76 Facts About Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of scientific research to national security and economic well-being, and was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.

Vannevar Bush became vice president of MIT and dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938.

Vannevar Bush is known particularly for his engineering work on analog computers, and for the memex.

Vannevar Bush was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1938, and soon became its chairman.

In Science, The Endless Frontier, his 1945 report to the President of the United States, Vannevar Bush called for an expansion of government support for science, and he pressed for the creation of the National Science Foundation.

Vannevar Bush was born in Everett, Massachusetts, on March 11,1890, the third child and only son of Perry Bush, the local Universalist pastor, and his wife Emma Linwood.

Vannevar Bush was named after John Vannevar, an old friend of the family who had attended Tufts College with Perry.

The family moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1892, and Vannevar Bush graduated from Chelsea High School in 1909.

Vannevar Bush then attended Tufts College, like his father before him.

Vannevar Bush became a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, and dated Phoebe Clara Davis, who came from Chelsea.

Vannevar Bush transferred to GE's plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to work on high voltage transformers, but after a fire broke out at the plant, Bush and the other test men were suspended.

Vannevar Bush returned to Tufts in October 1914 to teach mathematics, and spent the 1915 summer break working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as an electrical inspector.

Vannevar Bush preferred to quit rather than study a subject that did not interest him.

Vannevar Bush subsequently enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology electrical engineering program.

Vannevar Bush received his doctorate in engineering jointly from MIT and Harvard University.

Vannevar Bush accepted a job with Tufts, where he became involved with the American Radio and Research Corporation, which began broadcasting music from the campus on March 8,1916.

The station owner, Harold Power, hired him to run the company's laboratory, at a salary greater than that which Vannevar Bush drew from Tufts.

Vannevar Bush attempted to develop a means of detecting submarines by measuring the disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field.

Vannevar Bush's device worked as designed, but only from a wooden ship; attempts to get it to work on a metal ship such as a destroyer failed.

Vannevar Bush immediately realized the potential of such an invention, for these were much more difficult to solve, but quite common in physics.

For developing the differential analyzer, Bush was awarded the Franklin Institute's Louis E Levy Medal in 1928.

Vannevar Bush taught boolean algebra, circuit theory, and operational calculus according to the methods of Oliver Heaviside while Samuel Wesley Stratton was President of MIT.

When Harold Jeffreys in Cambridge, England, offered his mathematical treatment in Operational Methods in Mathematical Physics, Vannevar Bush responded with his seminal textbook Operational Circuit Analysis for instructing electrical engineering students.

In 1935, Vannevar Bush was approached by OP-20-G, which was searching for an electronic device to aid in codebreaking.

Vannevar Bush was paid a $10,000 fee to design the Rapid Analytical Machine.

That year Vannevar Bush became the dean of the MIT School of Engineering.

The companies Vannevar Bush helped to found and the technologies he brought to the market made him financially secure, so he was able to pursue academic and scientific studies that he felt made the world better in the years before and after World War II.

Vannevar Bush became its president on January 1,1939, with a salary of $25,000.

Vannevar Bush was now able to influence research policy in the United States at the highest level, and could informally advise the government on scientific matters.

Vannevar Bush soon discovered that the CIW had serious financial problems, and he had to ask the Carnegie Corporation for additional funding.

Vannevar Bush clashed over leadership of the institute with Cameron Forbes, CIW's chairman of the board, and with his predecessor, John Merriam, who continued to offer unwanted advice.

Vannevar Bush made it a priority to remove him, regarding him as a scientific fraud, and one of his first acts was to ask for a review of Laughlin's work.

In June 1938, Vannevar Bush asked Laughlin to retire, offering him an annuity, which Laughlin reluctantly accepted.

Vannevar Bush gutted Carnegie's archeology program, setting the field back many years in the United States.

Vannevar Bush saw little value in the humanities and social sciences, and slashed funding for Isis, a journal dedicated to the history of science and technology and its cultural influence.

However, Congress was not convinced of its value, and Vannevar Bush had to appear before the Senate Appropriations Committee on April 5,1939.

Vannevar Bush remained a member of the NACA until November 1948.

Concerned about the lack of coordination in scientific research and the requirements of defense mobilization, Vannevar Bush proposed the creation of a general directive agency in the federal government, which he discussed with his colleagues.

Vannevar Bush had the secretary of NACA prepare a draft of the proposed National Defense Research Committee to be presented to Congress, but after the Germans invaded France in May 1940, Bush decided speed was important and approached President Franklin D Roosevelt directly.

Loomis suggested that the lab should be run by the Carnegie Institution, but Vannevar Bush convinced him that it would best be run by MIT.

Vannevar Bush declined to provide NDRC funding for it on the grounds that he did not believe that it could be completed before the end of the war.

Vannevar Bush's critics saw his attitude as a failure of vision.

Vannevar Bush became director of the OSRD while Conant succeeded him as chairman of the NDRC, which was subsumed into the OSRD.

Vannevar Bush attempted to interpret the mandate of the OSRD as narrowly as possible to avoid overtaxing his office and to prevent duplicating the efforts of other agencies.

Vannevar Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1944 to press for its use, arguing that the Germans would be unable to copy and produce it before the war was over.

Vannevar Bush played a critical role in persuading the United States government to undertake a crash program to create an atomic bomb.

Vannevar Bush briefed Roosevelt on Tube Alloys, the British atomic bomb project and its Maud Committee, which had concluded that an atomic bomb was feasible, and on the German nuclear energy project, about which little was known.

In March 1942, Vannevar Bush sent a report to Roosevelt outlining work by Robert Oppenheimer on the nuclear cross section of uranium-235.

Vannevar Bush soon became dissatisfied with the dilatory way the project was run, with its indecisiveness over the selection of sites for the pilot plants.

Vannevar Bush was particularly disturbed at the allocation of an AA-3 priority, which would delay completion of the pilot plants by three months.

At the meeting, Churchill forcefully pressed for a renewal of interchange, while Vannevar Bush defended current policy.

Vannevar Bush appeared on the cover of Time magazine on April 3,1944.

Vannevar Bush toured the Western Front in October 1944, and spoke to ordnance officers, but no senior commander would meet with him.

Vannevar Bush was able to meet with Samuel Goudsmit and other members of the Alsos Mission, who assured him that there was no danger from the German project; he conveyed this assessment to Lieutenant General Bedell Smith.

In May 1945, Bush became part of the Interim Committee formed to advise the new president, Harry S Truman, on nuclear weapons.

Vannevar Bush was present at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on July 16,1945, for the Trinity nuclear test, the first detonation of an atomic bomb.

Vannevar Bush proposed international scientific openness and information sharing as a method of self-regulation for the scientific community, to prevent any one political group gaining a scientific advantage.

Vannevar Bush was less successful in promoting his ideas in peacetime with President Harry Truman, than he had been under wartime conditions with Roosevelt.

Vannevar Bush's view encompasses the problems of information overload and the need to devise efficient mechanisms to control and channel information for use.

Vannevar Bush was concerned that information overload might inhibit the research efforts of scientists.

Vannevar Bush therefore pressed for OSRD to be wound up as soon as possible.

Vannevar Bush felt that basic research was important to national survival for both military and commercial reasons, requiring continued government support for science and technology; technical superiority could be a deterrent to future enemy aggression.

In Science, The Endless Frontier, a July 1945 report to the president, Vannevar Bush maintained that basic research was "the pacemaker of technological progress".

Vannevar Bush helped create the Joint Research and Development Board of the Army and Navy, of which he was chairman.

The authority that Vannevar Bush had as chairman of the RDB was much different from the power and influence he enjoyed as director of OSRD and would have enjoyed in the agency he had hoped would be independent of the Executive branch and Congress.

Vannevar Bush was never happy with the position and resigned as chairman of the RDB after a year, but remained on the oversight committee.

Vannevar Bush was outraged when a security hearing stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance in 1954; he issued a strident attack on Oppenheimer's accusers in The New York Times.

Alfred Friendly summed up the feeling of many scientists in declaring that Vannevar Bush had become "the Grand Old Man of American science".

Vannevar Bush continued to serve on the NACA through 1948 and expressed annoyance with aircraft companies for delaying development of a turbojet engine because of the huge expense of research and development as well as retooling from older piston engines.

Vannevar Bush was similarly disappointed with the automobile industry, which showed no interest in his proposals for more fuel-efficient engines.

From 1947 to 1962, Vannevar Bush was on the board of directors for American Telephone and Telegraph.

Vannevar Bush worked closely with the company's president, Max Tishler, although Bush was concerned about Tishler's reluctance to delegate responsibility.

Vannevar Bush distrusted the company's sales organization, but supported Tishler's research and development efforts.

Vannevar Bush was survived by his sons Richard and John and by six grandchildren and his sister Edith.

Vannevar Bush was buried at South Dennis Cemetery in South Dennis, Massachusetts, after a private funeral service.

The Vannevar Bush papers are located in several places, with the majority of the collection held at the Library of Congress.