Endless Frontier
Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A prodigiously researched biography of Vannevar Bush, one of America’s most awe-inspiring polymaths and the secret force behind the biggest technological breakthroughs of the twentieth century.
As the inventor and public entrepreneur who launched the Manhattan Project, helped to create the military-industrial complex, conceived a permanent system of government support for science and engineering, and anticipated both the personal computer and the Internet, Vannevar Bush is the twentieth century’s Ben Franklin.
In this engaging look at one of America’s most awe-inspiring polymaths, writer G. Pascal Zachary brings to life an American original—a man of his time, ours, and beyond. Zachary details how Bush cofounded Raytheon and helped build one of the most powerful early computers in the world at MIT. During World War II, he served as Roosevelt’s adviser and chief contact on all matters of military technology, including the atomic bomb. He launched the Manhattan Project and oversaw a collection of 6,000 civilian scientists who designed scores of new weapons. After the war, his attention turned to the future. He wrote essays that anticipated the rise of the Internet and boldly equated national security with research strength, outlining a system of permanent federal funding for university research that endures to this day.
However, Bush’s hopeful vision of science and technology was leavened by an understanding of the darker possibilities. While cheering after witnessing the Trinity atomic test, he warned against the perils of a nuclear arms race. He led a secret appeal to convince President Truman not to test the Hydrogen Bomb and campaigned against the Red Scare.
Elegantly and expertly relayed by Zachary, Vannevar’s story is a grand tour of the digital leviathan we know as the modern American life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of the technocrats who shaped America's development into a world power, Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) oversaw the Manhattan Project. A mathematician and an electrical engineer, Bush became a professor at MIT in 1919 and within a decade was at the cutting edge of the calculator technology that generated the computer revolution. In 1940, FDR appointed Bush chair of the newly organized National Defense Research Council. His role there was not as an inventor but as a facilitator: while organizing the atomic-bomb project, he also coordinated other complex wartime interactions among military, political and scientific communities that had no paradigm for working together. Zachary, a Wall Street Journal reporter with an extensive background in information technology, convincingly and sympathetically depicts his protagonist as an archetype of the engineer as "public polymath," the central figure of a now postmodern nation. Bush was a man of action. Like many others of his generation, he distrusted participatory democracy, preferring an elitist model of decision-making. His insider's objections to a Cold War America dominated by large hierarchical institutions are clearly presented in this carefully researched biography, The conviction that humanity is not doomed to repeat its behaviors is Vannevar Bush's most important legacy--and by no means an ignoble one.
