Vannevar Bush

Person

A black-and-white photograph of a man in a suit and glasses sitting at a desk, holding a pencil over a document. — Vannevar Bush at his desk, between 1940 and 1944.Source: US Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab)License: public domain

Vannevar Bush was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator. He joined MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering in 1919 and became the university’s vice president and dean of its School of Engineering in 1932. During the Second World War he directed the US Office of Scientific Research and Development.

In July 1945 The Atlantic Monthly published his essay “As We May Think”, in which he described the memex, a device to aid human memory.