1945
In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article, published in the July issue of “The Atlantic Monthly,” called “As We May Think,” in which Bush extolled the cooperation evident among scientists during World War II. He challenged scientists—and readers—to develop means of making knowledge widely available during peacetime as well.
The article looked at then-contemporary means of communication—publications, photography, facsimiles, microfilm—and discussed Bush’s vision of a futuristic device he called a Memex (a combining of “memory” and “index”), and defined as “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 supplement to his memory.”
Bush was an engineer and an inventor whose ideas may have been ahead of his times, but who made an enormous impact on contemporary society. He and Lawrence K. Marshall established the American Appliance Company in 1922 to produce the S-tube, a gaseous rectifier that greatly improved radio transmission. That company became Raytheon.
Beginning in 1927, Bush developed a differential analyser, an analog computer that solved differential equations with up to 18 independent variables. In 1939, he became president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., where he influenced the course of U.S. military research in the sciences. During World War II, he was chair of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), which evolved into the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which controlled the Manhattan Project and coordinated scientific research in sonar, radar, amphibious vehicles, and the mass production of penicillin and sulfa drugs. In a report to President Harry Truman in 1945, Bush recommended the creation of what would become the National Science Foundation. He was also a highly valued adviser to RC, serving on its Board of Directors from 1939 until 1946.
In many ways, Bush’s idea for the Memex conceptualized digital computing and the World Wide Web. He likened the machine to a desk: “In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5,000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.”
Bush continued, “When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard….Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space….It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.”
In “Engines of Creation,” author K. Eric Drexler suggests that Bush’s ideas directly influenced computer pioneers J.C.R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart, and also led to Ted Nelson’s work in the concepts of hypermedia and hypertext, now ubiquitous in computer technology.