The V Chip-waste Of Governments Time And

Money Essay, Research Paper

The following document will provide a vehicle for our assignments for the rest of the

semester. If you are interested the source for this text came from

http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/

I have intentionally done a global replace on the following words in the text to, in effect, misspell them?

Scientist

Device

Thinking

Knowledge

Your next assignment is to extract (nohead) this file and download it to your floppy disk so that you can

bring it to class Thursday (we will be spellchecking it, deleting everything from here on, and uploading it

back to the VAX as ASCII Text and mailing it back to me…

AS WE MAY THINK

by VANNEVAR BUSH

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, JULY 1945

This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The

Atlantic Monthly. It is reproduced here with their permission.

The electronic version was prepared by Denys Duchier, April 1994.

Please E-mail comments and corrections to dduchier@csi.uottawa.ca.

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 many 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 the

end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instalments 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 instalments 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 drinking man and the sum of our

knowledge. – The Editor

This has not been a scientist’s war; it has been a war in which all

have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional

competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and

learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective

partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end.

What are the scientists to do next?

For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there

can be little indecision, for their war work has hardly required them

to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their

war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their

objectives remain much the same.

It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride,

who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive

gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated

assignments. They have done their part on the devises that made it

possible to turn back the enemy. They have worked in combined effort

with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves

the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now,

as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy

of their best.

1

Of what lasting benefit has been man’s use of science and of the new

instalments which his research brought into existence? First, they

have increased his control of his material environment. They have

improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his

security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence.

They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological

processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an

increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his

physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an

improved mental health.

Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals;

it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate

and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and

endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an

individual.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased

evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization

extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and

conclusions of thousands of other workers – conclusions which he

cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet

specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the

effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results

of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for

their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works

and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these

amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously

attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields,

by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an

examination calculated to show how much of the previous month’s

efforts could be produced on call. Mendel’s concept of the laws of

genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his

publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and

extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being

repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in

the mass of the inconsequential.

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. The summation of human experience us being

expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading

through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the

same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities

come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical

sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what

is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under

the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings,

cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by

comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will

carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human

operator and thousand of times as fast – there are plenty of

mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific

records.

Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which

embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devises,

but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation

were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the

days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use,

since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of

pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent

breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that

time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.

Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not

produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough,

but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a

Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and

had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources

of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single

car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.

Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great

economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably.

Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile.

Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood.

Note the automatic telephone exchange, which has hundred of thousands

of such contacts, and yet is reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed

in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short,

the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million,

tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets – and it works! Its

gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its

construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for

months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an

age of cheap complex devises of great reliability; and something is

bound to come of it.

2

A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously

extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography,

followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on

magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not

appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of

modification and extension.

Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster

material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive

compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all

imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not

inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his

forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3

millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all

involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of

universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye,

simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in

photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera,

which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination.

There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposure, and the spring for

operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when

the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It

may well be stereoscopic, and record with spaced glass eyes, for

striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the

corner.

The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man