Endless frontier
In the 20th - the American - Century, no visionary stands taller than Vannevar Bush. As the inventor and public entrepreneur who launched the Manhattan Project, helped to create the military-industrial complex, conceived of a permanent system of government support for science and engineering and anticipated the personal computer and the Internet, Bush is our century's reincarnation of Ben Franklin. Beginning with his boyhood as a turn-of-the-century tinkerer in his father's basement in Massachusetts, Bush went on to study and teach electrical engineering at Tufts and MIT. An early academic entrepreneur, he cofounded Raytheon, a highly successful electronics company, in his spare time. At MIT, during the Depression, he built what were then the most powerful computers in the world. During World War II, he was Roosevelt's adviser and chief contact on all matters of military technology, including the atomic bomb. He launched the Manhattan Project and oversaw a collection of 6,000 civilian scientists who designed scores of new weapons. When an Allied victory seemed inevitable, his attention turned to the future. In July 1945 he published his legendary essay, "As We May Think," widely cited as the inspiration for the personal computer and the World Wide Web.
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- 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.
- Thank you for the recommendation! That book looks great.
- For those who want to learn more, the book "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" [0] by G. Pascal Zachary is very good. (G. Pascal Zachary also wrote "Showstopper: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft")
[0] http://www.gpascalzachary.com/endless_frontier__vannevar_bus...
[1] http://www.gpascalzachary.com/showstopper__the_breakneck_rac...
- In his 80s columns he wrote (roughly, by my memory) that by the turn of the millennium you'd be able to go to your computer and ask any question with a publically known answer, and get it back right away. I thought that was ridiculous, and today you can quibble, but basically yes, you can, and he was right on the money on the timing. That was an audacious prediction back then.
He influenced me the most by his columns on space development (A Step Farther Out, and a couple of anthologies The Endless Frontier). I don't clearly remember what was in them, but there was a kind of can-do attitude about developing technological civilization in a strategic way that seems more in tune with the 60s than anything happening now.
- "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" (1999 MIT Press)is an excellent biography of Bush by G. Pascal Zachary.
- Nice to see this posted here.
With the changing world order, I have been studying what happened in and after WWII to learn how science helped shift the center of power from Europe to the US. We Europeans have very little knowledge of exactly how to take the big bets that has served the US militarily and economically since then.
Here’s some of my (slightly rambling) notes from reading the Endless Frontier with this aim:
https://skaersoe.com/2025/03/19/lessons-from-vannevar-bush-o...
Currently I’m looking for like minded people to communicate the gap: https://frontier.ngo/
