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.
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..
> 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.”
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.