It’s the 65th anniversary of Vannevar Bush’s essay, “As We May Think.” The landmark piece was published in The Atlantic Monthly in July and then subsequently as an abridged version in Life magazine in September, effectively bookending the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bush first began mulling the idea of a machine that could help humans achieve a higher level of organized knowledge in a 1939 essay, “Mechanization and the Record.” Building on that idea, he sent a letter to the editor of Fortune magazine describing what he called memex, (a portmanteau of “memory” and “index”) his conceptualization of this sort of collective memory machine that would eventually become the blueprint for the modern day web.
But World War II was heating up and Bush was temporarily distracted. An American engineer and science administrator, he was a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project. It wasn’t until the war was coming to a close did he redirect his attention back towards developing his idea of a memory bank.
Perfect Timing
Big Science was just beginning with governments finally acknowledging the pertinence of scientific progress in national development in the form of capital support. There was only one problem. Historically, the main catalyst for science had always been warfare. Now that the war was over, what were these scientists going to do?
Bush’s answer was timely and elegant. As Edward A. Weeks — the then editor of the Atlantic — eloquently put it:
For 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 not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments 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 instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work.
In his essay, Bush would discuss and elaborate on concepts that would become the foundation and inspiration for modern realizations including hypertext, the personal computers, the internet, and even Wikipedia.
The Memex
Even with limited technology, Bush’s theoretical proto-hypertext concept would be able to put knowledge and information conveniently at a user’s fingertips, a self-contained research library.