Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush (Everett, Massachusetts, March 11, 1890 – June 30, 1974) was an American engineer and scientist. He is known for the political role he played in the development of the atomic bomb and for his idea Memex, for which we can consider him the father of the concept "hypertext". The Memex was a project that was never carried out; but later in 1989, it was a precursor to the World Wide Web.

Biography

He was born on March 11, 1890 in Everett, Massachusetts and studied at Tufts College of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he later held various teaching and administrative positions. He had two sisters. His father was a Universalist minister. As a child, Bush was often ill and remained bedridden for long periods of time. At school he demonstrated a great aptitude for mathematics. From a young age he was already an excellent student and in 1913 he built a machine that was used to calculate distances between uneven terrain, which he called Profile Tracer .

In 1919, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT, where he taught for 12 years (in total he spent 25 years as a teacher). He worked on tasks such as manufacturing optical and photographic composition devices, and microfilm storage and retrieval systems.

In 1922 he founded the American Appliance Company with his Tufts colleague Laurence, K. Marshall and the scientist Charles G. Smith in Cambridge (Massachusetts), which would later become Raytheon. Raytheon is currently the main defense contractor for the US Government. Among the products they manufacture are: infrared scopes, cybersecurity, chemical agent detectors, or Arabic-English translators. They gained great relevance in the investigation of possible dangers after September 11, such as the detection of possible radioactivity or immunity to subsequent attacks.

In 1927 he built the first analog computer, which he called a differential analyzer. It differed from digital computers in that it represented numbers using variable voltage electrical voltages, and served to automatically perform some of the elementary operations. This invention had an impact in many areas, especially engineering and chemistry.

In 1939 he was appointed president of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, and Director of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; In 1941 he was appointed, by the president of the United States, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, being head of the Manhattan Project, a community of scientists in charge of creating the atomic bomb at the dawn of World War II. World.

In 1945 he published an article called "As we may think" in the magazine Atlantic Monthly, where he mainly described the arrival of two devices.

First of all, a thinking machine that was capable of carrying out certain calculations; task that is currently carried out by simple calculators. Secondly, a machine that worked through dictation and was capable of storing voice information to represent it in written form. Nowadays there is software capable of doing this, although a higher degree of precision can be achieved.

The last of his achievements, and the one that most influenced the vision of hypertext and the Internet for later stages, was undoubtedly the Memex, a mechanical device for storing books, recordings and communications, with a very simple search, fast and non-linear; The Memex was never developed, but it inspired the work of his successors Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and, later, Tim Berners Lee.

According to some scholars, researchers and declassified official documents, he was the second in command of the MJ-12 group. He was in charge of choosing a group of scientists in various branches to take charge of future examinations of flying vehicles crashed on American territory, whether they were from terrestrial nations, for example spy ships of the USSR (in the middle of the Cold War), as extra-terrestrials, under the command of General Marshall, during the administration of President Truman in 1948.^{[citation needed]}

In 1949 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics.

The differential analyzer

Such invention was created by Vannevar Bush. The differential analyzer was an analog calculator that was built between 1925 and 1931 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Physically it was composed of mechanical amplifiers, each of which was in turn made up of a glass disc and a metal wheel, and in this way the whole could rotate by means of an electric motor.

There were several different models of these devices, including twelve to eighteen roulette integrators that, through their connections through gear trains, represented each of the coefficients of an integral or differential equation. Thus we have a machine capable of performing differential equations of up to 18 variables and was designed to solve problems in electrical networks.

The differential analyzer had a very large media impact and in 1935 a second, more powerful version began to be built, which came to light in 1942 and was kept secret. It was basically a device used to calculate firing tables for the US Navy, which attempted to solve ballistic equations for projectile trajectories. The analyzer consisted of about 2000 electronic tubes, several thousand electromagnetic relays, and approximately 320 kilometers of cable; In total it weighed about 200 tons.

Memex

This device consists of flat bases with a translucent surface that is capable of finding information stored in a database at high speed. On one of the surfaces the user writes key words or drawings that would follow universal standards, and on the other surface the library or database where all the data to be searched is found would be reflected. The way of working would be similar to that carried out by human thought using the main capacity of association and not through the mechanical location of topics in an index. In this way the reader will be able to add comments and notes to the Memex film.

Therefore, the Memex is a device in which all types of texts, records, books and communications are stored, which can be mechanized so that it can be consulted with extreme speed and flexibility. To consult an article, the user builds a network of associated paths, according to their interest, through all the materials in the library so that they can change the configuration whenever they want; Reading paths are created, linking the available articles, and you can modify this configuration whenever you want.

Bush wanted the memex to emulate the way the brain links data by association rather than traditional, hierarchical indexes and storage paradigms, and to be easily accessible as "a future device for individual use... a sort of mechanized private archives and a library" in the form of a desk. The memex was also conceived as a tool to study the brain itself.

After thinking about the potential of augmented memory for several years, Bush, outlining his thoughts at length in <<As We Might Think>>, predicted that "entirely new forms of encyclopedias, ready with a mesh of associative paths that cross them, Ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

Shortly after As We Might Think was published, Douglas Engelbart read it, and with Bush's visions in mind, began the work that would later lead to the invention of the mouse. Ted Nelson, who coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia", was also greatly influenced by Bush's essay.

Vannevar Bush's contributions on registration, information retrieval and reading in libraries and documentation centers have made Bush one of the most cited imported authors in the field of Information and Documentation. Bush breaks the separation between author and reader, and the border marked by both roles is no longer so strict, so the reader can make annotations and notes.

We owe Bush this machine, the Memex, but also the storage of information in a different way, where everything is connected to everything else. Bush thus manages to keep up with his time, and is aware of the technological problems that are increasing.