Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century

Vannevar Bush has received more attention from historians of technology and science than any other twentieth-century engineer, but until now no biography of him had been published. G. Pascal Zachary’s Endless Frontier admirably fills this lacuna, taking advantage of the existing secondary material on Bush and supplementing it with his own exhaustive research in the primary sources. The result is not so much a fundamental revision of the previous Bush literature as a fuller portrait of the man.

Zachary’s main themes will be familiar to readers of Larry Owens’s work (e.g., “The Counterproductive Management of Science in the Second World War: Vannevar Bush and the Office of Scientific Research and Development,” Business History Review 68 [Winter 1994]: 515–76): the tensions between Bush’s personal philosophy stressing the individual, his technocratic impulses, and the larger organizations he dealt with in his career. In 1938 Bush wrote that he would circumscribe the individual “as little as possible” (p. 8). And he spent a lifetime making sure that he was circumscribed as little as possible. Whether by threatening to sue his college for not paying him his wages promptly, forcing his graduate advisor to sign a contract stipulating the work required for his thesis, or launching a petty dispute with tax officials in the middle of World War II, Bush fought to keep his freedom as an individual even if it meant bullying others to do so.

Bush’s computing machines reflect the primacy he put on the individual. As Owens has shown (“Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer,” Technology and Culture 27 [January 1986]: 63–95), the operation of Bush’s differential analyzer was transparent to the users, inculcating in them a profound understanding of its underlying mathematical principles. Zachary calls the memex, a futuristic data retrieval machine Bush described in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945, “a machine that could amplify the consciousness of a single person, not run an organization” (p. 267).

Of course Bush himself ran organizations, most notably the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and later the Office of Scientific Research and Development. While Bush’s large-sized personal ambition remained in view, Zachary considers Bush to have been a very effective administrator: “a master at sizing up situations, he worked best when interfered with the least” (p. 347). But Zachary also gives many examples of Bush’s adeptness in dealing with adversaries and the bureaucracy.

The early stages of the atomic bomb program perhaps best demonstrate Bush’s skills as a research manager. Although Bush was initially skeptical about the possibilities of a fission weapon, Zachary follows Stanley Goldberg (“Inventing a Climate of Opinion: Vannevar Bush and the Decision to Build the Bomb,” Isis 83 [September 1992]: 429–52) in assigning Bush a central role in moving the United States to an all-out atomic weapons program. Zachary writes that Bush “brought a fuzzy goal into clear view more quickly than anyone had a right to expect” (p. 209). On the other hand, Zachary notes Bush’s lack of support for both missile research and the ENIAC, explaining both cases by a lack of vision on Bush’s part coupled with his hunch that neither would be ready before the end of the war.

Zachary claims that after the war Bush’s “moment had passed” (p. 380). His power had come from the war and his personal relationship with FDR, and both were gone. Although Bush coveted the secretary of defense position, Truman bypassed him, instead making him the head of the Defense Research Board, where he was powerless to implement his agenda of rationalizing defense research. While Bush continued to hold titles that might suggest power, such as seats on corporate boards or memberships on high level government committees, real power lay elsewhere, and his counsel was frequently ignored. Ever the engineer, he continued his innovative work...