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Comment by ricksunny | Hacker News Reader

I think the most enduring mystery of #Vannevar Bush is why his name is no longer a household one today, in the way that Edison's is or that we have every reason to expect Musk's to be 80 years from now.

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.

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My guess is that because Bush, from my memory of everything I learned about him, was mostly behind the scenes. Edison for example, kept himself in the news as the face of everything, even doing photo-ops to present himself as an eccentric genius. Bush was preferred to be glue behind the scenes for the most part. Probably like how we may all know Eisenhower as the face of D-Day, who yes, played a big role, but none of us probably know the name of the guy on his staff who handled every excruciating detail of the logistics of it all (which is probably one of the most impressive parts of D-Day).

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.

Another unsung hero who helped usher in the modern age is J.C.R Licklider and I am sure there are hundreds of others like them, even today, who remain nameless and are driven more by intellectual curiosity than who gets the credit. Theirs are the shoulders of Giants.

I like this and agree:

>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..

Good article, thanks.

> 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.”

Sounds like the rare combo of skilled scientist / engineer who knows how to do real things and people person.

> I think the most enduring mystery of #Vannevar Bush is why his name is no longer a household one today, in the way that Edison's is or that we have every reason to expect Musk's to be 80 years from now.

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.

Nietzsche wrote about this in ~1885:

> 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.

medias favored einstein instead of bohr ? or was it that einstein papers were more pivotal ?

Considering bell's experiment proved bohr right and einstein wrong...

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.

Here is the talk, the biographical background part is the first 20 mins, and the innovation lessons part is the last 17 mins. (Pardon the rushed editing):

https://youtu.be/IEKnA69M8eg

Thank you for the recommendation! That book looks great.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/475762.Endless_Frontier

Zachary's a good writer. HN denizens might know him for "Showstopper!", about Dave Cutler's project at Microsoft to remake VMS as WNT.

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