Vannevar Bush

1. Lead

Vannevar Bush (11 March 1890 – 28 June 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator who, more than any other single person, organised the mobilisation of American science for the Second World War. Born in Everett, Massachusetts, the son of a Universalist minister, he studied electrical engineering at Tufts and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a professor and, in 1932, vice-president and dean of engineering. In 1939 he became president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and in June 1940, at his own initiative, he persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), a civilian body that would coordinate scientific research for the military. In 1941 the NDRC became the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), with Bush as its director, and under his direction American scientists developed radar, the proximity fuse, penicillin production on an industrial scale, and, above all, the atomic bomb, through the Manhattan Project, which Bush helped to create and which he supervised as chairman of the Military Policy Committee. He was, in the words of one historian, “the general of physics”, the man who turned American science into a weapon of war.

Bush’s importance extends beyond the war itself. In 1945 he wrote Science, The Endless Frontier, a report to President Harry S. Truman that argued for the continued federal support of basic scientific research in peacetime, and that led directly to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950, the institution that has funded American science ever since. He also invented the differential analyser, an early analogue computer, and he proposed, in a famous essay of 1945, “As We May Think”, the memex, a device for storing and retrieving information that anticipated the hypertext and the personal computer by decades. He was a man of contradictions: a scientist who became a bureaucrat, an inventor who became an administrator, a civilian who wielded more power over the American war effort than most generals, and a man who, after the war, warned against the dangers of the military-industrial complex that he had helped to create. His career raises the question of how science should be organised in a democracy, and of what happens when scientists become servants of the state.

2. Key Facts

Born	11 March 1890, Everett, Massachusetts, United States
Died	28 June 1974 (aged 84), Belmont, Massachusetts, United States
Nationality	American
Role / Office	Electrical engineer; professor and vice-president of MIT; president of the Carnegie Institution (1939–1955); director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (1941–1947); chairman of the Military Policy Committee of the Manhattan Project
Known for	The NDRC and OSRD; the mobilisation of American science for war; the Manhattan Project; radar and the proximity fuse; Science, The Endless Frontier (1945); the memex
Spouse / Family	Phoebe Davis (married 1916, died 1969); two sons, Richard and John
Military rank	Civilian (no military rank; held the wartime post of director of the OSRD)

3. Early Life and Education

Family and Childhood

Vannevar Bush was born on 11 March 1890 at Everett, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Perry Bush, a Universalist minister, and Emma Linwood Paine Bush. He was the youngest of three children, and he grew up in a household that was, by his own account, strict, religious and intellectual: his father, who had been a sea captain before becoming a minister, taught his children the value of hard work and of self-reliance, and his mother, who was a schoolteacher, taught them the value of learning. Bush was a sickly child, suffering from a series of illnesses that kept him out of school for long periods, and he spent much of his childhood reading and building things, developing the practical ingenuity that would mark his career as an engineer. He was, by his own admission, a poor student at school, more interested in mathematics and in machines than in the classical curriculum, and his teachers despaired of him; but he was also, as his father recognised, a boy of exceptional intelligence, and he was allowed to follow his own interests, a freedom that shaped his approach to science for the rest of his life.

Everett and Chelsea

Everett, the town in which Bush was born, was a suburb of Boston, a town of factories and of working-class families, and Bush grew up in a world that was, in his own words, “a world of machines”. His father was the minister of the Universalist church in Everett and later in Chelsea, and the family lived in the parsonage, a modest house that was always full of books and of visitors. Bush’s childhood was spent in the streets of Everett and Chelsea, playing with the children of factory workers, and in the workshops of the town, where he learned to use tools and to take machines apart. The experience taught him that science was not an abstract pursuit, but a practical one, and that the test of an idea was whether it worked. It also taught him that he was, by temperament, an engineer rather than a scientist: he was interested, not in discovering the laws of nature, but in using them to build things that would work in the real world.

Education and First Service

Bush studied electrical engineering at Tufts College, graduating in 1913, and he then worked for a year at the General Electric Company, where he learned the practical business of engineering in industry. He returned to academic life in 1914, studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate in 1916, and he joined the faculty of MIT, where he became, in 1923, a professor of electrical engineering. At MIT he worked on the problems of electrical power systems, and he invented, with his students, the differential analyser, a mechanical analogue computer that could solve differential equations, a device that was, in the 1930s, the most powerful computer in the world. He also worked as a consultant to industry, and he founded, with a colleague, the Raytheon Company, which became one of the largest manufacturers of electronic equipment in the United States. In 1932 he was appointed vice-president of MIT and dean of the School of Engineering, a post that gave him responsibility for the administration of one of the largest engineering schools in the world, and that taught him the skills of administration that he would later use in Washington.

4. Rise to Prominence

The Carnegie Institution and Washington

In 1939, Bush was appointed president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, a private research institution that funded scientific research, and he moved to Washington, where he became involved in the politics of science. He was a man who understood, earlier than most scientists, that the war in Europe would involve the United States, and that American science would need to be organised for war. In June 1940, he persuaded President Roosevelt to create the National Defense Research Committee, the NDRC, a civilian body that would coordinate scientific research for the military, and he became its chairman. The NDRC was a new kind of organisation: it was civilian, it was funded by the government, and it was staffed by scientists who worked, not in military laboratories, but in universities and in industry, on problems chosen by the scientists themselves. Bush’s argument was that scientists, left to themselves, would produce better weapons than soldiers, who did not understand science, and Roosevelt, who trusted Bush, accepted the argument. The NDRC was the first step in the mobilisation of American science, and it was Bush’s creation.

The OSRD and the Mobilisation of Science

In June 1941, six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the NDRC became the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the OSRD, with Bush as its director, and with a budget that grew, by 1945, to more than 450 million dollars, a sum that was, at the time, enormous. The OSRD was responsible for the development of radar, of the proximity fuse, of penicillin production, of the atomic bomb, and of hundreds of other weapons and devices, and Bush, as its director, was the man who decided which projects would be funded, which scientists would work on them, and how the results would be used. He was a demanding administrator, who insisted on results and who was impatient with bureaucracy, and he was also a political operator, who understood how to deal with the military, with Congress, and with the President. His power was extraordinary for a civilian: he reported directly to the President, he controlled the largest scientific research programme in history, and he was, in effect, the general of American science. His rise to prominence was complete, and it was a rise that had been achieved, not by military rank, but by the force of his ideas and by his ability to organise.

5. Vannevar Bush’s Role in World War II

Radar and the Proximity Fuse

Bush’s first great achievement in the war was radar. In 1940, the British shared their secret of the cavity magnetron, the device that made radar practical, with the Americans, and Bush created the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, the Rad Lab, to develop radar for the American military. The Rad Lab, which employed more than 4,000 scientists and engineers, developed radar for aircraft, for ships and for ground forces, and it produced, by 1945, more than 100 different radar systems, which were used in every theatre of the war. Radar transformed the war at sea and in the air: it allowed the Allies to detect German submarines, to direct their fighters against German bombers, and to navigate in bad weather. Bush’s second great achievement was the proximity fuse, a small radar set inside an artillery shell that detonated the shell when it came close to its target, rather than on impact or after a fixed time. The proximity fuse, which was developed under the OSRD, increased the effectiveness of anti-aircraft fire by several times, and it was used, in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, to devastating effect against German troops. Both radar and the proximity fuse were, in Bush’s words, “the weapons that won the war”, and both were the products of the organisation he had created.

The Radiation Laboratory

The Radiation Laboratory at MIT, the Rad Lab, was the largest and most successful of the OSRD’s laboratories, and it deserves to be described in detail because it shows Bush’s method of organisation. The Rad Lab was staffed by physicists from universities across the United States, who were brought together in a single building at MIT, given a clear objective — to develop radar — and left to work with a minimum of bureaucratic interference. Bush’s principle was that scientists work best when they are given a problem and left alone, and the Rad Lab, which produced more than 100 radar systems in five years, proved him right. The laboratory was also a model for the post-war organisation of American science: it showed that the government could fund basic research in universities, and that the results could be turned into weapons and into products, a lesson that Bush would later apply in his report Science, The Endless Frontier.

The Manhattan Project

Bush’s most important role in the war was in the creation of the Manhattan Project, the American programme to build the atomic bomb. In 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard had written to President Roosevelt warning him that the Germans might be working on an atomic bomb, and Roosevelt had created a committee to investigate the possibility. Bush, who became chairman of that committee in 1940, was initially sceptical, but by 1941 he was convinced that an atomic bomb was possible, and that the United States should build one before the Germans did. In 1942 he persuaded Roosevelt to create the Manhattan Project, a military programme under the command of General Leslie Groves, with the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as its scientific director, and he served as chairman of the Military Policy Committee, the body that supervised the project. The Manhattan Project, which employed more than 130,000 people and cost more than two billion dollars, built the first atomic bombs, which were tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, and dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August and on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Bush was not a physicist, and he did not work on the bomb itself, but he was the administrator who made the project possible, and he was, in that sense, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb.

Penicillin and Other Projects

The OSRD was responsible for hundreds of projects, and Bush’s role in them was to decide which were worth funding and which were not. One of the most important was penicillin, the antibiotic that had been discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928 but that could not be produced in quantity. Under the OSRD, American scientists and industrialists developed a method of producing penicillin on an industrial scale, using deep-tank fermentation, and by 1944 penicillin was available in quantity to the Allied armies, where it saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers. Bush also supervised the development of the bazooka, of the Norden bombsight, of new explosives, and of the DUKW, the amphibious truck that was used in the landings in Normandy and in the Pacific. His method was to fund many projects, to accept that some would fail, and to concentrate resources on those that succeeded, a method that was, in effect, the application of the principles of venture capital to scientific research. The OSRD was, by the end of the war, the largest scientific research organisation in history, and Bush, as its director, was the most powerful civilian in the American war effort.

6. Key Decisions

Decisions in War

Creating the NDRC (June 1940). Bush’s decision to persuade Roosevelt to create the NDRC was the decisive choice of his career. It created a civilian body to coordinate scientific research for the military, and it established the principle that scientists, not soldiers, should decide which scientific projects were worth pursuing. The decision was controversial at the time — the military resented civilian interference — but it proved to be the foundation of the American scientific war effort.

Creating the Manhattan Project (1942). His decision to persuade Roosevelt to create the Manhattan Project, and to put it under military command, was a decision to build the atomic bomb before the Germans did. The decision was based on the fear that the Germans were working on a bomb, a fear that proved to be unfounded — the German atomic programme was far behind the American — but the decision, once made, could not be unmade, and it led to the use of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Recommending the use of the bomb (1945). Bush was a member of the Interim Committee, the body that advised President Truman on the use of the atomic bomb, and he supported the decision to use the bomb on Japan without warning. He later defended the decision as a military necessity, arguing that it saved lives by ending the war quickly, but he also acknowledged that it was a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Decisions After the War

Writing Science, The Endless Frontier (1945). Bush’s decision to write his report to President Truman, arguing for the continued federal support of basic scientific research in peacetime, was a decision that shaped American science for the next seventy years. The report led to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950, and it established the principle that the government should fund basic research, and that the results should be made available to all.

Opposing the military control of science (1945–1950). After the war, Bush opposed the proposal to put the National Science Foundation under military control, and he argued that science should be controlled by civilians, not by soldiers. The argument was successful, and the NSF was created as a civilian agency, a decision that Bush regarded as one of the most important of his career. The decision also reflected Bush’s conviction, formed during the war, that science flourishes only when scientists are free to choose their own problems, and that a civilian agency, accountable to Congress and to the public, was a better guardian of that freedom than a military one.

7. Controversies

The Atomic Bomb

The central controversy about Bush concerns his role in the creation and use of the atomic bomb. His defenders argue that he was a patriot who helped to build a weapon that ended the war and saved lives, and that he had no choice but to build the bomb, because the Germans might have built it first. His critics argue that he was one of the men who created a weapon of mass destruction, that he knew the Germans were not close to building a bomb, and that he pressed for the use of the bomb on Japan when a demonstration, or a warning, might have achieved the same result. The controversy has been debated ever since, and it has produced a large literature, in which Bush is portrayed, variously, as a hero, as a villain, and as a tragic figure who understood the dangers of the weapon he had helped to create, but who could not prevent its use. Bush himself, in his later years, expressed doubts about the decision to use the bomb, and he wrote that the bomb had “changed the world for ever”, a statement that has been quoted as an admission of the moral ambiguity of his career.

The Interim Committee

A related controversy concerns Bush’s membership of the Interim Committee, the body that advised President Truman on the use of the bomb. The committee, which met in May and June 1945, recommended that the bomb should be used on Japan without warning, and that it should be used on a military target, although the targets chosen — Hiroshima and Nagasaki — were cities with large civilian populations. Bush supported the recommendation, and he later defended it, arguing that a demonstration would not have convinced the Japanese to surrender, and that the bomb was a military weapon like any other. His critics argue that the committee’s recommendation was based on a narrow military calculation, and that it ignored the moral and political consequences of using a weapon of mass destruction on a civilian population. The controversy continues, and it is a reminder that the decisions made by scientists in wartime can have consequences that extend far beyond the laboratory.

Science and the State

A second controversy concerns Bush’s role in the creation of the military-industrial complex. Bush argued, in Science, The Endless Frontier, that the government should fund basic scientific research, and that the results should be made available to all; but he also argued that the government should not control science, and that scientists should be free to pursue their own interests. His critics argue that the system he created — in which the government funds science, and science serves the military — has led to the militarisation of American science, and to the dependence of universities on military funding, a dependence that Bush himself warned against in his later years. His defenders argue that the system he created was necessary in wartime, and that it has produced, in peacetime, the greatest scientific enterprise in history. The controversy continues, and it is a reminder that the organisation of science is a political question, and that the decisions made by scientists in wartime can shape the organisation of science for generations.

8. Later Life and Death

Science, The Endless Frontier

After the war, Bush returned to the Carnegie Institution, where he served as president until 1955, and he wrote Science, The Endless Frontier, a report to President Truman that argued for the continued federal support of basic scientific research in peacetime. The report, which was published in July 1945, was a landmark in the history of American science: it argued that basic research was the “pacemaker of technological progress”, that the government should fund it, and that the results should be made available to all. The report led, after five years of debate in Congress, to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950, and it established the principle that the government should fund basic research in universities, a principle that has shaped American science ever since. Bush also wrote, in 1945, the essay “As We May Think”, in which he proposed the memex, a device for storing and retrieving information that anticipated the hypertext and the personal computer by decades, and that has been recognised as one of the founding texts of computer science.

Final Years

Bush retired from the Carnegie Institution in 1955, and he spent his final years in Belmont, Massachusetts, where he wrote his memoirs, Pieces of the Action, published in 1970, and where he continued to write and to speak about the organisation of science. His health declined in the 1960s, and he suffered a stroke in 1969, which left him partially paralysed. He died at Belmont on 28 June 1974, aged eighty-four, and he was buried in the cemetery at Belmont. He left behind a reputation that remains divided: to his admirers, the man who organised American science for war and for peace, and who created the institutions that have funded American science ever since; to his critics, a man who helped to create the atomic bomb and the military-industrial complex, and who, by his own admission, changed the world for ever, for better and for worse. His papers, which are held at the Library of Congress, continue to be studied by historians of science, and his name is honoured by the Vannevar Bush Award, given each year by the National Science Board for exceptional service to the nation in science and technology.

9. Legacy of Vannevar Bush

The National Science Foundation

Bush’s lasting legacy is the National Science Foundation, the institution that he proposed in Science, The Endless Frontier and that was created in 1950. The NSF, which funds basic scientific research in universities across the United States, has funded, since its creation, the work of more than 200 Nobel laureates, and it has supported the research that led to the internet, to the laser, and to the human genome project. Bush’s report, which argued that the government should fund basic research and that the results should be made available to all, established the principle that has shaped American science for more than seventy years, and it is the reason why Bush is remembered, not only as a wartime administrator, but as the architect of the post-war American scientific enterprise. The NSF is, in that sense, Bush’s monument, and it is a monument that continues to shape the world. The foundation’s budget, which was less than four million dollars in its first year, grew to several billion dollars a year by the end of the twentieth century, and its grants have supported research in every field of science, from physics and biology to computer science and engineering.

The Memex and the Computer

Bush’s second legacy is the memex, the device he proposed in his essay “As We May Think” in 1945. The memex was a desk, with a screen and a keyboard, that would store all of a person’s books, records and communications, and that would allow the person to retrieve them by association, following trails of links from one item to another. The essay, which was published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, has been recognised as one of the founding texts of computer science, and it anticipated, by decades, the hypertext, the personal computer and the World Wide Web. Bush’s idea of the memex was, in effect, the idea of the internet, and it is the reason why he is remembered, not only as a wartime administrator, but as a visionary who saw, in 1945, the future of information technology. The memex was never built, but its influence on the development of the computer has been profound, and it is a reminder that Bush was, first and foremost, an inventor.

10. Assessment by Historians

The Administrator of Science

Historians assess Bush as the most important science administrator in American history, and the assessment rests on his achievement in organising American science for war and for peace. As director of the OSRD, he created the largest scientific research programme in history, and he produced, in five years, radar, the proximity fuse, penicillin, and the atomic bomb, weapons that transformed the war. As the author of Science, The Endless Frontier, he created the institutions that have funded American science ever since, and he established the principle that the government should fund basic research. Historians also note his method: he believed that scientists work best when they are given a problem and left alone, and he applied that principle in the Rad Lab, in the Manhattan Project, and in the NSF. The assessment is not without qualification — his power was extraordinary for a civilian, and his decisions, above all the decision to build and to use the atomic bomb, have been criticised — but the consensus is that he was a man of exceptional ability, and that his achievement in organising American science was without parallel.

The Moral Assessment

The moral assessment of Bush is more complicated, and it rests on the question of the atomic bomb. Bush was a man who understood the dangers of the weapon he had helped to create, and who, in his later years, expressed doubts about the decision to use it; but he was also a man who pressed for its creation, who supported its use, and who, after the war, continued to argue that science should serve the state. His defenders argue that he was a patriot who did what was necessary to win the war, and that the bomb, although terrible, saved lives by ending the war quickly; his critics argue that he was a man who, by creating the atomic bomb, changed the world for ever, and that the world he created is a more dangerous place because of it. The consensus among historians is that Bush was a man of great ability and of great moral ambiguity, a scientist who became a bureaucrat, an inventor who became an administrator, and a civilian who wielded more power than most generals, and whose career raises the question of what happens when scientists become servants of the state, a question that remains relevant today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Vannevar Bush?
Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) was an American engineer and science administrator who directed the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the Second World War, organised the Manhattan Project, and wrote Science, The Endless Frontier, which led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.

What was the OSRD?
The Office of Scientific Research and Development was a civilian agency created in June 1941, with Bush as its director, to coordinate scientific research for the military. It was responsible for radar, the proximity fuse, penicillin production, and the Manhattan Project, and it employed more than 30,000 scientists and engineers by 1945.

What was Bush’s role in the Manhattan Project?
Bush helped to create the Manhattan Project in 1942, persuading President Roosevelt to fund it, and he served as chairman of the Military Policy Committee, the body that supervised the project. He was not a physicist and did not work on the bomb itself, but he was the administrator who made the project possible.

What is Science, The Endless Frontier?
Science, The Endless Frontier is a report that Bush wrote to President Harry S. Truman in July 1945, arguing for the continued federal support of basic scientific research in peacetime. The report led to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950.

What was the memex?
The memex was a device proposed by Bush in his essay “As We May Think” (1945), a desk that would store all of a person’s books, records and communications, and allow them to be retrieved by association. The essay anticipated hypertext, the personal computer and the World Wide Web by decades.

Did Bush support the use of the atomic bomb?
Yes. Bush was a member of the Interim Committee that advised President Truman on the use of the bomb, and he supported the decision to use it on Japan without warning. He later expressed doubts about the decision, but he defended it as a military necessity.

Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Vannevar Bush” — consolidated biography: birth 11 March 1890, death 28 June 1974, NDRC, OSRD, Manhattan Project, Science, The Endless Frontier, memex.
2. Vannevar Bush, Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) — the report to President Truman; the argument for federal support of basic research.
3. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”, The Atlantic Monthly (July 1945) — the memex and the future of information technology.
4. G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1997) — biography; the differential analyser, the NDRC, the OSRD, the Manhattan Project.
5. James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (1993) — the Manhattan Project, the Interim Committee, and the decision to use the bomb.
6. David H. DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance (1992) — the OSRD, the Radiation Laboratory, and the mobilisation of American science.