Introduction: Ellul returns
Many nineteenth century thinkers, convinced of the Enlightenment premise that both nature and society were intelligible, and carried away by the growing prestige of the sciences, saw progress as a natural human development and believed that rational criteria guided societal choices. Biological evolution also appeared to provide a model for change applicable to history. An associated triumphalism in modernity dominated European popular culture until the outbreak of World War I and the post-war rise of dictatorial regimes. Yet even then a positive view of science remained largely intact. Even after World War II, the Shoah, saturation bombings of civilians, and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the industrialization of science proceeded at an ever faster pace, assisted by an increasing involvement of state power. The United States science adviser Vannevar Bush (1945) went so far as to present post-World War II science as an “endless frontier” and font of social benefits in healthcare, economic development, and military defense.
Bush, Vannevar
Vannevar Bush (Fig. 1), the son of a clergyman, was born in Massachusetts on 11 March 1890. He attended Tufts University in the years before the First World War and earned both B.S. and M.S. degrees. He then continued on for a doctorate, which was conferred upon him in 1916 simultaneously by both Harvard and MIT. While a graduate student, he worked for General Electric and the US Navy, and taught mathematics at Tufts. In 1919 he joined the teaching staff of MIT, obtaining a full professorship in 1923 and becoming Vice President and Dean of the Engineering School in 1932. He remained with MIT until 1938, when he was elected President of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, a position he held until retiring from active public life in 1955.
Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century
In the 20th - the American - Century, no visionary stands taller than Vannevar Bush. As the inventor and public entrepreneur who launched the Manhattan Project, helped to create the military-industrial complex, conceived of a permanent system of government support for science and engineering and anticipated the personal computer and the Internet, Bush is our century's reincarnation of Ben Franklin. Beginning with his boyhood as a turn-of-the-century tinkerer in his father's basement in Massachusetts, Bush went on to study and teach electrical engineering at Tufts and MIT. An early academic entrepreneur, he cofounded Raytheon, a highly successful electronics company, in his spare time. At MIT, during the Depression, he built what were then the most powerful computers in the world. During World War II, he was 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. When an Allied victory seemed inevitable, his attention turned to the future. In July 1945 he published his legendary essay, "As We May Think, " widely cited as the inspiration for the personal computer and the World Wide Web. In his landmark "Endless Frontier" report, published only weeks later, he boldly equated national security with research strength, outlining a system of permanent federal funding for university research that endures to this day.