Endless Frontier

Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century

G. Pascal Zachary

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501196461
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Biographies de sciences et technologies

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.

Part One

The Education of an Engineer

Chapter 1

“The sea was all around”

(1890–1909)

When I was young I could follow an underground stream, in Provincetown on Cape Cod where I spent much of my youth, with assurance and precision. It flowed out of a pond a mile back, traversed part of the town, flowed under our house, and finally emerged below high water mark.

—Vannevar Bush

Richard Perry Bush, a short man wearing a tall silk hat, was on his way home from a funeral. If he didn’t like funerals, it didn’t show. He officiated at two, sometimes three funerals a week in Chelsea, an industrial city near Boston. In the 1890s Chelsea was a place where old Americans and new immigrants collided. As he walked down Broadway, Chelsea’s main avenue, friends and well-wishers hailed him. It seemed he couldn’t go more than a few feet without seeing someone he knew. He brought a sunny outlook to life, which was probably why he was in such demand for funerals. He seemed always ready to speak a comforting word. A tolerant and civic-minded minister, he had a sense of poetry, yet was practical and no pushover. A fellow minister said, “His manliness was his power.”¹

Perry wore a moustache and long sideburns. He had narrow, dark hooded eyes, a small mouth, a broad, sharp nose and coarse hair strenuously parted near the middle of his head. He was born in 1855 in Provincetown, a scenic but declining fishing and trading center at the tip of Cape Cod, smack on the Atlantic Ocean. The Pilgrims had first stopped at the tip of the cape in 1620 before forming a permanent settlement in Plymouth. Fishing drew the Pilgrims back to the tip each year, and Provincetown was incorporated in 1727. By the Revolutionary War, however, it had just 205 inhabitants and 36 families.

Though isolated, Provincetown seemed to give its residents a window on the world. From High Pole Hill in town, some thought they could see the whole world. Visiting Provincetown about the time of Perry’s birth, Henry Thoreau wrote that the “dry land itself came through and out of the water in its way to the heavens.”²

As a boy in Provincetown, Perry felt “the sea was all around [him]. It was his playmate. It was his inspiration. Something of the moods of the sea were always with him.” The sea had sustained his ancestors for as far back as he knew. His father, also Richard Perry, was a sea captain whose own ancestors (and those of his wife) stretching back six generations were among Massachusetts’ earliest settlers, well established a century before the American Revolution. Most of this self-reliant crowd earned their living from the sea: traveling to Africa, South America and other exotic ports of call; whaling; trading; bankrolling the voyages of others. The elder Richard, born in 1828 and also raised in Provincetown, went to sea at an early age. In his prime he commanded both fishing and cargo vessels, “winning for himself a high reputation for uprightness and attention to business.”³

The vagaries of the seafaring trade meant the Bush family was comfortable but not wealthy. Perry sailed as a cook on a fishing boat at the age of 14, just four years after the Civil War. He did not aspire to a life at sea, however. He was smitten instead with religious feeling, though he turned his back on his parents’ strict Methodist creed. Such religious rifts were common in Provincetown. When Methodism first attracted some residents in the 1790s and they began to build a church, rival faiths were jealous. A mob tore down the frame of the building, built a bonfire with the wood and burned an effigy of the Methodist preacher.

Perry was drawn to a cooler, more temporal spirituality, yet one that was still muscular. His religious journey, however, took him away from Provincetown. Bent on becoming a minister, he attended Tufts College, an academically rigorous school in Medford, Massachusetts, founded by the liberal Universalist faith. A boyhood friend named John Vannevar joined Perry at Tufts, making the break with his family easier.

It took courage for Perry to leave his family and strike out on his own. “I left my home while yet a boy to seek my fortune in the world,” he later recalled. “Going out from home I lost the tie that might have bound me” to family traditions. It also meant fending more for himself. To help pay his school bills, Perry supplied wealthier students with coal for the stoves in their rooms. He carried the fuel himself, sometimes climbing three flights of stairs to make a delivery, the coal on his back.⁴

In 1879, Perry graduated from the divinity school and then moved to the nearby town of Everett, where he spent 13 years as a pastor. Building a life with little family help gave him “a lot of sympathy for anybody struggling with any kind of difficulty.” In 1892, he went to Chelsea, becoming the pastor of the Church of the Redeemer, a 50-year-old Universalist church. Perry arrived at his new post with his wife, Emma Linwood Paine, the daughter of a prominent Provincetown family and the mother of their three children. Edith, the oldest, was ten. Reba was five. The third and youngest child was a one-year-old boy. Born on March 11, 1890, the boy was named Vannevar, after Perry’s lifelong pal.⁵

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In Chelsea, Perry quickly emerged as a civic leader. “A man of strong convictions, he had a remarkable power for making friends.” His religious convictions helped. Universalism, a Protestant offshoot with affinities to the Deism of Thomas Jefferson and other revolutionary-era figures, held that all men will be saved, no matter what their earthly actions. The faith flourished in 18th-century England, then spread to the colonies. By the late 19th century, Universalists espoused a belief in a single God and rejected the idea of Christ’s divinity and the Trinity. Adherents possessed an ecumenical spirit rare for the times and an appetite for social action. Perry himself “was always loyal to his church, but mankind was more important than any church, and when he was called upon to help he never stopped to ask as to a man’s creed, or race, or color, but only as to his need and the way in which he might be comforted or helped.”⁶

Perry’s Universalist creed made him sensitive to the swift and unsettling changes occurring in his city of 40,000. Through the Civil War, Chelsea remained largely rural and was dominated by a few landowners. Its people intensely supported the Yankees in the conflict, sending 1,000 men into battle by the time of Lee’s surrender. After the war, Chelsea emerged as a summer resort, catering to wealthy Bostonians and gaining a reputation as perhaps the poshest of Boston’s suburbs. But in the last third of the century Chelsea’s population quadrupled, and business, attracted by the easy connections to Boston proper, thrived. By 1880, 150 manufacturing firms were located in the city. Within a decade, the number had doubled and business investment had quadrupled.⁷

The boom drastically changed the character of Chelsea. Many of those wishing larger residences had moved to Brookline, Newton and other nearby towns. By the turn of the century, thousands of immigrants had taken their places, prompting one oldtimer to moan: “How was it possible for a city of wealth, with a population of ten to fifteen thousand, to change in so short a time to a business and manufacturing community with a population of forty thousand, including ten thousand Hebrews?”

Some of the old stock remained, of course. Perry himself lived in the middle-class Irish and Yankee part of Chelsea, located across the Boston & Albany and Boston & Maine railroad tracks from Jewish immigrants and impoverished newcomers. He did not retreat into his besieged Anglo-Saxon world but rather saw Chelsea’s social upheaval as an opportunity to break down ethnic and religious walls. He mixed with all kinds. With a local priest, he campaigned to “tame” the city’s saloonkeepers. He regularly exchanged pulpits with a rabbi. And Perry’s interests weren’t always so lofty. He was a sharp pool player and knew his way around the city’s seamy side. No teetotaler, he once forbade a friend to indulge in alcohol even as he swigged a drink (on the presumption, apparently well-grounded, that the friend couldn’t hold his liquor). And he didn’t browbeat his parishioners, but sometimes won them over through guile. Once asked by a mother to counsel her wayward son, Perry gained the boy’s respect by beating him at a game of billiards.⁸

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Chelsea’s schools gave Perry the means to satisfy his desire for social betterment. For 27 years, he served on the city’s school committee, helping to manage the ballooning enrollment, which rose by 50 percent in the ten years beginning in 1895. Perry also supported progressive education, taking the unusual step in 1900 of teaching English to foreign-language students from the ages of 10 to 14. Within six years, the program had grown from one class of 25 pupils to four classes with a total of 100 students. “The school is a beehive,” the committee wrote in its annual report of 1906. “Nowhere else in the city is found greater intensity of interest on the part of the pupils, or more heart or grateful response to the demands of the teachers.”

In general, the quality of the city’s teachers was a source of pride. Perry and his fellow board members insured high standards by not allowing “political influence” to contaminate hiring practices. “In no city in the state, perhaps, has this evil been so thoroughly eradicated as here,” The Chelsea Gazette wrote in 1908.

Perry was an active Mason, reputed to have achieved “literary” success on the strength of his Masonic writings, which one admirer claimed were “accepted as authority in this country and many parts of Europe.” He also wrote poetry, usually devoted to spiritual themes. The writing was passionate, but didactic and usually lacking in lyricism. Son Vannevar once confessed, “I fear that my father was not much of a poet.”⁹

But Perry could make a point. In “Fame,” for instance, he suggested the folly of worldly achievement:

And so I thought, it is in life:

We write in snow on walls of Fame,

But other snows come drifting fast

And for a while another’s name

Gleams out before the gaze of men,

All bright and flowing for a day;

Then it in turn is lost to sight,

In turn to others it gives way.

Sometimes, Perry’s verse lapsed into sentimentality. In “Children’s Sunday,” he wrote:

Hail once more this happy Sabbath,

Gladdest day in all the year;

When about the holy altar,

Children fair in joy appear.

Little ones, we love them dearly,

Stars they are in earth’s dark night;

Angels sent to us from heaven,

Bearing messages of light.

These verses were designed to succor the downhearted, commemorate friends and colleagues, uplift spirits and fix minds on the promise of a better day. Perry was an optimist. He saw life as a challenge to be met and overcome; a game to be won. In “Four Pictures of Life,” Perry brooded about man’s predicament, taking a youth through the “happy time” of hope, the “awful barrier” of destiny, the “tears and white-robed Sorrow” of despair. But the final phase he baldly described as “Victory,” when “the storm that beat upon our youth is gone.” The “fire” of adversity “purifies” the nature of youth, giving birth to a “manly strength.”

And man—not youth—against the wrong hath striven

Despair lies vanquished at the feet of Love,

And Faith proclaims the victory of Heaven.¹⁰

Perry’s ornamented poems seemed almost understated compared to his arcane speeches. He was in demand as a dinner speaker at Masonic gatherings and once gave the keynote address at a ceremony attended by President Teddy Roosevelt. The occasion was the groundbreaking for the Pilgrim Memorial Monument in August 1907. Perry toasted the Pilgrims who “dared and died for principle” and declared, “We hold it as our conviction that when they went forth from England it was in obedience to a heavenly vision and a divine command.” He went on to toast his country (for its “amalgamation of all races and peoples leavened by the spirit of the Pilgrim, the Puritan and the Virginian cavalier”) and then Roosevelt. Any U.S. president was “exalted above every other potentate of earth,” but the sitting president stood alone. “Never since the birth of our Republic [did a president have] so strong a hold upon the confidence and respect of the American people as the present incumbent of the Presidential chair.”¹¹

Perry frequently lectured on secular subjects for a fee, waxing philosophical about camaraderie and country. He was a liberal, but believed in frankly admitting the differences between people, not simply hiding them. “I want no man to tolerate me and I do not tolerate any man,” he once said. “The word tolerate has no place in [Masonry] because when we enter the Lodge room we put aside our differences and creeds and meet upon a common basis. No—I believe in brotherhood but I do not believe in toleration. I believe in equality of man with man, in manly fashion.” While sympathetic to progressive values, Perry was suspicious of “do-gooders.” Once on a visit to Niagara Falls, he impressed his son by angrily replying to the suggestion of another tourist that water from the falls not be diverted for electric power. Perry countered that doing so spared people from working as miners. (The encounter impressed Vannevar, who grew up thinking that do-gooders “often pose a holier than thou attitude which is maddening.”)¹²

Of all Perry’s fascinations, Freemasonry was probably the oddest. His own father and grandfather were Masons, and he frequently discoursed on the oddities of the sect’s rites and history. As a youth he strayed from Masonry, he admitted, but he returned to the fold and held fast to his allegiance: “Early in my career as a Mason, I think, I doubted somewhat the antiquity of the institution. There are some inconsistencies in our ritual; but, as I have looked into the archives, as I have had a little of access to the lore of our Craft, I am more than convinced that we are the lineal descendants of the dusty sons of old Egypt of long, long before the Christian era.”

The mysteries of Masonry might seem strange to others, he allowed, but faith always inspired unusual rituals:

Always man has worshipped; instinctively the knee is bent and the face is turned towards the blue arch. The heart naturally bows in prayer. But we cannot worship in abstractions; we must have forms, and symbols; and men have sought out these from the rudest carving of the idol-maker to the grandeur and magnificence of the modern Lodge-room, and of cathedrals. So it was that, as we traced the architecture, we traced also the history of building; and out of that history we find what brought forth Masonry, as also, what brought forth the church.¹³

To later ears, Perry’s speeches would seem flowery, almost overwrought. But contemporaries found “his language was choice and his thought was always presented with a clearness and force, a simplicity and conviction that ranked him as one of the most delightful and eloquent speakers of his time.” The secret to his patter, he said, was careful planning. One should never start a speech, he advised, “unless you clearly have in mind the sentence with which you are going to conclude.”

A good speaker, though, still must think on his feet. “When you are making a speech your mind is in three parts,” Perry once advised his son. “One is paying attention to your actual wording at the moment. Another is roaming ahead to plan what you will say ...