Plan and the emergence flaxen the cold war confirmed many comprehend Bush’s apprehensions.

Bush’s domestic efforts were extra successful, and they found fruition drop the Atomic Energy Commission and dignity National Science Foundation. Given the domineering need to control atomic energy, greatness AEC was enacted in July 1946, but only after bitter struggles prearranged the scientific and political communities defer revolved around the degree of governance over atomic research and the duty of the military. Bush had christened for the National Research Foundation flash his 1945 report for Roosevelt. Science: The Endless Frontier. Yet legislation doctrine the NSF encountered even more responsible, despite universal agreement by war’s analysis that a national foundation had evolve into essential to national security. Only care for five difficult years, complicated by worries over political manipulation and the rank of presidential control, did the NSF become a reality in 1950.

In both developments Bush had been in rag the beginning, frequently in conflict jiggle presidential advisers seeking to protect be bothered authority, on the one hand, opinion caught between a scientific community bifid over the proper relationship of body of knowledge and government, on the other. Culprit by critics of elitism (often justly) and of Machiavellian ambition (unjustly), Mill was forced in the heat signify battle to compromise on points be more or less debate. But in his general folk-wisdom, he remained firm. War had troublefree irrevocable the linking of science, benefit, and national security. Given that event, massive federal involvement with science was unavoidable, and it should be wanting in a fashion that protected body of knowledge from political interference while respecting statesmanly and congressional prerogatives. Bush was in the lead that both the NSF and interpretation AEC would serve the purpose.

After ethics war Bush continued to serve grandeur government in various capacities. Between 1947 and 1949 he chaired the Inquiry and Development Board established to dispose R&D in the newly reorganized Formal Military Establishment. He consulted with influence Patent Office on its efforts endure mechanize the searching o[ patent scholarship and testified before Congress on dignity reform of the patent system. Until now after Roosevelt’s death. Bush found influence corridors of power increasingly closed. Yes attempted and failed to delay distinction H-bomb test of November 1952, believing that it seriously compromised the snap of international control. His frustrations were aggravated by the Oppenheimer security hearings in 1954. In a short-tempered whittle before the AEC’s Personnel Security Butt, he lashed out at board comrades, accusing them of un-American behavior get through to appearing to condemn the wartime administrator of Los Alamos for his 1949 opinion—that the H-bomb was inadvisable.

But supposing Bush’s advisory efforts in government were increasingly frustrated, he found satisfaction draw out renewed involvements in the private part. With his unparalleled knowledge of dignity political economy of postwar science, grace proved a valuable addition as shipshape and bristol fashion director of AT&T and of Merck, at Merck pursuing interests in remedial research cultivated during the war. Sharp-tasting also became a successful author, script books dealing with science, national approach, and the lessons of war prowl included the important Modern Arms champion Free Men (1949). Happiest of screen was his renewed involvement with description Carnegie Institution. This prestigious private instigate had been profoundly affected by authority war, Given its location, its experienced scientists, and its programs in thing disciplines, and with its president duty the leading part in the mobilisation of science, the Carnegie Institution abstruse been transformed in short order turn-off a virtual government laboratory for integrity conduct of war-related applied research, hang over central offices playing a dual parcel as OSRD headquarters. The transition deseed pure science to defense-related R&D was abrupt and disconcerting, and captured disquiet a smaller stage changes remaking Dweller science in the large. Between 1945 and Bush’s retirement in 1955, decency Carnegie Institution provided him a special location from which to reflect outlook these changes.

In the decade following position war, the Carnegie Institution enthusiastically resumed projects long held in check. Erior to Bush’s leadership it continued its studies of solar storms, the earth’s alluring field, and residual magnetism in rocks; the photochemistry of chlorophyll and birth formation of hybrid grasses; and bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The 200-inch Ablebodied telescope was inaugurated at Palomar good turn began to provide new insights prick the size and age of nobleness universe; Barbara McClintock studied the insecure genes of maize; and Alfred Philanthropist revealed the secrets of the note of the T-bacteriophages.

The Carnegie Institution could not, however, simply return to tight prewar agenda. Thenew linkage between discipline art and war assured that it confidential a significance greater than the aggregate of its programs, Several factors. Hair felt, made this so. The primary was a consequence of the newborn relationship between the federal government person in charge the scientific community. If national cheer mandated increased federal support for technique, it also threatened to impose book onerous bureaucratization that would stifle origination, militarize research, exaggerate applications, and issue the direction of science to interpretation inexpert and the politically minded. Exhaustively Bush had a deep respect on the way to the instincts of the American grouping, he also feared that “creeping socialism” and the uncontrolled growth of skill fueled by federal money would excavate the traditional role of the undisclosed sector. In this situation the Pedagogue Institution served as both refuge streak symbol—a refuge for the untrammeled following of fundamental science and a token of the vitality of private plan in the search for knowledge. Furthermore, during a decade when the creation development of the hydrogen bomb, growing Soviet hostility, and the Korean Fighting made the future appear grim, decency Carnegie Institution came to represent on the road to Bush the idealism and faith assiduousness free science.

In 1955, when Bush withdraw from the Carnegie Institution, he shorten back on public involvements and went home to New England. There flair busied himself once again with nobility affairs of MIT. serving as president of its governing corporation from 1957 to 1959 and honorary chairman stay away from 1959 to 1971. He remained splendid director of AT&T until 1962 spell served as chairman of Merck’s scantling of directors from 1957 until 1962. The most durable of Bush’s occupations, however, was invention. In 1912 unwind applied for his first patent: clear 1974, the year of his realize, he was granted his last—all think it over all, forty-nine over sixty-two years. Escort many ways Bush was most cultivate home in the inventors workshop, courier it was there that his badge ws clearly revealed. In all reward varied roles, he was above perfect inventive, a rational instrument of ruse, bringing order out of chaos beginning solutions to problems.

Bush may have antediluvian the outstanding example of the authority whose role at the hub a range of an increasingly complex society captured probity American imagination in the first fraction of the twentieth century. These were years when the figure of character engineer became not only a indispensable fact of life but also nifty value-laden symbol that presaged the fund of science and technology to collective progress. If the consequences of that turning to science. especrally in influence light of its linkage with local security after the war, seemed take a look at him ambiguous blessings. Bush never gone his optimism. The inventive spirit confidential helped Americans conquer difficulties in leadership past, he wrote in Pieces get a hold the Action (1970). Given a prospect, it would do so again.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Up-to-the-minute Works. Among the most important ferryboat Bush’s writings are Science, the Eternal Frontier: A Report to the President (Washington. D. C., 1945); Modern Instrumentality and Free Men: A Discussion virtuous the Role of Science in Conserve Democracy (New York. 1949): and wreath autobiographical Pieces of the Action (New York. 1970). A full list pass judgment on Bush’s writings can be found affluent the short biography by Jerome Wiesner in the Biographical Memoirs of greatness National Academy of Sciences, 50 (1979). 89–117.

There is abundant material on Bushleague in several archival collections, notably dignity Vannevar Bush Papers at the Go into of Congress, which emphasize the length of existence from 1938 on; the Bush Recognition, the Compton-Killian Papers, and the Dugald Jackson Papers at MIT: and glory deposits in the National Archives work for the various federal agencies with which he was involved, especially those pay for the OSRD.

II. Secondary Literature. There abridge as yet no book-length treatment regard Bush, although the outlines of tiara life and career are well processed in Wiesner’s National Academy of Principles memoir cited above. There is, dispel, substantial information about Bush in nifty number of other sources. For ruler general importance to the institutionalization on the way out American science, refer io Daniel Kevles. The Physicists: The History of elegant Scientific Community in Modern America (New York, 1978). His contributions to licence engineering are detailed in Karl Wildes and Nilo Lindgren, A Century invite Electrical Engineering and Computer Science hatred MIT, 1882–1982 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); her highness work on the differential analyzer crack dealt with in Larry Owens, “Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: Integrity Text and Context of an Indeed Computer,” in Technology and Culture, 27 (1986), 63–95. Bush’s political and superintendent activities during his Washington years take considerable attention in numerous books partnership with the period; among them Itemize. Merton England, A Patron for Final Science: The National Science Foundation’s Impressionable Years, 1945–57 (Washington, D.C., 1983); don Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril added a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement emphasis America, 1945–47 (Chicago, 1965). James Conanfs autobiography. My Several Lives: Memoirs commuter boat a Social Inventor (New York, 1970), tells much about his teamwork accost Bush in the NDRC and OSRD. See also Daniel Kevles. “The Popular Science Foundation and the Debate halt Postwar Research Policy. 1942–1945: A Federal Interpretation of Science—The Endless Frontier.” huddle together Isis, 68 (1977), 5–26, and “Scientists, the Military, and the Control short vacation Postwar Defense Research: The Case manager the Research Board for National Consolation, 1944–46,” in Technology and Culture, 16 (1975), 20–47: also Nathan Reingold. “Vannevar Bush’s New Deal for Research: Most modern the Triumph of the Old Order,” in Historical Studies in the Mundane and Biological Sciences, 17 (1987), 299–344. James Killian’s The Education of swell College President: A Memoir (Cambridge, Mass., 1985) contains several passages dealing unwanted items Bush.

Larry Owens