Vannevar Bush: A Public Sector Entrepreneur

Someone did me the favor years ago of pestering me to read As We May Think.

If you haven't, you should. It's interesting on its own, but particularly because it was published in the summer before WWII ended (when he was running what to me sounds like a precursor to DARPA). After the war he pushed for the creation of the National Science Foundation.

I mention the date specifically because I had to triple check it because there is no fucking way someone wrote this in 1945. It was, and he did.

Just in case: Vannevar Bush is the ideator of the "Memex", the idea for an (electro-photo-mechanical, desk sized) information organizer, between the miniaturized library with annotation/filing facilities and the personal assistant - a precursor (especially of the documentational side of Decision Support Systems - of which the World Wide Web could be considered a distributed implementation).

The article which described it, "As we may think": http://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf

> The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds and interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected, Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him. [...]

There was a book length biography of Vannevar Bush published a few years ago -- "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" by G. Pascal Zachary that was quite good. The phrase "Endless Frontier" is a a reference to an essay that Bush wrote entitled "Science, the Endless Frontier" that argued for the continued federal funding of science after WWII.

Loonshots[1] has a chapter on the impact Bush had on the war and generations of national research afterwards. It's crazy to think he did the things he did, when he did them.

[1] https://www.bahcall.com/book/

Bush is an interesting person (I built a desk-sized Memex "reproduction" and am currently building 20 tiny Memex!) but I wonder about using him as a role model. The era of Big Science that he helped create after WWII was wildly one-sided, with most of the money going to the large firms that built the war machine.

Many excellent inventions and innovations resulted but all from within ~one worldview and that's not a productive way to run greenfield research today.

> [...] the entrepreneurship literature would have it that entrepreneurship policy falls like manna from governments[, ]devised and implemented by nameless bureaucrats [...] Al Link ... puts the person, with all their attendant humanness, at the center of entrepreneurship policy [...] people matter for policy, just as they do for entrepreneurship. [...] Al explains with crystal clear clarity what exactly shaped [Vannevar] Bush, and how he in turn shaped America’s science and technology policy, and ultimately the emergence of a knowledge driven economy and society. [Al Link's ]inspirational book, A Generosity of Spirit: The Early History of the Research Triangle Park (1995) [...] focused on the people and their leadership in transforming North Carolina[: ...] the strategy of transforming North Carolina did not emerge from bloodless, nameless bureaucrats pulling the levers of public policy, but rather from the bold, creative, and entrepreneurial action of leaders. [...] Al ... makes it clear that Vannevar Bush’s legacy and imprint on American science and technology extend well beyond his death[: ]Al makes a compelling case that the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which is generally attributed with unleashing scientific research at American universities for commercialization and innovation, has its roots in the spirit and ideas of Bush. [... E]ntrepreneurship in the public sector can ignite not just science and technology policy, but ultimately innovation policy and the attendant economic prosperity

(From the Preface from David B. Audretsch)

"it wasn't all magic" an NSA history by Colin Burke has some very interesting stories about Vannevar.

Vannevar Bush’s legacy of public sector entrepreneurship lives on in Raytheon, the company he co-founded.