Vannevar Bush is best known for his 1945 essay "As We May Think," which described an imaginary, automated system to link together all of humanity’s knowledge. It was a system, in short, that prefigured hypertext and the Web by almost 50 years.
But this visionary essay was really just a footnote to the life of a man who through force of will and obstinate determination helped create the modern, technocratic age. Endless Frontier, a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary, describes how Bush stamped his indelible imprint on our times.
First, Bush cast himself as a new kind of individual: an engineer. In the 1920s, this was a fuzzy category. Bush helped define the engineer as a hands-on sort of person – a new category, Zachary points out, that "conceived of education and expertise as the staging ground for risky journeys into the mysterious frontier of technical innovation."
But engineers might never have reached prominence in the national psyche if it weren’t for a climactic event: World War II. This war of dumb machines drove home the primacy of technology.
When the US entered the war, Bush went from being president of the Carnegie Institute of Washington to FDR’s right-hand man. It was Bush’s skill at bureaucratic infighting that allowed him to succeed and establish a technocracy. Once World War II was over, engineers were firmly entrenched in the nation’s power structure. They had helped the US win the war – just think of what they could do during peacetime!
But, the ironic coda to this story is that after having helped create the military-industrial complex that defined the postwar era, Bush was deeply unhappy with what he had wrought. Here, Zachary becomes most eloquent, almost elegiacal. Bush had always been suspicious of big institutions, believing instead in the primacy of the creative individual. But, admitted Bush, as society and technology became more complex, humans became more like cogs. "Is courage needed to watch a radar screen or adjust a guided missile?" he asked.
Yet it was too late for anything but rhetorical questions. Vannevar Bush had already unleashed the Promethean force of technology that we continue to wrestle with.
Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, by G. Pascal Zachary: US$32.50. The Free Press: (800) 223 2348, +1 (201) 967 5810.
This article originally appeared in the October issue of Wired magazine.
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