Talk:Vannevar Bush

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Contents 1 Analog computers 2 Memex 3 His name 4 Perspective/NPOV 5 Bush's hostility to the social sciences 6 For Midgley

[edit] Analog computers

Analog differential analysers are completely different animals to Babbage difference engine! Sure, their output might be similar (a table of numbers) but the construction, operation etc. are completely different (for example - diff. analyser is an analog machine, while difference engine is purely digital). Needs checking! (no signature)

In books by Norbert Wiener, Bush is quoted not as having "constructed a differential analyser" but as the inventor of analog computers. Now, this could probably be as controversial as calling Marconi the "father of radio", but I suspect that Bush's work before 1945 deserves more attention than his short article about the Memex. After all, he never built the Memex, just speculated about its future existence. --LA2 19:36, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree. His work on differential analysers is massively more important than the speculative Memex; in the pre-digital era these were the cutting edge in scientific computing. They go back to Victorian integrator mechanisms (Kelvin etc) but Bush's contribution was the invention of the torque amplifier that made multi-stage devices feasible (see [1]).Nothign else at the time could handle heavy differential equations in physics. Later, differential analysers were used on problems like the dynamics of the Barnes Wallis bouncing bomb. 213.120.158.228 20:19, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Memex

"He despised the humanities?" Hardly. Read his most famous article, "As we may think" -- it's about a guy researching the history of the longbow, for crying out loud! He was certainly a social conservative, and may have disliked the trend in certain forms of the humanities/social sciences (like anthropology), which were often used at the time to promote radical causes like communism and sexual promiscuity (think of the works of Margret Mead), but that isn't the same thing. --[[User::jhbadger|Dr. Jonathan Badger]]

The Memex section paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 do not appear to be NPOV. I would suggest they either need some substantiation for the contained value judgements or they need to be rewritten. I have commenced with two simple word changes to paragraph 4.

Further to this, paragraph 3 may be factual, but if so, it would be more credible if it contained actual references with regards to what influence Bush had to "choking" off funding to anthropology studies and to what extent, ref: "...(he badly weakened American anthropology when he choked off a large part of its funding in the 1930s)...".

The next line also appears as if it was written by a bitter librarian on his staff, "... and refused to talk to the librarians who could have helped refine his ideas." Is there some documentary evidence that he was particularly disrespectful to the librarians of his time? Threepd 14:43, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Until there is documented evidence, I've changed the wording to reflect that he was not active in the library community, but hopefully, I've removed the defiant tone. I also went ahead and included some qualifications to the "he despised the humanities." This is just over the top and needs a STRONG citation if it's to stay that way.

Who was Buckland, who is like him, and in what manner was the conceptual Memex proven - or even proved - to have been so flawed? Midgley 14:23, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Buckland is an acamedic in the field of Library Science. In other words he's a librarian whose work is not cataloguing books or giving reference service but doing research in everything that has to do with library science, which is also called Information Sciebce. see Talk:Memex for more. --AlainV 02:59, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

I've not seen what he wrote. Given that the Memex was an idea rather than a design, I think the tone of the articles condemnation is harsh. If I was the chief scientist, then I'd expect that academic librarians etc would be among the sort of people who would implement such ideas, not regard them as a jury to decide whether I had produced a completely formed plan. Particularly if it was part of an essay in a magazine - or did the Memex get design work done on it as well? Midgley 13:16, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

No, the Memex was never fully designed or prototyped, it did not even reach (under its memex name or other names) the stage of virtual prototype like Alan Kay's Dynabook, but Bush was given a contract to build something that would have been its precursor, the "Rapid Selector". If the Rapid Selector had worked it would have been in a sense the precursor to a real memex in the same way that the early versions of the NLS (computer system) and the first versions (not the one Steve Jobs finally saw working) of the Xerox Alto can be seen as early precursors of our modern networked personal computers. But Bush never managed to make the Rapid Selector work and Buckland traces the History of the project and its meaning. And Buckland's research is very recent, becasue when Bush did his work there were not as many academics in the field of Library Science (or Information Science) as we have now, and the few that existed then were more busy with topics such as library economy than looking at gadgets devised by engineers. --AlainV 16:13, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Some of this should find a place in the articles I think. Perhaps one reason Bush didn't involve library academics was that they were visibly busy with other things? I think it is all very well to look back from now (or 1882) and see that something couldn't work, but Tsiolkovsky's idea of an orbital tower was no less interesting for not being possible without carbon fibre and Bush's pointer Where We Might Go is not diminished by being a reflection of what many people were thinking around then. Midgley 22:09, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

The few academic librarians (full time professors teaching Library Science or Library Economy in Colleges and universities) were busy with a lot of other things but there were uncountable librarians working in libraries per se, ready to answer all his questions. Bush had in theory an incredibly easy access to the teams of librarians working at MIT when he was president there and to the thousands of librarians at the library of Congress when he was Roosevelt's foremost Science specialist. He chose to ignore them and also ignore their services as information sleuths (they could have found for him the publications by others such as Goldberg and Paul Otlet) and went on to reinvent the wheel. His famous positions at MIT and the White House are the reasons why the Memex went on to be hyped in US popular magazines and why he was cited on and on, again and again whenever thinking of the future of computing was done in the US. There's a very nice article on this :Kahn, Paul, Nyce, James M., Oren, Tim, Crane, Gregory, Smith, Linda C., Trigg, Randall H., Meyrowitz, Norman (1991): From Memex to Hypertext: Understanding the Influence of Vannevar Bush. In: Walker, Jan (ed.): Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 91 Conference. December 15-18, 1991, San Antonio, Texas. p.361. Linda C. Smith did a marvelous study of how the original Memex article has been misappropriated and ill cited by anybody wanting to justify themselves with a precedent. Her paper has been published and re-published in several places. So, "Memex as an Image of Potentiality Revisited." can be found in: From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine. Ed. James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn. Boston: Academic Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 367. --AlainV 22:39, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] His name

family relation to other Bushes? Prescott, George HW , George W uncle or something 64.160.47.37 00:40, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

"No relation."[2] --Fastfission 05:04, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

Pronunciation of first name. Needs a reference. I've been told VAN e var; sorry , I don't have a reference either.

Van-EE-ver. Like receiver. He once made a joke that everybody called him "Van" because nobody could figure out how to pronounce it correctly. I don't have a reference on hand but I'm 100% positive of these things. --Fastfission 05:04, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Perspective/NPOV

This article makes fun of his Memex idea, accuses him (without citing sources) of anti-Semitism, repeats silly charges about being part of an evil cabal of 12 and devotes an entire section trying to wrap criticisms of Bush around an apocryphal pun. The rest of the world seems to think of Bush as a major figure, but you wouldn't know it from this article. Other than come up with "Memex", did he do anything for 20 years at MIT? (He seems like he was a pretty smart guy). What about the differential analyzer? Was it important?

Or how about his role as the first head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development? Science and technology played a big role in US efforts to win World War II, things like radar, bombsights, FM radios, the atomic bomb. Other than grab power and control the Manhattan Project, what did he do for four years? (One account said he convinced FDR to fund the Manhattan Project).

Where's the perspective? The coverage of topics proportionate to their importance? Like many articles, this is a patchwork of factoids without an over-arching understanding of the subject. A high school student doing a report on science policy would be ill-served reading this rather than the EB version. Surprisingly (for a major computer topic), the article on the differential analyzer remains a stub. JoelWest 23:22, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Some tagging for requiring references. Factoids rearranged into something factual (barring checks for precision) and hopefully more useful. An article on the general imperfection of humans may be worth writing, but this is not it (I mean I agree with the remarks above). Unreferenced stuff should be excised in due course, and archived here lest it all be rediscovered later. Midgley 14:51, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Norbert Wiener - referred to above here - was at MIT according to one reference on the Web because Harvard discriminated against Jews - making MIT a better university, of course.

"However, Harvard didn't have Jews on the faculty. That was sort of an issue that I became aware of. Of course, with the growth of Fascism and the treatment of Jews by Hitler the awareness of Jews grew. I even had it in Woodrow Wilson High, I remember. There were homes who would have parties and wouldn't invite Jews. I had a friend who was the son of the local pharmacist, and I once took him to a party with me where he hadn't been invited. It wasn't an unusual thing to do in those days, but the family bawled me out: "We don't accept that kind of person here." So there was a certain amount of anti-Semitism, not in my family or even in my immediate circle, but very strong in the academic world before World War II. Harvard, particularly, was [anti-Semitic]. You had people like Norbert Wiener, his brother-in-law, Philip Franklin, and Norman Levinson, all of whom had been spurned by Harvard and were at MIT. It made MIT a very good department. Harvard has changed now."

http://content.cdlib.org/dynaxml/servlet/dynaXML?docId=hb1p3001qq&doc.view=entire_text An interview with another US university chancellor, Albert Bowker.

In an ancyclopaedia article about a person, it is not encyclopaedic to remark on ways in which they (may) have been identical to the general run of their peers in their time - it is worth noting if they are usefully or notably different from them. An article on anti-semitism in US universities might well be worth writing, and Wiener might be an example in it, but that is not this article and that is not made out to be notable or relevant in this article. Midgley 15:58, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I've read the Norman Lewinson article. It seems hard to reconcile that with the assertion here. There is no other mention in this article of the Provost of MIT, tht also needs more detail. Midgley 16:04, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

You mean Norman Levinson. What made Bush's anti-semitism unusual was that at the time, MIT was largely free of that sort of thing. Admissions were, and still are, based on merit and not on whether the applicant was a son or grandson of an alumnus or went to the right boarding school (a tactic used by Ivy-league schools to keep out Jews and others).

I'm not sure of what your agenda is, Midgley. First you were objecting to mentioning Bush's anti-semitism because it was unsourced, and now that it is sourced, you claim that it is unimportant, since lots of other people were anti-semetic at the time. -- Rglovejoy 16:20, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

My agenda? Writing an encyclopaedia. The reference to admissions is interesting, given that the man in question is described in his own article as having been admitted to most of (the courses in his subject) at MIT. If there is something that is different here, then that is perhaps worth trying to substantiate and write abotu - eg "unlike all other senior faculty at MIT, V Bush made appointment decisions on the basis if his documented anti-semitism." It doesn't quite fit with appointment as Provost, and it isn't made out by one person not getting one job on one occasions. 16:25, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

redacted

..Anti-semitism.. While the provost at MIT, Bush had been accused of anti-semitic bias. In 1937, Bush had turned down Norbert Wiener's request to appoint Norman Levinson to a assistant professorship in the mathematics faculty. Wiener and G.H. Hardy, who was visiting Harvard at the time, went to Bush's office to protest. Hardy was alleged to have said, "Tell me, Mr. Bush, do you think you're running an engineering school or a theological seminary?" ^[1]

Quoting again from the Lveinson article, Levinson ..." joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1937." It doesn't say which job he got, but that appears to be the same 1937, and there is no assertion that the Provost had been changed. A reason for removing it is that it doesn't seem to reach the standard of scholarsip needed for a significant assertion about someone in an encyclopaedia. Midgley 16:28, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

As I noted in Midgley's talk page, Bush was made a Vice President and Dean of Engineering of MIT in 1932. The citation in the Sylvia Nasar book said that Bush was the provost, a position that did not exist until 1949, and not the vice president. Bush reported directly to Karl Taylor Compton, the president of the Institute. I'll go ahead and make those changes. -- Rglovejoy 17:06, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I like the edit, Midgley. If Bush ever did or said anything pro-semetic, I think it would be good to include that here as well. -- Rglovejoy 18:04, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

There may well be scope for an article on the admissions policies of American universities in the 1920s-50s, and that may well touch on anti-semitism (although I suspect there are more conspicuous groups who were disadvantaged) but that would be that article, and this is this article. Midgley 14:23, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm an outsider on content development but an avid user of wikipedia. Reading this article, I was first startled to see the charge of anti-semitism (in a full section given this title!), then appalled to see how thin the evidence was. Charges of anti-semitism are serious and can blacken a historical figures name indefinitely, being propagated from one source to another. I suggest you either produce something more substantial or remove this section from the article. A good encyclopedia article will be widely read and quoted and therefore should strive to be definitive. Encyclopedias are not the place for rumors. Adamsiepel 13:06, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bush's hostility to the social sciences

In response to Midgley's query, here are my sources for my edits.

Bush's hostility to social sciences, particularly anthropology, was documented in:

• G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997).

Unfortunately, I don't have the page number but if you search on Google Book Search (books.google.com) for "Vannevar Bush anthropology" you will get several other excellent sources for this assertion.

As for how this hostility prevented Bush from meeting with the librarians who could have helped him clean up the Memex's defects, the source for that is:

• Colin Burke, Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush and Memex (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994).

Again, I don't have the page number. This was all from research I did as an undergraduate student, years ago. --Coolcaesar 06:14, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] For Midgley

Please, would you take some aspirin, dress a Vannevar pajama and go to sleep, please?! What a PITA! 201.19.129.247 02:48, 1 November 2006 (UTC)