“As we May Think”

Vannevar Bush, science adviser to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, published the influential essay “As We May Think” in Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. World War II was still raging, but its outcome was reasonably certain, and Bush looked beyond the war to the science and technology of peace.

Science and technology had enabled increased human control over the material world, improving food, clothing, and shelter; increasing security; reducing labor; improving medicine; increasing life span; and improving communication. The growth of science meant an ever-expanding record of ideas. As human knowledge grew, the ability to transmit and review new knowledge became increasingly difficult. Exchange across disciplines often became superficial, as knowledge increased within ever-more-isolated fields. The first glimmerings of information overload were visible.

Science was extending the boundaries of knowledge. At the same time, research publishing had already exploded far beyond humanity's ability to access and use the knowledge that science was creating, and the ongoing expansion of knowledge meant that the problem would worsen. The knowledge of the atomic age was being managed using the same techniques and media that were used to manage knowledge in the early steam age.

Bush was particularly sensitive to the danger of lost knowledge, not merely through lack of access, but also because of the risk of its burial in a mass of information. For example, he wrote that “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.”

Bush's article focused on one specific challenge: He asked how science and technology could solve the problem of managing human knowledge. His article summarized the technological advances of the time, and demonstrated how they could be applied to the problem.

Bush outlined the concepts of a dozen important inventions. These included the hand-held calculator; the personal computer; and the idea of dry photography that gave birth to the Polaroid camera, the Xerox machine, and electrostatic photocopying. He conceptualized improvements to photography that included universal focus, automatic focus, automatic zoom, automatic exposure and lighting control, and automatic [Page 18]loading and rewind, along with head-mounted cameras for still photography and, by extension, camcorders for live action. He proposed a viewer interface mounted in the lenses of an ordinary pair of eyeglasses, used in some forms of heads-up display. Other technical advances included the telefax (already in partial use), the image scanner, remote imaging, microphotography, video photography, analog data compression, voice-activated text transcription, the text scanner, handwriting storage, document imaging, punch-cards for sophisticated computing, electronic computing, and advanced algorithmic programming. He also explored artificial intelligence, decision-support systems, special computers for local applications, problem-solving systems, educational simulations, distance learning, improved symbolic representation systems for mathematics and logic, logic engines, search engines, digitized search algorithms, associative search algorithms, database programs, credit cards, personal information cards, and electromagnetic code strips.

Improvements in the technology that Bush described meant that the realization of these inventions would use different means than he predicted. Nevertheless, the technology did exist for the applications that Bush proposed in his own time. It was his unique genius to see these opportunities, and to understand how they could be made to work in an integrated series of information-technology devices and knowledge-management systems.

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