Vannevar Bush

17.01 - References - Persons - Vannevar Bush

Summary

• Vannevar Bush was an american engineer, inventor and science administrator. He emphasized scientific research's importance to national security and economy.
• He founded Raytheon,was vice president of MIT
• he had a string of his own inventions, including the 'memex' (which is why we are interested in him

Details

• Bush came up with the idea of the memex during the 1930s, which he imagined as a form of memory augmentation involving a device that stores all data on microfilm and mechanized so that it can be consulted with speed and flexibility.
• The memex idea was like the brain in that it stored links instead of indexes or hierarchies
• the ideas that spawned information systems? the interenet? how to deal with information overload
• He wrote an essage in 1945 called 'as we may think' that anticipated many aspects of the information society: internet, hypertext links, PCs
• He was concerned about information overload

References

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
• Range - Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World - David Epstein

Quotes

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers.
— Vannevar Bush[3]
Bush's paper might be regarded as describing a microcosm of the information society, with the boundaries tightly drawn by the interests and experiences of a major scientist of the time, rather than the more open knowledge spaces of the 21st century. Bush provides a core vision of the importance of information to industrial/scientific society, using the image of an "information explosion" arising from the unprecedented demands on scientific production and technological application of World War II. He outlines a version of information science as a key discipline within the practice of scientific and technical knowledge domains. His view encompasses the problems of information overload and the need to devise efficient mechanisms to control and channel information for use.
— Johnston and Webber[4]

Highlight: In 1945, former MIT dean Vannevar Bush, who oversaw U.S. military science during World War II—including the mass production of penicillin and the Manhattan Project—authored a report at the request of President Franklin Roosevelt in which he explained successful innovation culture. It was titled “Science, the Endless Frontier,” and led to the creation of the National Science Foundation that funded three generations of wildly successful scientific discovery, from Doppler radar and fiber optics to web browsers and MRIs. “Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice,” Bush wrote, “in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”

Interesting Related

-11.12 - References - Zettelkasten system notes
18.11 - Ideas - Notetaking