Vannevar Bush Engineered the 20th Century
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
I wish I could see a lot more parallels to this. Right now the only thing that jumps to mind is the NLNet grants.
The recent round of 45 NGI Zero grants was announced just yesterday, https://nlnet.nl/news/2024/20240618-Call-announcement.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720037 . But in general, if I'm looking for something inspiring or hopeful, I'll often see what NLNet sponsored folks have been up to; https://hn.algolia.com/?query=nlnet&sort=byDate
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11rXfniJtbvzAgSMv2Wpx...
He really transformed US innovation. Some good, some questionable, and some stories probably yet to be told. Hope you enjoy. I'm working on uploading the video of the talk here over the next couple of days. If any questions I'll try to field them here.
This is one article that speaks to that, notably writing from 1990. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-24-fi-444-st...
By the way, I do recommend reading what remains the only biography of Vannevar, "Endless Frontier", written by the same author as OP's article, G Pascal Zachary. It is quite good. The subject probably merits multiple biographies just as many other pivotal people in history also have multiple biographies to provide different angles or more nuance as more information comes to light.
> Bush knew how to map, build and manage the relationships and organizations necessary to get things done. He knew how to craft the human networks that could build the technological networks.. At OSRD’s height.. roughly two-thirds of the nation’s physicists were working for him.. Bush ambiguously noted that his role was far more administrative than technical: “I made no technical contribution to the war effort,” he wrote. “Not a single idea of mine ever amounted to shucks. At times, I have been called an ‘atomic scientist.’ It would be fully as accurate to call me a child psychologist.”
Addition: Also sort of like how everyone knows Edison as the man behind the light bulb, but not very many people can name the people on Edison's team that helped with the light bulb.
>Bush was preferred to be glue behind the scenes for the most part.
re. associating with something like Edison does the light bulb, I ageee there's probably a lot to that. In ny presentation above I demonstrate what historians unanimously agree on that Vannevar was the single most pivotal individual to set the conditions for justifying initiating the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer gets the popular credit, but Vannevar was kicking off the feasibility studies for fissile chain reactions long before Oppenheimer enters the picture.
But people don't want to be associated with such a destructive invention like they do the light bulb, right? So any would-be propagators of their impact narrative have to wrestle with that moral quandary as well..
For the same reason newton is while leibniz is not. And einstein is but bohr is not. Marketing. What gets to be a household name is determined by those who command the media/cultural apparatus.
> Where solitude ends, there begins the market-place; and where the market-place begins, there begins also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies. In the world even the best things are worthless without those who make a side-show of them: these showmen, the people call great men.
> Little do the people understand what is great — that is to say, the creator. But they have a taste for all showmen and actors of great things. Around the creators of new values revolves the world: — invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory: such is the course of things.
Einstein was wrong about the most fundamental aspect of physics of the 20th century. Also, einstein's papers weren't as 'pivotal' as the media leads us to believe.
It's not just einstein. Look at napolean. The guy was one of the greatest military dunces and yet the media portrays him as a military genius. So much of our 'heroes' are artificial creations. Today, it's Turing. The media makes it like he won ww2 for us and that he invented the computer. He did neither, but people think he did because the media decided to canonize him.
Many points in the book feature him being discreet about some name or some incident, even 20+ years on. For example, 'General Blank'early in the book, or this excerpt towards the end that is speculated on:
'...other incidents such as a moment where he [Truman] and Forrestal and I were talking about something, and Forrestal spoke about the political implications of the decision. President Truman said to him 'Look, Jim, when you take a thing as serious as this to the American public, you should forget political considerations." '
It's fun recognizing that sometimes VB must be read in a Straussian way. Even to his security-cleared peers, under wartime / atomic secrecy he has to write with implication rather than directly due to risk of security lapses. The nuclearsecrecy blog by Alex Wellerstein is a great source for this kind of thing.
> Compton's deputy, Alfred Loomis, said that "of the men whose death in the Summer of 1940 would have been the greatest calamity for America, the President is first, and Dr. Bush would be second or third." Bush was fond of saying that "if he made any important contribution to the war effort at all, it would be to get the Army and Navy to tell each other what they were doing."
> His most difficult problems, and also greatest successes, were keeping the confidence of the military, which distrusted the ability of civilians to observe security regulations and devise practical solutions, and opposing conscription of young scientists into the armed forces.. OSRD requested deferments for some 9,725 employees of OSRD contractors, of which all but 63 were granted. In his obituary, The New York Times described Bush as "a master craftsman at steering around obstacles, whether they were technical or political or bull-headed generals and admirals."
> In "As We May Think", an essay published by the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, Bush wrote: "This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership."
> Bush gradually drifted into the backwaters of science and technology. The rise of digital computing passed him by: an analog man to the end, he underrated the possibilities of digital technology. He did, however, make one contribution to the field. His “memex”—an idea for a machine that could store and connect information and thus work as an artificial aid to memory—later inspired others to create a version in digital form: hypertext. Wikipedia entries, with their hyperlinks taking readers ever deeper and wider, would likely have pleased Bush despite their digital form.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-rise-and...
that's one thing that strikes me about the memex: it's very analog and, to me, that makes it seem like less of a direct line to the modern notions of hypertext, at least on first glance
> In September 1940, Norbert Wiener approached Bush with a proposal to build a digital computer. Bush declined to provide NDRC funding for it on the grounds that he did not believe that it could be completed before the end of the war. The supporters of digital computers were disappointed at the decision, which they attributed to a preference for outmoded analog technology. In June 1943, the Army provided $500,000 to build the computer, which became ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer. Having delayed its funding, Bush's prediction proved correct as ENIAC was not completed until December 1945, after the war had ended. His critics saw his attitude as a failure of vision.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEKnA69M8eg&t=2279s
Closest I think we get is tweetorials, but would be closer if tweets had anchors to text in e-books & long-form documents, arriving upon which I could be presented with a selection of people in my social/academic network who had already taken off from that particular anchor point; and whose path ('trail' really is the ideal term) I could follow along onward to the next anchor point that they were inspired to find.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-claude-shannons-informati...
In all seriousness, mentoring someone with the talent and potential of Shannon is no small matter.
It still boggles my mind how someone who had written a master's thesis of the stature of Shannon would have the courage to pursue a PhD. What could one possibly do more in life that could top that. Had it been anyone else, he may have crumbled under an intellectual existential crisis.