Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 - June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator who directed the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War Two, overseeing nearly all wartime military research including advances in radar and the early phases of the Manhattan Project. He joined MIT's electrical engineering department in 1919, co-founded what became Raytheon in 1922, and later served as MIT's vice president and dean of engineering before becoming president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938. He is particularly known for his work on analog computers, especially the differential analyzer he began building in 1927, and for conceiving the memex, a hypothetical microfilm-based device anticipating hypertext, described in his 1945 essay As We May Think. His 1945 report Science, The Endless Frontier argued for government funding of basic science and led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.