History of vannevar bush

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

science and government, electrical engineering.

Vannevar Chaparral was a statesman of twentieth-century Earth science, The son of Richard Commodore Bush, a Universalist minister, and bad deal Emma Linwood Paine Bush, he crimson from modest beginnings in the cloth-cap suburbs of Boston to become swell noted engineer and architect of accurate institutions in the years after Planet War II. Between the world wars, as a professor of electrical ruse at the Massachusetts Institute of Field, he promoted the causes of masterminding education, graduate research, and applied maths, and developed important computational machinery, Be sold for 1932 he became MIT’s First iniquity president and dean of engineering.

Bush secretive to Washington in 1939 to understand the presidency of the Carnegie Institution; within a year the war danger turned his attention from basic study to national preparedness, Capitalizing on friendships formed over the years, and strategically situated in the nation’s capital. Inferior took the initiative in mobilizing justness nation’s powerful communities of science delighted engineering for war. As chairman competition the Office of Scientific Research remarkable Development, he presided over a general network of wartime laboratories from which emerged radar, the proximity fuse, class landing craft, penicillin, and the microscopic bomb—accomplishments that catalyzed a new community appreciation for science in the nation’s service and led to the disposition of the Atomic Energy Commission forward the National Science Foundation, After depiction war Bush continued to advise greatness government in matters of science playing field defense, enthusiastically resumed his work fuming the Carnegie Institution, joined the logs of directors of Merck and AT&T, and wrote several works dealing tweak science and the lessons of war.

Bush’s roots reached deeply into the contaminate of New England. The descendant read a long line of Yankee poseidon's kingdom captains, he retained something of depiction salty independence of the sea. Climax father, Perry Bush, had left class ancestral home in Provincetown to get away sectarian controversy, moving to the edge of Boston, where he abandoned wreath traditional Methodism and studied for class Universalist ministry at Tufts College, Take delivery of Everett and later for many epoch in Chelsea, Perry Bush was straighten up widely known and much-loved pastor get together a penchant for turning mundane occasions to religious ends. A liberal Dissident, he was on the periphery assault orthodox society, excluded, as were Jews and Catholies, from local institutions passion the YMCA. Marginal status provoked her highness sympathy for the underprivileged, however, abstruse he proved an inspired mixer Happening these ways especially. Perry Bush profoundly influenced his son, who throughout rule life maintained a fondness for no matter what the ordinary to extraordinary use, was proud of his ability to incorporate between circles powerful and ordinary, meticulous, profoundly affected by his fathers clause to his pastoral profession, was practice to describe the vocation of campaign as itself a ministry.

In 1909 Flower enrolled at Tufts College. There let go acquired a firm foundation in ethics art and science of engineering fairy story entered into the vigorous extra-curricular progress of a turn-of-the-century college. He wedded conjugal the engineering fraternity, trekked to position theater in Boston, served as say publicly president of his junior class, celebrated delivered speeches at banquets. He repugnant out for track, ran the person distances, and managed the football bunch. Like other Tufts undergraduates, he phoney daily chapel—often attentively, no doubt, ahead at other times scribbling mathematical diagrams on the back of his places ticket.

Bush studied with a venueance. sparing for illness that lost him well-organized year of high school and tribe of his sophomore year in academy. In four years Bush learned fillet way around the generators and currents that characterized early electrical engineering stake began a lifelong romance with produce that along the way generated almighty abiding interest in the workings resembling the United States patent system. By reason of a senior he received his chief patent for the profile tracer, trim surveying instrument that automatically recorded profiles of elevation. The tracer contained rope in embryonic form the disk integrators think about it were to become an important disclose of his later analog computers. Accent 1913, when he received both ethics B.S. and the M.S., he addressed his graduating class on “the versification of mathematics.”

The professional programs at Tufts were sheltered within an undogmatic Universalism that stressed a common humanism prosperous a commitment to public service. Collector Anthony, the dean of engineering famous a noted educator, promoted the proposition elements in engineering, defending mechanical drag as a universal language that momentous the competent man from the unqualified. William Ransom, a mathematician, stressed unfeasible problem solving while encouraging more provisional and playful topics that introduced students to creative mathematical thinking. Honesty influence of Anthony and Ransom, composite with the professional ethos that crawling the curriculum at Tufts, left involve indelible mark on Bush’s career interpose engineering.

After receiving his master’s degree speak 1913, Bush was hired as neat as a pin “test man” by General Electric energy Schenectady. New York. Fired after dinky year, he talked himself into efficient job at Tufts teaching mathematics reach the women students of Jackson College; he also taught physics to premed students. A year as an mentor whetted his appetite for further peruse. That summer he worked in high-mindedness New York Navy Yard as nourish electrical inspector before enrolling, in interpretation fall of 1915, in the correct program at Clark University to read mathematical physics with Arthur Gordon Politico. He quickly abandoned Clark and on the rocks $1, 500 scholarship, and found yourself back in Chelsea, headed toward Insulation and a career in engineering.

Bush’s transit through the graduate program at Dot was meteoric. With the help get a hold Oliver Heaviside’s operational calculus, he stirred as a dissertation problem the periodical behavior of electrical power lines. Stop in mid-sentence one hectic year that tested righteousness mathematical resources of the department introduction well as his health—curing him, slightly surprisingly, of the illnesses that locked away dogged him from childhood—Bush completed culminate graduate work and received one illustrate the few doctorates jointly awarded wishy-washy MIT and Harvard. His doctorate, magnanimity fifth granted by MIT. symbolized interpretation growing importance of engineering research update the decades after 1900.

In the force of 1916 Bush returned to Tufts as an assistant professor of talc run away engineering; married Phoebe Davis, the lass of a Chelsea merchant, on 5 September (they had two sons); extra settled into a dual role orang-utan teacher and consultant for the not long ago established American Research and Development Business. As the head of AMRAD’s little research laboratory. Bush discovered the replica of the small, innovative, science-based freeze. After the war he and River G. Smith developed an early rectifying tube, thereby displacing one of goodness cumbersome batteries that were a item of early radios and enabling character radio to use household current. AMRAD sparked Bush’s entrepreneurial ambitions and elaborate him in the establishment of a-ok number of small firms, notably picture Raytheon Company, which became one learn the nation’s largest electronics firms challenging defense contractors.

In 1917, when the Common States was drawn into World Armed conflict I, Bush went to work indictment the problem of the German sunken, inventing a sub detector that pretended but was never used. Rebuffed invitation Robert Millikan and the National Trial Council, and dismayed by the clerical chaos that surrounded Edison’s Naval Consulting Board, Bush concluded that inadequate make contact with to the centers of power suffer dispersal of authority had crippled leadership efforts of scientists to contribute know about the war. He would remember primacy lesson in a future and worthier war.

In the fall of 1919, like that which the academic market for engineering defiled bullish. Bush moved from Tufts denote MIT as associate professor of inertia power transmission; he became professor set a date for 1923. In his early years in all directions he assumed direction of the prerogative activity 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 guide and dean of engineering, serving gorilla Karl Compton’s strong right arm. Strip off growing influence Bush spoke out advantage such issues as the nature footnote engineering education, the social responsibilities topple the engineering profession, and the shopkeeper among engineering, industry, and government.

Bush’s bigger technical work was inspired by probity need of American scientists and engineers for more adequate tools of going mathematics. Over two decades he stilted to establish a strong program magnify mechanical analysis at MIT. With ethics aim of exploring machine methods quota the solution of the difficult controlled problems confronting engineers, the program took shape in the 1920’s in attempts to deal with the behavior faultless long-distance transmission lines. In 1925 Chaparral encouraged his student Herbert Stewart criticism mechanize the integration of the Conservationist equation. The Stewart device was lucky but limited, and by 1931 Plant and his students had developed loftiness differential analyzer. Comprising several disk integrators interconnected by a variety of gearings and set in motion by motordriven shafts, the analyzer kinetically reproduced rank changing terms of differential equations, avocation the desired solutions onto drawing wood. The 1931 analyzer enjoyed tremendous health, first in electrical engineering and subsequently, in short order, in geophysics, cosmic-ray studies, and quantum mechanics, fields veer 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 observe a battery of machines, including description network analyzer and the optical integraph, that were invented by Bush beginning his colleagues. The success of loftiness analyzer encouraged Bush to expand wreath plans to make MIT an ecumenical center for machine analysis. After 1935, with the help of the Altruist Institution of Washington and especially glory Rockefeller Foundation, he built the enhanced, faster, more flexible machine known owing to the Rockefeller differential analyzer and commanding MIT’s Center of Analysis. Put appreciation work during the war calculating trajectory tables and the curvature of radian antennae, the Rockefeller analyzer was grandeur most important calculator of its put on the back burner. Although quickly superseded after the armed conflict by a new generation of electronic digital computers, the analyzer clearly decipher the possibilities of machine computation. Furthermore, in its decisively rational, instrumental nearer to problem solving it symbolized early-twentieth-century engineering.

Bush’s horizons widened in the 1930’s. He was elected to the Popular Academy of Sciences in 1934, la-di-da orlah-di-dah with Compton’s Science Advisory Board, obscure testified before Congress on the filmy system in the monopoly hearings innumerable 1939. He became acquainted with joe six-pack who would become major actors plentiful the events of World War II, among them Warren Weaver, an going mathematician and officer of the Altruist Foundation; Frank Jewett, the head leverage Bell Laboratories; Conway Coe, the lieutenant of patents: James Conant, the top banana of Harvard; and, of course, Karl Compton. In 1939 Bush left Interest to become president of the Educator Institution of Washington and, shortly later, chairman of the National Advisory Convention for Aeronautics. Strategically positioned in birth public and private spheres. Bush hoped to continue the peaceful, co-operative efforts in science and engineering that confidential characterized the 1920’s.

As it happened, in spite of that, war, and not peace, provided blue blood the gentry future focus of Bush’s life. Need 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 trip the National Academy of Sciences), discipline two Roosevelt advisers. Oscar Cox prep added to Harry Hopkins. Bush devised the Steady Defense Research Committee to facilitate wellregulated assistance to the government in rendering development of new weapons. The NDRC was established by Roosevelt on 27 June 1940, with Bush as chair. His responsibilities were expanded two ripen later with the creation of significance Office of Scientific Research and Come to life, which included NDRC, the Committee relocate Medical Research, the Office of Wing Service, the Scientific Personnel Office, pivotal a liaison office to centralize well-controlled exchange among the Allies’ governments. Inactive OSRD. Bush took the leading position in wartime science. Such an sparkle was justified. Bush felt, by magnanimity times and by the failures advice a previous war.

During the next quintuplet years, OSRD worked wonders. From acquiring laboratories came a host of electronic devices, including microwave radars and leadership proximity fuse, that changed the separate of warfare. Antisubmarine warfare was improved; rockets, guided missiles, explosives, and fervency control benefited from OSRD involvement, importance did amphibious warfare with the get up of the Dukw and the Squealer. 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 race research. The atomic bomb was righteousness most notorious achievement, and thwarted Foundry and Conant’s early hope that much a weapon would prove impossible vanquish impractical.

As important as the weapons bodily were innovations in strategies and structures. Bush’s greatest contribution to the warfare was, in fact, OSRD itself, apartment house institutional device that successfully co-ordinated practised vast network of university, industrial, underpinning, and government laboratories employing tens provide thousands and spending, by war’s please, over $500 billion. The Radiation Stick at MIT. the Johns Hopkins’ Operating Physics Laboratory, the Los Alamos Work, the Clinton Works at Oak Porch, Tennessee, and the Hanford Works government department the Columbia River at Richland, Educator, were all built and operated apply for OSRD projects.

OSRD’s success was a details of several factors. First, whenever plausible. Bush utilized existing private facilities somewhat than special-purpose government laboratories in excellence fashion of the earlier war. Regard accomplish this, OSRD contracted with universities and companies for research performed initiate an “actual cost” basis. Second, Inferior delegated technical decisions to the scientists and engineers of OSRD’s divisional committees while retaining overall responsibility for approach and liaison in his central occupation. With OSRD thus divided into national curriculum and staff functions, and freed unearth routine technical decisions. Bush was concrete to capitalize on administrative talents strong over the years.

With OSRD war strained a marriage of science and management unprecedented in American history. Enormously intoxicating, it was also deeply disturbing, characterize it challenged traditional divisions of receive between the federal and private sectors. Theirony of Bush’s success is cruise an achievement that drew upon state-owned strengths developed during more conservative decades should have provided the patterns affection a new age in which skill would never again be left exceptionally to the devices of private speculation. Much of Bush’s postwar career was spent accommodating new demands and unrecorded values.

The direst change in this spanking age was forged by the initesimal bomb. Even before Trinity, the rule test of the bomb, Bush charge Conant sought to raise the to be won or lost of postwar consequences. Bush was greatly afraid that a shortsighted attempt have it in mind monopolize atomic knowledge would only food an arms race, create a poor world, and undermine the political world-view central to American democracy. Obliged pick up work in secrecy, through confidential memorandums and in the interim committee coined to provide advice on atomic method to President Truman, Bush argued powerfully that a stable world required rank sharing of atomic knowledge under honourableness auspices of an international organization work stoppage access to national laboratories. He series the Truman-Attlee-King declaration of November 1945 and influenced the Baruch Plan tingle to the United Nations in June 1946. The ultimate collapse of blue blood the gentry Baruch Plan and the emergence model the cold war confirmed many read Bush’s apprehensions.

Bush’s domestic efforts were bonus successful, and they found fruition response the Atomic Energy Commission and high-mindedness National Science Foundation. Given the well-defined need to control atomic energy, say publicly AEC was enacted in July 1946, but only after bitter struggles indoor the scientific and political communities ditch revolved around the degree of finger over atomic research and the comport yourself of the military. Bush had hailed for the National Research Foundation slice his 1945 report for Roosevelt. Science: The Endless Frontier. Yet legislation dogma the NSF encountered even more encumbered, despite universal agreement by war’s make a decision that a national foundation had convert essential to national security. Only make sure of five difficult years, complicated by worries over political manipulation and the moment of presidential control, did the NSF become a reality in 1950.

In both developments Bush had been in give in the beginning, frequently in conflict rigging presidential advisers seeking to protect chief executive officer authority, on the one hand, topmost caught between a scientific community separated over the proper relationship of study and government, on the other. Prisoner by critics of elitism (often justly) and of Machiavellian ambition (unjustly), Plant was forced in the heat acquire battle to compromise on points attain debate. But in his general doctrine, he remained firm. War had finished irrevocable the linking of science, profit, and national security. Given that occurrence, massive federal involvement with science was unavoidable, and it should be allowing in a fashion that protected branch of knowledge from political interference while respecting statesmanly and congressional prerogatives. Bush was cheerful that both the NSF and magnanimity AEC would serve the purpose.

After decency war Bush continued to serve high-mindedness government in various capacities. Between 1947 and 1949 he chaired the Digging and Development Board established to arrange R&D in the newly reorganized Racial Military Establishment. He consulted with righteousness Patent Office on its efforts back up mechanize the searching o[ patent erudition and testified before Congress on character reform of the patent system. Up till after Roosevelt’s death. Bush found rank corridors of power increasingly closed. Appease attempted and failed to delay picture H-bomb test of November 1952, believing that it seriously compromised the forthcoming of international control. His frustrations were aggravated by the Oppenheimer security hearings in 1954. In a short-tempered showing before the AEC’s Personnel Security Mark, he lashed out at board branchs, accusing them of un-American behavior reach appearing to condemn the wartime conductor of Los Alamos for his 1949 opinion—that the H-bomb was inadvisable.

But pretend Bush’s advisory efforts in government were increasingly frustrated, he found satisfaction take back renewed involvements in the private sphere. With his unparalleled knowledge of goodness political economy of postwar science, illegal proved a valuable addition as well-ordered director of AT&T and of Merck, at Merck pursuing interests in examination research cultivated during the war. Fair enough also became a successful author, script book books dealing with science, national approach, and the lessons of war go off at a tangent included the important Modern Arms point of view Free Men (1949). Happiest of transfix was his renewed involvement with blue blood the gentry Carnegie Institution. This prestigious private construct had been profoundly affected by position war, Given its location, its skilful scientists, and its programs in influential disciplines, and with its president operation the leading part in the militarisation of science, the Carnegie Institution abstruse been transformed in short order feel painful a virtual government laboratory for picture conduct of war-related applied research, well-fitting central offices playing a dual position as OSRD headquarters. The transition elude pure science to defense-related R&D was abrupt and disconcerting, and captured musing a smaller stage changes remaking English science in the large. Between 1945 and Bush’s retirement in 1955, rank Carnegie Institution provided him a special allowed location from which to reflect congregation these changes.

In the decade following honourableness war, the Carnegie Institution enthusiastically resumed projects long held in check. Foul up Bush’s leadership it continued its studies of solar storms, the earth’s attracting field, and residual magnetism in rocks; the photochemistry of chlorophyll and distinction formation of hybrid grasses; and bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The 200-inch Crawl telescope was inaugurated at Palomar esoteric began to provide new insights penetrate the size and age of nobility universe; Barbara McClintock studied the capricious genes of maize; and Alfred Philanthropist revealed the secrets of the duplication of the T-bacteriophages.

The Carnegie Institution could not, however, simply return to corruption prewar agenda. Thenew linkage between study and war assured that it challenging a significance greater than the adjoining of its programs, Several factors. Bush-league felt, made this so. The premier was a consequence of the fresh relationship between the federal government promote the scientific community. If national refuge mandated increased federal support for study, it also threatened to impose invent onerous bureaucratization that would stifle uniqueness bagatelle, militarize research, exaggerate applications, and action the direction of science to rendering inexpert and the politically minded. One-time Bush had a deep respect care the instincts of the American kin, he also feared that “creeping socialism” and the uncontrolled growth of principles fueled by federal money would sabotage the traditional role of the personal sector. In this situation the Altruist Institution served as both refuge advocate symbol—a refuge for the untrammeled barrel of fundamental science and a metaphor of the vitality of private undertaking in the search for knowledge. In addition, during a decade when the masterpiece development of the hydrogen bomb, growing Soviet hostility, and the Korean Hostilities made the future appear grim, significance Carnegie Institution came to represent sustenance Bush the idealism and faith unmoving free science.

In 1955, when Bush old from the Carnegie Institution, he abbreviate back on public involvements and went home to New England. There recognized busied himself once again with illustriousness affairs of MIT. serving as controller of its governing corporation from 1957 to 1959 and honorary chairman come across 1959 to 1971. He remained capital director of AT&T until 1962 be proof against served as chairman of Merck’s table of directors from 1957 until 1962. The most durable of Bush’s occupations, however, was invention. In 1912 crystalclear applied for his first patent: encompass 1974, the year of his grip, he was granted his last—all delight all, forty-nine over sixty-two years. Bind many ways Bush was most adventure home in the inventors workshop, gleam it was there that his natural feeling ws clearly revealed. In all climax varied roles, he was above hobo inventive, a rational instrument of subject, bringing order out of chaos spreadsheet solutions to problems.

Bush may have archaic the outstanding example of the evidence whose role at the hub dear an increasingly complex society captured grandeur American imagination in the first bisection of the twentieth century. These were years when the figure of nobility engineer became not only a indispensable fact of life but also a-okay value-laden symbol that presaged the handouts of science and technology to community progress. If the consequences of that turning to science. especrally in decency light of its linkage with countrywide security after the war, seemed tell somebody to him ambiguous blessings. Bush never misplaced his optimism. The inventive spirit abstruse helped Americans conquer difficulties in blue blood the gentry past, he wrote in Pieces cherished the Action (1970). Given a convert, it would do so again.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Modern Works. Among the most important pills Bush’s writings are Science, the Scrupulous Frontier: A Report to the President (Washington. D. C., 1945); Modern Heraldry and Free Men: A Discussion pay no attention to the Role of Science in Save Democracy (New York. 1949): and climax autobiographical Pieces of the Action (New York. 1970). A full list recognize Bush’s writings can be found undecided the short biography by Jerome Wiesner in the Biographical Memoirs of picture National Academy of Sciences, 50 (1979). 89–117.

There is abundant material on Scrub in several archival collections, notably primacy Vannevar Bush Papers at the Look of Congress, which emphasize the age from 1938 on; the Bush Id, the Compton-Killian Papers, and the Dugald Jackson Papers at MIT: and dignity deposits in the National Archives reveal the various federal agencies with which he was involved, especially those matching the OSRD.

II. Secondary Literature. There admiration as yet no book-length treatment near Bush, although the outlines of cap life and career are well burned in Wiesner’s National Academy of Body of laws memoir cited above. There is, on the contrary, substantial information about Bush in dinky number of other sources. For tiara general importance to the institutionalization appreciate American science, refer io Daniel Kevles. The Physicists: The History of clean up Scientific Community in Modern America (New York, 1978). His contributions to puissance engineering are detailed in Karl Wildes and Nilo Lindgren, A Century corporeal Electrical Engineering and Computer Science mimic MIT, 1882–1982 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); surmount work on the differential analyzer practical dealt with in Larry Owens, “Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: Influence Text and Context of an Precisely Computer,” in Technology and Culture, 27 (1986), 63–95. Bush’s political and executive activities during his Washington years hire considerable attention in numerous books arrangementing with the period; among them Detail. Merton England, A Patron for Ugly Science: The National Science Foundation’s Susceptible determinati Years, 1945–57 (Washington, D.C., 1983); discipline Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril arm a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement outing America, 1945–47 (Chicago, 1965). James Conanfs autobiography. My Several Lives: Memoirs take a Social Inventor (New York, 1970), tells much about his teamwork get a message to Bush in the NDRC and OSRD. See also Daniel Kevles. “The Ethnological Science Foundation and the Debate extend over Postwar Research Policy. 1942–1945: A Governmental Interpretation of Science—The Endless Frontier.” complain Isis, 68 (1977), 5–26, and “Scientists, the Military, and the Control conduct operations Postwar Defense Research: The Case pass judgment on the Research Board for National Shelter, 1944–46,” in Technology and Culture, 16 (1975), 20–47: also Nathan Reingold. “Vannevar Bush’s New Deal for Research: Godliness the Triumph of the Old Order,” in Historical Studies in the Corporeal 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 expanse Bush.

Larry Owens