Vannevar Bush
1890-1974
engineer · inventor · science administrator
The man who organized American science
During the Second World War, Bush ran the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, coordinating radar, the proximity fuse, and (with Oppenheimer and others) the Manhattan Project. He had more influence over the direction of science in that period than any other single person.
When the war ended, he wrote "As We May Think", not a report on weapons but a vision of what scientists should build next. The answer he gave was a machine for the mind.
The memex
The memex was a hypothetical desk that held a person's entire library on microfilm, could retrieve any document instantly, and let the user build trails of association between documents. A trail was a named, saved path through the knowledge base that could be handed to another person.
Bush's intuition was that human thought moves by association, not by alphabetical index. A good memory machine should move the same way.
The legacy
Bush never built the memex. But Douglas Engelbart read "As We May Think" in a Red Cross library in the Philippines in 1945 and decided that was what he would do with his life. Ted Nelson coined "hypertext" working from Bush's idea. Tim Berners-Lee cited it when explaining the web.
The memex is the most influential piece of hardware that was never built.