Vannevar Bush Rough Draft
From DigitalRhetoricCollaborative
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and inventor known for his visionary Atlantic Monthly article titled As We May Think which introduced his hypothetical “memex,” a microfilm device akin to modern hypertext. Published in 1945, the article described the memex 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 (AWMT).” Bush envisioned his device as a utilitarian work desk, replete with a screen and a system of buttons and levers that manipulated its many functions. However, instead of using traditional storage patterns based around indexes and structural hierarchies, the memex would organize information based on associative links similar to the way the human brain processes, stores, and remembers information. It would have the ability to link associated pieces of information together and, in the process, generate more linkages, creating an “associative trail” of information and memory at the tip of one’s fingers. (Zachary 262).” Since it functionally operated in ways similar to human memory, Bush viewed his device as a mechanical appendage to the human mind that could “give man access to and command the inherited knowledge of the ages (AWMT).”
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Background
War Time Career
Prior to writing As We May Think in 1945, Bush acted as a founding member of Raytheon, one of America’s leading defense contractors and electronics corporations, while also serving as a pioneer in the field of analog computers. At the start of World War II, Bush recognized a growing need for scientific research directed toward the war effort. Using Fredric Delano, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s trusted uncle, as an intermediary, Bush proposed the creation of a new federal department that would “correlate and support scientific research on mechanisms and devices of warfare (Zachary 112).” Roosevelt approved and established the National Defense Research Committee, naming Bush the department’s chairman. However, the NDRC was funded by a presidential emergency fund, exposing it to perilous financial restraints (Zachary 129). In May of 1941, Roosevelt established the congressionally funded and less legally limited Office of Scientific Research and Development, an organization that subsumed Bush’s NDRC. Nevertheless, Roosevelt appointed Bush director of the OSRD, giving him the authority to begin developing small batches of weapons. While serving as the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Bush advocated for and oversaw America’s burgeoning atomic program, a program eventually christened the Manhattan Project and credited with the creation of the atomic bomb.
