Endless frontier

Vannevar Bush is presented here as a figure who shaped American life in the twentieth century. He was an inventor and a builder of institutions whose work touched the founding of the Manhattan Project, the growth of the military-industrial complex, and the idea that the government should keep funding science and engineering. He also foresaw the personal computer and the Internet, which leads the author to compare him with Benjamin Franklin.

The story starts with Bush as a young tinkerer experimenting in his father's Massachusetts basement. He went on to study and teach electrical engineering at Tufts and MIT, where he worked as an early academic entrepreneur. Alongside his teaching, he helped found Raytheon, a successful electronics firm. During the Depression, his MIT work produced some of the most powerful computing machines of the day.

In World War II, Bush became President Roosevelt's principal advisor on military technology, including atomic weapons. He directed the Manhattan Project and supervised roughly 6,000 civilian scientists who developed many new weapons. As Allied victory came into view, he turned to the future, publishing his essay "As We May Think" in 1945. Weeks later, his report "Endless Frontier" argued that national security depended on research capacity and proposed a lasting federal system for funding university research.