Inventing the Future

For the past fifty years the U.S. national science and technology enterprise has evolved under the heavy influence of the engineer Vannavar Bush. Most students of science and technology policy as well as many practicing scientists and engineers know Bush’s role, but few people know much about Bush the man or the forces that shaped him and ultimately his ideas. G. Pascal Zachary in his Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, conveys for the first time a full picture of Bush as the inventor of machines as well as organizational systems.

We learn from Zachary’s detailed historical and psychological profile that Bush, the son of a New England minister, earned patents in areas such as topographical surface mapping and analog calculating before he graduated from college. He maintained his interest in invention as he progressed to become a professor at MIT. During the 1920s and 1930s he had extensive interaction with military R&D, which helped prepare him for the critical role he would play in World War II.

Zachary leaves no doubt that he considers Bush a visionary. As an architect of institutional design for national purposes, Bush’s achievement was on the level of Alexander Hamilton’s initial building of our national financial institutions in the 1790s or Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to influence and shape the design of the League of Nations in the 1920s. In the 1940s, as director of the Office of Science Research and Development, Bush mobilized and managed the innovative power of the entire U.S. network of academic and industrial scientists and engineers for the sole purpose of winning the war. In so doing, he glimpsed, perhaps for the first time in the United States, the power of organizing large-scale science and technology assets for attaining national political and economic goals. In fact, even before the end of the war, he saw that the nation might benefit from a permanent national investment in science and technology. With this simple vision, Bush set out in 1945 to design and implement a system for long-term state-supported basic scientific and technological research. This design and the subsequent institutions and programs developed for national science and technology were built around a number of characteristics central to Bush the man. Zachary does an excellent job of describing in great detail the psychological, social, and technological forces and constraints that shaped Bush and his subsequent design of the U.S. science and technology enterprise.

Zachary reveals how Bush’s thinking was characterized by order, vision, control, invention, and rationality, all of which served him well during the war years. But Bush can be seen as the returning war hero who has a hard time adjusting to civilian life. The take-charge certainty that made him so effective in marshalling national intellectual resources was ill-adapted to the political reality in which democracy would play an essential role in crafting science and technology policy.

Unlike Wilson or Hamilton, Bush lacked deep knowledge of philosophy, political theory, or history. He believed that the science and engineering approach to problem solving and national development was superior to the rougher hewn and often inexact political process associated with modern democracy. The combination of this belief with his wartime experience of almost unimaginable power led Bush to imagine a world in which science for the public good could be largely separated from public discourse. In fact, throughout this biography, we learn repeatedly that Bush did best when he had to interact only with elites, the resources were virtually unlimited, and oversight was nil. It was in this world, which for the most part was non-democratic in its character, that Bush felt that science and technology could best be guided for the national good.

A blinkered vision

Throughout his life, Bush retained his drive to invent, often working on several machines or systems at a time. One of his most remarkable ideas, which he developed over nearly 15 years, appeared in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. “As We May Think” details, with amazing clarity, what the Internet is today and what digital libraries will be tomorrow. Long before even the simplest computer existed, he could already conceive of advanced computational systems and their potential purposes. He could not accept, however, that computers would use digital systems rather than the analog system that he imagined. Zachary perceptively observes that this was a sign of Bush’s intellectual and practical limitations.

Zachary does not seem to notice another important limitation in Bush’s thinking. A gifted and confident rationalist, Bush had only a limited understanding of the nonrational–or in organizational parlance, politics. He did not anticipate how science would become part of the larger public policy arena. Ever the engineer, Bush developed a means by which a nation might do science but not a means by which a nation might determine what science to do. He took it for granted that only scientists and engineers could determine what science might be best pursued.

For their part, the leading politicians of the day were as unaware of the importance of science and technology as Bush was of politics. To President Truman, Bush was a bother. And the usually rational Bush could be quite emotional on the subject of Truman. To Bush’s political nemesis, Senator Kilgore of West Virginia, federal spending on research should be guided not by the needs of science but by its usefulness in attaining economic justice and equity. Given the limited perspectives of the major participants, we should not be surprised to learn that little progress was made in the direction of building a democratically oriented national science and technology enterprise. Bush’s vision took us to the first stage of democratic science: defining the means. Unfortunately, he could not see as far as the second stage, which is to define the relationship between means and ends and to develop a way to choose what end is most desired.

Ultimately, this meant that unlike the civilian-led military or the agricultural research system that links farmers closely with scientists, the national science enterprise design developed by Bush is quite limited and in serious need of completion. Readers of Zachary’s excellent biography of Bush should see clearly the limits of Bush’s vision and understand the constraints that these limits place on the nation’s ability to develop a science agenda that is driven by what the people want. No doubt Bush himself would want to do some tinkering with his invention by this time.

Vannevar Bush, inventor, dreamer, and war hero would be and should be proud of his two biggest inventions: conceptualization of how we might extend our minds beyond our physical limits through information technology and the way we might drive our national destiny through science and technology. Both inventions are the kind of things that change the way we think and as a result change our world.