Vannevar Bush
"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers."
- Vannevar Bush; As We May Think; Atlantic Monthly; July 1945
Vannevar Bush was never directly involved with the creation or development of the Internet. He died before the creation of the World Wide Web. Still many view Bush to be the Godfather of our wired age frequently making reference to his 1945 essay, "As We May Think." In his article, Bush outlined a theoretical machine he named a "memex," which was to enhance human memory by permitting the user to store and recall documents linked by associations. This associative linking was very similar to what is best-known today as hypertext. Indeed, Ted Nelson who subsequently did pioneering work with hypertext credited Bush as his primary influence. Others, such as J.C.R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart have also paid tribute to Bush.
Bush was born on March 11, 1890, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He had two sisters. His father was a Universalist minister. Bush did well in school where he displayed an aptitude for math. He taught at Tufts University from 1914 to 1917, did submarine- detection research for the US Navy, and then joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the age of twenty-nine. At MIT, Bush worked with a team of researchers to construct an automated network analyzer to work mathematical differential equations, and in the 1930's helped form the first analog computers.
President Roosevelt appointed Bush to Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee in 1940 to assist with World War II. In 1941, Bush was named Director of the newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), founded to coordinate weapons development research. The organization engaged more than 6000 scientists by the end of the war, and oversaw development of the atom bomb. From 1946 to 1947, he served as chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board.
Bush brought together the U.S. Military and universities with a degree of research backing not previously deployed, supplying the universities with large, new revenue streams for formation of laboratories, attainment of equipment, and the conduct of gross and practical research. In return, the military received the rewards of rapidly improving technology.
Thanks in part to Bush's initial setup, the three lead universities in that partnership for several decades were Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley. Through the influence of projects like SAGE and organizations like the IPTO, the university / military partnership instituted by Bush provided the foundation for later development of the ARPANET.
However, Vannevar Bush's most direct influence on the development of the Internet and our current high speed Internet Providers hails from his visionary description of an information system he called "memex", in an article titled "As We May Think". After toying with the potential of augmented memory for a few years, Bush set out his ideas at length in the essay in the Atlantic Monthly which is reported as having been composed in 1936 but set aside as war loomed. He withdrew it from his drawer and it was published in July 1945.
In this important article, Bush predicted that "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." A few months later Life magazine printed a condensed version of "As We May Think," accompanied by several illustrations exhibiting the possible appearance of a memex machine and its companion components. This edition of the essay was later read by both Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, and was a factor in their individual conceptualizations of the various ideas that became hypertext.
In the private sector, Vannevar Bush was a cofounder of Raytheon, one of the United State's biggest defense contractors. He was also president of the Carnegie Institute of Washington research organization from 1939 to 1955.
Bush's memex was a breakthrough revelation. The vision painted by memex greately inspired the incoming generations of scientists and engineers who built the Internet, notably J.C.R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart. Many leading researchers recognized that a memex type system would in time be built, and worked to help realize it. Only today, more than 50 years later, is Bush's dream becoming fully realized with the growth of personal computers, the web, and search engines.