Literature/1945/Bush


 * http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
 * http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/365/mark/material/notes/Chap1/VBushArticle/

Editorial
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. -- THE EDITOR

Features

 * Patents of the microfilm selector or statistical machine

Excerpts

 * Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.... The difficulty seems to be not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.
 * ... our contemporary encyclopedias are still in the coach-and-horse phase of development, rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane. These observers realize that the modern facilities of transport, radio, photographic reproduction and so forth are rendering practicable a much more fully succinct and accessible assembly of facts and ideas than was ever possible before. --- @ 1938/Wells p. 84.

Wikimedia

 * As We May Think
 * The article was a reworked and expanded version of his 1939 Mechanization and the Record.
 * Memex

Reviews

 * --- http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html