Purposive Drift

Celebrating Vannevar Bush

In the first piece of writing I ever published on the web, "As We Might Learn: Vannevar Bush where are you now??, I began by saying:

"I'd like to begin with a mystery. Something that has been puzzling me for a couple of years. Why is Vannevar Bush not celebrated as a great American hero?"

When I wrote it I was still on a long quest to put together the fragments that the memory of Bush had broken into. I first came across his name as the author of "As We Might Think", where he wrote about a hypothetical machine, the Memex, which had a big influence on those of us concerned with, what we then called, hypermedia.

Later I came upon a fragment in book, which mentioned his name in relation to Norbert Weiner, one of the pioneers of cybernetics. In another book I found a reference to one of his students, Frederick Terman, who set up the Science Park at Stanford University - the seed that grew into Silicon Valley. I began to feel that this man was more important than the description of Scientific Adviser to President Roosevelt I had first encountered. Gradually, surfing from fragment to fragment I began to build a picture of a very complex, very influential man, who somehow had disappeared from view. As I wrote in "As We Might Learn":

"This year as we hit the fiftieth anniversary of the two A bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Bush's name may pop up as the man who wrote the memo that launched the Manhattan Project. But even then he is likely to remain relatively obscure and the full range of his achievements and influence hidden from view. And this in a man who was top class as an inventor, engineer, entrepreneur, businessman, administrator, academic, mentor, public servant, eminence gris, and visionary. A man whose impact on the US and the development of science, technology and business may have been profound. A man who may indirectly have been responsible for the medium through which you reading this, the Internet itself."

In my last post I mention Vannevar Bush's name in passing and linked to an entry in Wikipedia to give more details. When I checked the link again, I felt it didn't do him justice and thought I ought to write a bit more. Hence this piece.

These days Vannevar Bush is, perhaps, a little better know than when I first became interested in him. There is a good biography of him by Pascal Zachary, "The Endless Frontier". But even so, for a man, whose actions and influence has played such an important part in shaping our world for good and ill he still remains too much in the shadows.

So this is why I feel Vannevar Bush deserves more than a passing mention. As Pascal Zachary wrote in a piece in Wired:

"Vannevar Bush is a great name for playing six degrees of separation. Turn back the clock on any aspect of information technology - from the birth of Silicon Valley and the marriage of science and the military to the advent of the World Wide Web - and you find his footprints. As historian Michael Sherry says, "To understand the world of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, start with understanding Vannevar Bush."