Who they are
Vannevar Bush ran the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII, coordinating the Manhattan Project and other wartime science efforts. He wrote Science, the Endless Frontier — the 1945 report to FDR that laid the intellectual foundation for the National Science Foundation and American postwar research funding. His 1945 essay "As We May Think" imagined the Memex, a desk-sized device for linking and retrieving documents that anticipated hypertext and the web by half a century.
Core Ideas
- Government-funded basic research as the engine of long-term innovation
- The Memex as proto-hypertext