Bush, Vannevar

Bush, Vannevar (1890–1974), inventor, engineer, wartime administrator.Armed with a dual Harvard–Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) doctorate in mathematics and electrical engineering, Bush, a native of Everett, Massachusetts, became a pioneering designer of analog computers as a professor of engineering (and later dean) at MIT from 1919 to 1938. The differential analyzer (1928), a mechanical array of precisely machined gears, cams, and shafts capable of solving previously unsolvable differential equations of interest to the electrical industry and researchers in many specialized fields, brought Bush public attention as the inventor of a “mechanical brain.”

Arriving in Washington, D.C., in January 1939 as president of the Carnegie Institution (1939–1953) and chair of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, Bush soon began the work of organizing American science for the coming war. In June 1940, with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's approval, he established the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) to mobilize researchers. In June 1941, the NDRC became part of a new and larger organization, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), also led by Bush. Carving out a space between the military, which would use the new weapons developed under OSRD contract in academic and industrial research laboratories, and the corporations building these weapons, Bush helped facilitate a profound transformation in military attitudes. When World War II began, the U.S. armed services were bastions of technological conservatism; by war's end they were technological enthusiasts. Among the weapons Bush championed were radar and the atomic bomb.

In Science—the Endless Frontier (1945), an OSRD report to Roosevelt articulating the federal government's duty to fund basic research in American universities, Bush called for a new federal agency, a National Research Foundation. In 1950, after years of debate, President Harry S. Truman established the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF, however, was not the organization envisioned in Bush's report. Indeed, Bush had by then concluded that the armed services had taken over American science; his Modern Arms and Free Men (1949) called on the nation's political leaders to reassert control of the military. By the time of his death, Bush had become a severe critic of the very world of government‐science relations he had helped bring into existence.
See also Cold War; Education: Rise of the University; Education: Education in Contemporary America; Nuclear Weapons; Science: Since 1945; Technology.

Bibliography

Larry Owens , Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer, Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 63–95.
G. Pascal Zachary , Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, 1977.

Michael A. Dennis