Vannevar Bush

Bush studied engineering at Tufts and earned an engineering doctorate jointly awarded by Harvard and MIT. At MIT he worked on network and differential analysers, using machines to model electrical systems and solve differential equations. In 1932 he became MIT’s vice president and dean of engineering.

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During the Second World War Bush led the Office of Scientific Research and Development, coordinating government needs with university and industrial laboratories through research contracts. Its programmes included radar, proximity fuzes and mass production of penicillin. Carnegie’s headquarters housed the agency’s central offices.

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Responding to Roosevelt’s 1944 request, Bush presented Science: The Endless Frontier to Truman in 1945. It proposed federal support for basic research in universities and for scientific training. The report informed subsequent policy debate; the National Science Foundation was established in 1950 after legislative revisions.

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In As We May Think, also published in 1945, Bush described a proposed Memex using microfilm to store books, records and correspondence. Users would create and preserve associative trails between documents. This design for personal information retrieval later influenced hypertext research.

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