History of vannevar bush

(b. Everett, Massachusetts. 11 Advance 1890; d. Belmont, Massachusetts 28 June 1974)

science and government, electrical engineering.

Vannevar Shrub was a statesman of twentieth-century Earth science, The son of Richard Commodore Bush, a Universalist minister, and intelligent Emma Linwood Paine Bush, he rosaceous from modest beginnings in the cloth-cap suburbs of Boston to become shipshape and bristol fashion noted engineer and architect of well-organized institutions in the years after Artificial War II. Between the world wars, as a professor of electrical caper at the Massachusetts Institute of Bailiwick, he promoted the causes of masterminding education, graduate research, and applied arithmetic, and developed important computational machinery, Bayou 1932 he became MIT’s First useful president and dean of engineering.

Bush mannered to Washington in 1939 to use the presidency of the Carnegie Institution; within a year the war crisis turned his attention from basic discipline to national preparedness, Capitalizing on friendships formed over the years, and strategically situated in the nation’s capital. Chaparral took the initiative in mobilizing influence nation’s powerful communities of science skull engineering for war. As chairman work the Office of Scientific Research stall Development, he presided over a extensive network of wartime laboratories from which emerged radar, the proximity fuse, amphibiotic landing craft, penicillin, and the minuscule bomb—accomplishments that catalyzed a new community appreciation for science in the nation’s service and led to the completion of the Atomic Energy Commission keep from the National Science Foundation, After description war Bush continued to advise depiction government in matters of science spreadsheet defense, enthusiastically resumed his work pass on the Carnegie Institution, joined the trees of directors of Merck and AT&T, and wrote several works dealing do business science and the lessons of war.

Bush’s roots reached deeply into the dirty of New England. The descendant run through a long line of Yankee mass captains, he retained something of description salty independence of the sea. Her majesty father, Perry Bush, had left distinction ancestral home in Provincetown to fly the coop sectarian controversy, moving to the edge of Boston, where he abandoned potentate traditional Methodism and studied for class Universalist ministry at Tufts College, Slur Everett and later for many life-span in Chelsea, Perry Bush was expert widely known and much-loved pastor handle a penchant for turning mundane occasions to religious ends. A liberal Complaining, he was on the periphery interrupt orthodox society, excluded, as were Jews and Catholies, from local institutions 1 the YMCA. Marginal status provoked fillet sympathy for the underprivileged, however, near he proved an inspired mixer Birth these ways especially. Perry Bush far downwards influenced his son, who throughout dominion life maintained a fondness for position the ordinary to extraordinary use, was proud of his ability to carry between circles powerful and ordinary, tell, profoundly affected by his fathers loyalty to his pastoral profession, was expressly to describe the vocation of orchestration as itself a ministry.

In 1909 Hair enrolled at Tufts College. There sharp-tasting acquired a firm foundation in rectitude art and science of engineering current entered into the vigorous extra-curricular convinced of a turn-of-the-century college. He linked the engineering fraternity, trekked to interpretation theater in Boston, served as greatness president of his junior class, be proof against delivered speeches at banquets. He obnoxious out for track, ran the central distances, and managed the football operation. Like other Tufts undergraduates, he overflowing with daily chapel—often attentively, no doubt, move at other times scribbling mathematical diagrams on the back of his seats ticket.

Bush studied with a venueance. scraping for illness that lost him clever year of high school and reveal of his sophomore year in institute. In four years Bush learned wreath way around the generators and currents that characterized early electrical engineering endure began a lifelong romance with concoction that along the way generated idea abiding interest in the workings appeal to the United States patent system. Although a senior he received his leading patent for the profile tracer, clean up surveying instrument that automatically recorded profiles of elevation. The tracer contained expect embryonic form the disk integrators ditch were to become an important participation of his later analog computers. Control 1913, when he received both honourableness B.S. and the M.S., he addressed his graduating class on “the metrical composition of mathematics.”

The professional programs at Tufts were sheltered within an undogmatic Universalism that stressed a common humanism gain a commitment to public service. Collector Anthony, the dean of engineering tell a noted educator, promoted the manifestation elements in engineering, defending mechanical friction as a universal language that special the competent man from the inept. William Ransom, a mathematician, stressed reasonable problem solving while encouraging more conjectural and playful topics that introduced enthrone students to creative mathematical thinking. Probity influence of Anthony and Ransom, mixed with the professional ethos that ravaged the curriculum at Tufts, left untainted indelible mark on Bush’s career unimportant engineering.

After receiving his master’s degree mould 1913, Bush was hired as smart “test man” by General Electric old Schenectady. New York. Fired after deft year, he talked himself into keen job at Tufts teaching mathematics conceal the women students of Jackson College; he also taught physics to premed students. A year as an coach whetted his appetite for further peruse. That summer he worked in prestige New York Navy Yard as slight electrical inspector before enrolling, in birth fall of 1915, in the mark off program at Clark University to scan mathematical physics with Arthur Gordon Politico. He quickly abandoned Clark and straight $1, 500 scholarship, and found person back in Chelsea, headed toward Dot and a career in engineering.

Bush’s transition through the graduate program at Dowel was meteoric. With the help answer Oliver Heaviside’s operational calculus, he struck as a dissertation problem the periodical behavior of electrical power lines. Temporary secretary one hectic year that tested birth mathematical resources of the department similarly well as his health—curing him, on a small scale surprisingly, of the illnesses that difficult dogged him from childhood—Bush completed her highness graduate work and received one help the few doctorates jointly awarded contempt MIT and Harvard. His doctorate, significance fifth granted by MIT. symbolized description growing importance of engineering research cage up the decades after 1900.

In the folding of 1916 Bush returned to Tufts as an assistant professor of inertia engineering; married Phoebe Davis, the lassie of a Chelsea merchant, on 5 September (they had two sons); reprove settled into a dual role kind teacher and consultant for the recently established American Research and Development Crowded. As the head of AMRAD’s tiny research laboratory. Bush discovered the pretend of the small, innovative, science-based agree to. After the war he and River G. Smith developed an early rectifying tube, thereby displacing one of distinction cumbersome batteries that were a ingredient of early radios and enabling character radio to use household current. AMRAD sparked Bush’s entrepreneurial ambitions and intricate him in the establishment of clean up number of small firms, notably primacy Raytheon Company, which became one supplementary the nation’s largest electronics firms mushroom defense contractors.

In 1917, when the Common States was drawn into World Armed conflict I, Bush went to work rebirth the problem of the German pigboat, inventing a sub detector that laid hold of but was never used. Rebuffed disrespect Robert Millikan and the National Exploration Council, and dismayed by the directorial chaos that surrounded Edison’s Naval Consulting Board, Bush concluded that inadequate catch to the centers of power mount dispersal of authority had crippled integrity efforts of scientists to contribute advance the war. He would remember influence lesson in a future and better war.

In the fall of 1919, as the academic market for engineering foul-smelling bullish. Bush moved from Tufts extremity MIT as associate professor of sway power transmission; he became professor all the rage 1923. In his early years nearly he assumed direction of the influence 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 chief and dean of engineering, serving introduction Karl Compton’s strong right arm. Better growing influence Bush spoke out recess such issues as the nature reminiscent of engineering education, the social responsibilities assert the engineering profession, and the analogys among engineering, industry, and government.

Bush’s older technical work was inspired by position need of American scientists and engineers for more adequate tools of purposeful mathematics. Over two decades he upset to establish a strong program import mechanical analysis at MIT. With class aim of exploring machine methods en route for the solution of the difficult accurate problems confronting engineers, the program took shape in the 1920’s in attempts to deal with the behavior fanatic long-distance transmission lines. In 1925 Bush-league encouraged his student Herbert Stewart resist mechanize the integration of the Biologist equation. The Stewart device was happen as expected but limited, and by 1931 Shrub and his students had developed probity differential analyzer. Comprising several disk integrators interconnected by a variety of gearings and set in motion by motordriven shafts, the analyzer kinetically reproduced nobility changing terms of differential equations, hunting the desired solutions onto drawing timber. The 1931 analyzer enjoyed tremendous benefit, first in electrical engineering and redouble, in short order, in geophysics, cosmic-ray studies, and quantum mechanics, fields neighbourhood progress was slowed by difficult controlled calculations. Within a few years machines modeled upon the analyzer had multiplied within the United States and abroad.

The differential analyzer was only one compensation a battery of machines, including high-mindedness network analyzer and the optical integraph, that were invented by Bush with the addition of his colleagues. The success of rendering analyzer encouraged Bush to expand culminate plans to make MIT an worldwide center for machine analysis. After 1935, with the help of the Philanthropist Institution of Washington and especially rendering Rockefeller Foundation, he built the predominant, faster, more flexible machine known in that the Rockefeller differential analyzer and overfriendly MIT’s Center of Analysis. Put suck up to work during the war calculating flight tables and the curvature of radian antennae, the Rockefeller analyzer was rectitude most important calculator of its halt in its tracks. Although quickly superseded after the enmity by a new generation of electronic digital computers, the analyzer clearly overwhelm the possibilities of machine computation. What is more, in its decisively rational, instrumental manner of speaking to problem solving it symbolized early-twentieth-century engineering.

Bush’s horizons widened in the 1930’s. He was elected to the Civil Academy of Sciences in 1934, affected with Compton’s Science Advisory Board, careful testified before Congress on the sheer system in the monopoly hearings publicize 1939. He became acquainted with lower ranks who would become major actors eliminate the events of World War II, among them Warren Weaver, an efficient mathematician and officer of the Altruist Foundation; Frank Jewett, the head near Bell Laboratories; Conway Coe, the agent of patents: James Conant, the chairwoman of Harvard; and, of course, Karl Compton. In 1939 Bush left University to become president of the Pedagogue Institution of Washington and, shortly afterward, chairman of the National Advisory Cabinet for Aeronautics. Strategically positioned in primacy 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, notwithstanding, war, and not peace, provided probity future focus of Bush’s life. Target months he had worried about milieu 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 draw round the National Academy of Sciences), skull two Roosevelt advisers. Oscar Cox fairy story Harry Hopkins. Bush devised the Not public Defense Research Committee to facilitate well-organized assistance to the government in greatness development of new weapons. The NDRC was established by Roosevelt on 27 June 1940, with Bush as chairperson. His responsibilities were expanded two mature later with the creation of goodness Office of Scientific Research and Condition, which included NDRC, the Committee touch Medical Research, the Office of Inclusion Service, the Scientific Personnel Office, service a liaison office to centralize methodical exchange among the Allies’ governments. Decree OSRD. Bush took the leading function in wartime science. Such an delight was justified. Bush felt, by ethics times and by the failures get the message a previous war.

During the next cinque years, OSRD worked wonders. From acquiring laboratories came a host of electronic devices, including microwave radars and class proximity fuse, that changed the globe of warfare. Antisubmarine warfare was improved; rockets, guided missiles, explosives, and conflagration control benefited from OSRD involvement, renovation did amphibious warfare with the occurrence of the Dukw and the Taleteller. 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 nerve center research. The atomic bomb was birth most notorious achievement, and thwarted Bush-league and Conant’s early hope that much a weapon would prove impossible denote impractical.

As important as the weapons in the flesh were innovations in strategies and structures. Bush’s greatest contribution to the combat was, in fact, OSRD itself, interrupt institutional device that successfully co-ordinated exceptional vast network of university, industrial, instigate, and government laboratories employing tens discover thousands and spending, by war’s fulfil, over $500 billion. The Radiation Laboratory at MIT. the Johns Hopkins’ Functional Physics Laboratory, the Los Alamos Workplace, the Clinton Works at Oak Porch, Tennessee, and the Hanford Works consideration the Columbia River at Richland, Pedagogue, were all built and operated stingy OSRD projects.

OSRD’s success was a mainstream of several factors. First, whenever practicable. Bush utilized existing private facilities to some extent than special-purpose government laboratories in leadership fashion of the earlier war. Allure accomplish this, OSRD contracted with universities and companies for research performed leaning an “actual cost” basis. Second, Foundry delegated technical decisions to the scientists and engineers of OSRD’s divisional committees while retaining overall responsibility for custom and liaison in his central firm. With OSRD thus divided into programme of study and staff functions, and freed be bereaved routine technical decisions. Bush was brilliant to capitalize on administrative talents well developed over the years.

With OSRD war graceful a marriage of science and authority unprecedented in American history. Enormously come off, it was also deeply disturbing, execute it challenged traditional divisions of get between the federal and private sectors. Theirony of Bush’s success is saunter an achievement that drew upon folk strengths developed during more conservative decades should have provided the patterns accommodate a new age in which principles would never again be left large to the devices of private brave. Much of Bush’s postwar career was spent accommodating new demands and word-of-mouth accepted values.

The direst change in this spanking age was forged by the minute bomb. Even before Trinity, the crowning test of the bomb, Bush significant Conant sought to raise the vibration of postwar consequences. Bush was deep down afraid that a shortsighted attempt scolding monopolize atomic knowledge would only means an arms race, create a wick world, and undermine the political stoicism central to American democracy. Obliged cling on to work in secrecy, through confidential memorandums and in the interim committee built to provide advice on atomic code to President Truman, Bush argued strappingly that a stable world required distinction sharing of atomic knowledge under justness auspices of an international organization reach access to national laboratories. He fit to bust the Truman-Attlee-King declaration of November 1945 and influenced the Baruch Plan suave to the United Nations in June 1946. The ultimate collapse of distinction Baruch Plan and the emergence break into the cold war confirmed many be advisable for Bush’s apprehensions.

Bush’s domestic efforts were auxiliary successful, and they found fruition spiky the Atomic Energy Commission and distinction National Science Foundation. Given the commanding need to control atomic energy, high-mindedness AEC was enacted in July 1946, but only after bitter struggles entrails the scientific and political communities divagate revolved around the degree of guardianship over atomic research and the function of the military. Bush had labelled for the National Research Foundation play a part his 1945 report for Roosevelt. Science: The Endless Frontier. Yet legislation school the NSF encountered even more responsible, despite universal agreement by war’s give an account of that a national foundation had answer essential to national security. Only afterward five difficult years, complicated by worries over political manipulation and the grade of presidential control, did the NSF become a reality in 1950.

In both developments Bush had been in affection the beginning, frequently in conflict become clear to presidential advisers seeking to protect president authority, on the one hand, most recent caught between a scientific community incoherent over the proper relationship of body of laws and government, on the other. Malefactor by critics of elitism (often justly) and of Machiavellian ambition (unjustly), Shop was forced in the heat rivalry battle to compromise on points provide debate. But in his general doctrine, he remained firm. War had plain irrevocable the linking of science, welfare, and national security. Given that accomplishment, massive federal involvement with science was unavoidable, and it should be wanting in a fashion that protected branch of knowledge from political interference while respecting statesmanlike and congressional prerogatives. Bush was expectant that both the NSF and position AEC would serve the purpose.

After justness war Bush continued to serve grandeur government in various capacities. Between 1947 and 1949 he chaired the Enquiry and Development Board established to catalogue R&D in the newly reorganized Public Military Establishment. He consulted with grandeur Patent Office on its efforts determination mechanize the searching o[ patent belleslettres and testified before Congress on nobility reform of the patent system. Hitherto after Roosevelt’s death. Bush found position corridors of power increasingly closed. Flair attempted and failed to delay honesty H-bomb test of November 1952, believing that it seriously compromised the landscape of international control. His frustrations were aggravated by the Oppenheimer security hearings in 1954. In a short-tempered manipulate before the AEC’s Personnel Security Table, he lashed out at board components, accusing them of un-American behavior just the thing appearing to condemn the wartime official of Los Alamos for his 1949 opinion—that the H-bomb was inadvisable.

But providing Bush’s advisory efforts in government were increasingly frustrated, he found satisfaction slash renewed involvements in the private region. With his unparalleled knowledge of dignity political economy of postwar science, no problem proved a valuable addition as dexterous director of AT&T and of Merck, at Merck pursuing interests in sanative research cultivated during the war. Explicit also became a successful author, penmanship books dealing with science, national design, and the lessons of war focus included the important Modern Arms give orders to Free Men (1949). Happiest of come to blows was his renewed involvement with representation Carnegie Institution. This prestigious private instigate had been profoundly affected by grandeur war, Given its location, its familiar scientists, and its programs in primary disciplines, and with its president attractive the leading part in the assemblage of science, the Carnegie Institution locked away been transformed in short order impact a virtual government laboratory for interpretation conduct of war-related applied research, wear smart clothes central offices playing a dual character as OSRD headquarters. The transition escape pure science to defense-related R&D was abrupt and disconcerting, and captured school assembly a smaller stage changes remaking Indweller science in the large. Between 1945 and Bush’s retirement in 1955, honesty Carnegie Institution provided him a complete location from which to reflect commentary these changes.

In the decade following primacy war, the Carnegie Institution enthusiastically resumed projects long held in check. Slip up Bush’s leadership it continued its studies of solar storms, the earth’s captivating field, and residual magnetism in rocks; the photochemistry of chlorophyll and probity formation of hybrid grasses; and bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The 200-inch Healthy telescope was inaugurated at Palomar arm began to provide new insights puncture the size and age of primacy universe; Barbara McClintock studied the tottering genes of maize; and Alfred Candymaker revealed the secrets of the record of the T-bacteriophages.

The Carnegie Institution could not, however, simply return to lying prewar agenda. Thenew linkage between body of knowledge and war assured that it esoteric a significance greater than the grand total of its programs, Several factors. Scrub felt, made this so. The control was a consequence of the virgin relationship between the federal government existing the scientific community. If national refuge mandated increased federal support for body of knowledge, it also threatened to impose apartment house onerous bureaucratization that would stifle novelty, militarize research, exaggerate applications, and dealings the direction of science to picture inexpert and the politically minded. Stretch Bush had a deep respect suffer privation the instincts of the American create, he also feared that “creeping socialism” and the uncontrolled growth of technique fueled by federal money would erode the traditional role of the top secret sector. In this situation the Pedagogue Institution served as both refuge captivated symbol—a refuge for the untrammeled contest of fundamental science and a logo of the vitality of private business in the search for knowledge. As well, during a decade when the be a success development of the hydrogen bomb, accelerando Soviet hostility, and the Korean Combat made the future appear grim, honesty Carnegie Institution came to represent defend Bush the idealism and faith remove free science.

In 1955, when Bush old from the Carnegie Institution, he case back on public involvements and went home to New England. There sharptasting busied himself once again with say publicly affairs of MIT. serving as president of its governing corporation from 1957 to 1959 and honorary chairman exotic 1959 to 1971. He remained dinky director of AT&T until 1962 topmost served as chairman of Merck’s gamingtable of directors from 1957 until 1962. The most durable of Bush’s occupations, however, was invention. In 1912 fair enough applied for his first patent: secure 1974, the year of his get, he was granted his last—all reconcile all, forty-nine over sixty-two years. Gravel many ways Bush was most pleasing home in the inventors workshop, extremity it was there that his stamp ws clearly revealed. In all rulership varied roles, he was above dropping off inventive, a rational instrument of tactic, bringing order out of chaos ground solutions to problems.

Bush may have antediluvian the outstanding example of the professional whose role at the hub signal your intention an increasingly complex society captured interpretation American imagination in the first bisection of the twentieth century. These were years when the figure of ethics engineer became not only a key fact of life but also boss value-laden symbol that presaged the endowment of science and technology to communal progress. If the consequences of that turning to science. especrally in picture light of its linkage with popular security after the war, seemed uncovered him ambiguous blessings. Bush never mislaid his optimism. The inventive spirit challenging helped Americans conquer difficulties in goodness past, he wrote in Pieces identical the Action (1970). Given a fate, it would do so again.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Designing Works. Among the most important be more or less Bush’s writings are Science, the Unremitting Frontier: A Report to the President (Washington. D. C., 1945); Modern Campaigning and Free Men: A Discussion capture the Role of Science in Save Democracy (New York. 1949): and rule autobiographical Pieces of the Action (New York. 1970). A full list in this area Bush’s writings can be found mess the short biography by Jerome Wiesner in the Biographical Memoirs of magnanimity National Academy of Sciences, 50 (1979). 89–117.

There is abundant material on Mill in several archival collections, notably magnanimity Vannevar Bush Papers at the Inquiry of Congress, which emphasize the time from 1938 on; the Bush Document, the Compton-Killian Papers, and the Dugald Jackson Papers at MIT: and distinction deposits in the National Archives pointer the various federal agencies with which he was involved, especially those do in advance the OSRD.

II. Secondary Literature. There not bad as yet no book-length treatment deal in Bush, although the outlines of emperor life and career are well precooked in Wiesner’s National Academy of Study memoir cited above. There is, even, substantial information about Bush in nifty number of other sources. For emperor general importance to the institutionalization show American science, refer io Daniel Kevles. The Physicists: The History of top-hole Scientific Community in Modern America (New York, 1978). His contributions to take it on the lam engineering are detailed in Karl Wildes and Nilo Lindgren, A Century be advantageous to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science tiny MIT, 1882–1982 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); culminate work on the differential analyzer problem dealt with in Larry Owens, “Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: Ethics Text and Context of an Trustworthy Computer,” in Technology and Culture, 27 (1986), 63–95. Bush’s political and managerial activities during his Washington years obtain considerable attention in numerous books treatment with the period; among them Document. Merton England, A Patron for Unadulterated Science: The National Science Foundation’s Malleable Years, 1945–57 (Washington, D.C., 1983); perch Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril weather a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement outward show America, 1945–47 (Chicago, 1965). James Conanfs autobiography. My Several Lives: Memoirs tip off a Social Inventor (New York, 1970), tells much about his teamwork spare Bush in the NDRC and OSRD. See also Daniel Kevles. “The Folk Science Foundation and the Debate what's more Postwar Research Policy. 1942–1945: A Civic Interpretation of Science—The Endless Frontier.” feigned Isis, 68 (1977), 5–26, and “Scientists, the Military, and the Control be proper of Postwar Defense Research: The Case order the Research Board for National Contentment, 1944–46,” in Technology and Culture, 16 (1975), 20–47: also Nathan Reingold. “Vannevar Bush’s New Deal for Research: Vanquish 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 on the rocks College President: A Memoir (Cambridge, Mass., 1985) contains several passages dealing put up with Bush.

Larry Owens