About the Book
The influence of Vannevar Bush on the history and institutions of twentieth-century American science and technology is staggeringly vast. As a leading figure in the creation of the National Science Foundation, the organizer of the Manhattan Project, and an adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman during and after World War II, he played an indispensable role in the mobilization of scientific innovation for a changing world. A polymath, Bush was a cofounder of Raytheon, a pioneer of computing technology, and a visionary who foresaw the personal computer and might have coined the term “web.”
Edited by Bush’s biographer, G. Pascal Zachary, this collection presents more than fifty of Bush’s most important works across four decades. His subjects are as varied as his professional pursuits. Here are his thoughts on the management of innovation, the politics of science, research and national security, technology in public life, and the relationship of scientific advancement to human flourishing. It includes his landmark introduction to Science, the Endless Frontier, the blueprint for how government should support research and development, and much more. The works are as illuminating as they are prescient, from considerations of civil-military relations and the perils of the nuclear arms race to future encyclopedias and information overload, the Apollo program, and computing and consciousness. Together, these pieces reveal Bush as a major figure in the history of science, computerization, and technological development and a prophet of the information age.
Table of Contents:
Foreword, by Neal Lane
Introduction, by G. Pascal Zachary
Editor’s Note
1. Preface to Operational Circuit Analysis (1929)
2. The Key to Accomplishment (1932)
3. The Inscrutable Past (1933)
4. The Warren Weaver Letters on the Future of Computing Machinery (1933)
5. The Persistent Fallacy of the Absent-Minded Professor (1933)
6. Stimulation of New Products and New Industries by the Depression (1934)
7. The Businessman in This Situation (1934)
8. Against Isolation and for Application of Science to Warfare (1935)
9. The Engineer and His Relation to Government (1937)
10. The Qualities of a Profession (1939)
11. Innovation, Enterprise, and Concentration of Economic Power (1939)
12. Letter to Herbert Hoover on “The Whole World Situation” (1939)
13. Letter to Archibald MacLeish on “Adequate Handling of Large Masses of Photographs” (1940)
14. “Leave No Stones Unturned in Research” (1940)
15. “To the Things of the Mind”: Memorandum Regarding Memex (1941)
16. Science and National Defense (1941)
17. Edison and Our Tradition of Opportunity (1944)
18. Salient Points Concerning Future of Atomic Bombs (1944)
19. The Builders (1945)
20. Teamwork of Technicians (1945)
21. As We May Think (1945)
22. “Letter of Transmittal” to President Harry Truman (1945)
23. “Summary” to Science, the Endless Frontier (1945)
24. Soldiers and Scientists in Partnership (1946)
25. Organizing Scientific Research for War (1946)
26. The Danger of Dictation of Science by Laymen (1946)
27. Should Scientists Resist Military Intrusion? (1947)
28. Science, Democracy, and War (1949)
29. How Science Works, or Doesn’t, Under Totalitarianism (1949)
30. The Essence of Security (1949)
31. The Atomic Bomb and the Defense of the Free World (1951)
32. A Few Quick (1951)
33. On Leadership and Management (1951)
34. “The Timing of the Thermonuclear Test” (1952)
35. “The Search for Understanding” (1953)
36. The Peak Wave of Progress in Digital Machinery (1954)
37. “An Opportunity Was Missed” to Halt Nuclear Arms Race (1954)
38. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1954)
39. Some Things We Don’t Know About Solar Power (1954)
40. The Future of Digital Information: Storage, Retrieval, Search, and the Construction of Knowledge (1955)
41. Faith and Science (1955)
42. Why Do We Pursue Science at All? (1955)
43. The Pioneer (1957)
44. “Those Who Talk Frequently Become Ignored” (1957/1959)
45. On Sputnik (1957)
46. “All-out War Unthinkable to Any Sane Individual” (1959)
47. Machines to Free Men’s Minds (1960)
48. On Space Exploration: The James Webb Letters (1961–1963)
49. The Other Fellows’ Ball Park (1961)
50. Two Cultures (1962)
51. Automation’s Awkward Age (1962)
52. What Is Research? (1963)
53. The Art of Management (1967)
54. “On the Difficulty in Vietnam” (1967)
55. Do Birds Sing for the Joy of Singing? (1970)
56. The Revolution in Machines to Reduce Mental Drudgery (1970)
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author :
G. Pascal Zachary is a writer and educator who has taught at Arizona State University, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1997). His other books include Showstopper: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft (1994) and The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy (2003). Zachary's writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, Wired, and Technology Review.
Review :
A brilliant engineer and incisive intellectual, Vannevar Bush stood at the crossroads of science and government policy at the height of the so-called American Century as few figures in history ever have. His penetrating reflections on the public role of scientists in a liberal democracy, a perennial concern, help give this collection an abiding, even urgent importance.
G. Pascal Zachary has thoughtfully curated and put into context a remarkable collection of Vannevar Bush’s writings. Bush’s prose transports us to the past—you can almost hear the clacking of a typewriter and catch a whiff of mimeograph ink—but his subject is the future and how to build it. Today, our challenges and aspirations for the years ahead are different. But Bush’s insights about research, technology, and America’s particular opportunity are as piercing and timely as ever.
Historians and engaged enthusiasts will find that Bush’s writings, brilliantly framed by Zachary’s introduction, provide both the compass and true north for our digital world. While imperfect, Bush’s visions are the bedrock of the world in which we live, work, and play. They codify the ideas and issues that shape the lion’s share of modern computing—and life as we know it does not exist without computing.
I can't think of a better guide through the writings of Vannevar Bush than G. Pascal Zachary, author of Endless Frontier, the definitive biography of Bush. This carefully curated collection belongs in the libraries of scholars and readers concerned with the origins of the information era: the technology, the politics, the institutions, and the people.
Zachary’s selection of Bush’s writings, and his insightful comments on them, are especially welcome today as a nation yearns for leadership in science and technology.
In the aftermath of World War II, it was not at all certain whether the United States would sag back into the Great Depression. Fortunately, the nation had sound leadership, and one of those distinguished leaders was Vannevar Bush, who charted a new future for the country in science and engineering. Today, from the vantage point of the digital revolution, we need to honor leaders like Bush, as has G. Pascal Zachary by editing these significant essays. Bush’s thoughtful writings deserve the careful attention of every citizen who seeks to understand how America was transformed in the years since 1945.
Zachary has brought Bush’s oeuvre back to life in this valuable volume, at a time when the post-pandemic world may be as open to new frameworks for science policy as it was seventy-five years ago as World War II was about to end.
Bush not only had his hand on the pulse of early computing, he was the one making the heart beat. With G. Pascal Zachary's Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush, there is a full resource for historians to fill this gap in early computing history.
These expertly selected writings by Vannevar Bush present the key ideas of America’s most influential public intellectual from the 1930s to the 1950s. They reveal engagement with a host of issues, ranging from the importance of funding basic science to the future of computing. Many of Bush’s ideas have a timeless quality and remain policy-relevant in our postindustrial society.
This book is a remarkable journey back in time to the moment after World War II when government-sponsored research was starting to gain ground. Bush’s leadership, advice, and direction to governments and agencies, university and industry leaders, was foundational and has stood the test of time.
If Vannevar Bush hadn’t existed, the United States might not have become the unquestioned leader of a globally-technological civilization. Bush’s indispensable insights and counsel to presidents, and especially his groundbreaking writings and speeches, prodded and motivated America’s intellectual class. Zachary is our preeminent expert on Bush, and we needed him to compile this compendium of Bush’s mind-bendingly original ideas.
This is a remarkable book about a remarkable man—and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand twentieth-century American history. Historians know Vannevar Bush as a brilliant scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, organizational leader, and powerful Cold Warrior. In this book, G. Pascal Zachary, Bush’s biographer, carefully selects and wisely edits some of Bush’s essays, correspondence, and speeches in order to reveal the aspects of Bush’s intellect and character that underlay his extraordinary career: his deep personal integrity; his passionate convictions about democracy and science; a contemplative and subtle faith in a better future; his profound insights, based on years of experience, into the politics of his own times; and, finally, a prescient understanding of the complex relationship between technology and society.
Zachary has brought into sharp focus the life and works of one of the great visionaries of the digital age. For those who understand that past is prologue, The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush may just be the key that unlocks a brighter future.
Zachary’s excellent selection and annotation of forty years of the foundational writings of Vannevar Bush lets us understand, from the pen of one of its architects, how the modern technological world came to be.
A fascinating collection of primary sources and, following in the footsteps of Bush himself, framed them in accessible prose. The book is an excellent resource for Cold War historians, college instructors, and undergraduates.
