B005HFI0X2 EBOK (47 page)

As the war drew to a close, FDR and his chief scientist pondered what was to become of the federally funded research system that had produced so many innovations. Bush recollected: “Roosevelt called me into his office and said, ‘What’s going to happen to science after the war?’ I said, ‘It’s going to fall flat on its face.’ He said, ‘What are we going to do about it?’ And I told him, ‘We better do something damn quick.’ ”
⁹

The president commissioned Bush to write a report on the future of science in America. Roosevelt was dead in 1945 when Bush presented the report to his successor, Harry Truman.
¹⁰
Published as
Science, the Endless Frontier
, the book became a best seller. Bush proposed a national research foundation that would provide contracts for research and scholarships to young scientists. Populists in Congress like Representative Harley Kilgore of West Virginia opposed Bush’s vision of federal grants to top-ranking research universities as elitist, preferring a decentralized system of government laboratories modeled on the highly successful federal agricultural research stations. When it was finally created in 1950, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was more modest than Bush had hoped but in the years that followed the system of federal support for science and technology developed largely along the lines he had sketched out.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

From this main trail of information about Bush, our imaginary memex permits us to move at any time to side trails linking Bush to specific topics relevant to the third industrial revolution. One is the link between Bush and the development of the atomic bomb.

In December 1938, the success of German scientists in splitting the atom alarmed the physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wingner. They persuaded Albert Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt warning him of the possibility that Hitler’s Germany might create atomic bombs. In October 1939, a month after Germany invaded Poland, the letter was delivered to FDR by a friend of his, Alexander Sachs. Concerned about the slow speed of research in the United States under the Uranium Committee supervised by Lyman Briggs, the physicists, under Einstein’s signature, wrote FDR again in March and April 1940. But it was not until Britain’s MAUD (military application of uranium technology) committee concluded that an atomic bomb could be made in the next few years that the American government began to move quickly. In fall 1940, the British government sent two leaders of its wartime science effort, Sir Henry Tizard and Sir John Cockcroft, to Washington to share the results of their research into the creation of two fissile materials.

Bush’s involvement with the atomic bomb began in 1940, when he extended the jurisdiction of the newly created NDRC over the Uranium Committee. Under the auspices of the OSRD, organized in June 1941 under Bush, teams at the University of Chicago, Columbia, the University of California, and Princeton worked on the secret atomic project. In spring 1942, California’s Ernest Lawrence made a breakthrough in plutonium production.

On March 9, 1942, Bush wrote FDR: “Present opinion indicates that successful use is possible, and that this would be very important and might be determining in the war effort. It is also true that if the enemy arrived at results first it would be an exceedingly serious matter.” He estimated that bombs could be produced in 1944. Roosevelt answered two days later: “I think the whole thing should be pushed not only in regard to development, but also with due regard to time. This is very much of the essence.”
¹¹

In 1942, Bush arranged for what came to be called the Manhattan Project to be turned over to the Army Corps of Engineers under the leadership of General Leslie Groves, but he continued to supervise the work as chair of the Military Policy Committee, which advised the president. The cultures of the US military and American corporate engineers and executives frequently clashed with that of immigrant atomic scientists, many of whom were political leftists suspicious of business and the military.

The secret project had practically unlimited resources. The federal government spent more than $2 billion between 1939 and 1945 on atomic research. In December 1942, a team that included the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi produced the first self-sustaining chain reaction in the first nuclear reactor, located under the bleachers of Stagg Field on the University of Chicago campus. The team leader, Arthur Compton, reported the result to Washington: “The Italian navigator [Fermi] has just landed in the new world.”

Plutonium and uranium were produced in factories in Hartford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee—the latter powered by Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority hydropower dams. The first atomic bombs were assembled at Los Alamos, New Mexico, by a scientific and engineering team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer. And so we return to Bush at ground zero on July 16, 1945, where we began.

THE INVENTION OF THE JET

Following another side link, we find that Bush played an administrative role in the development of the jet engine. Alarmed by intelligence reports about German advances in turbojet technology, in February 1941, General H. H. “Hap” Arnold of the army air corps asked Bush to form a committee on jet propulsion. Bush organized a Special Committee on Jet Propulsion, headed by W. F. Durand, that brought together representatives of GE, Westinghouse, and Allis-Chalmers. GE was selected to develop the turbojet engine designed by Britain’s Frank Whittle.

As often occurs in the history of invention, two inventors—Whittle in Britain and Hans von Ohain in Germany—came up with the idea of gas turbine engines to power aircraft around the same time. A gas turbine engine compresses air to raise its temperature, then forces it through a combustion chamber. The hot air spins the turbine and provides thrust as it escapes through an exhaust nozzle.

In 1928, Whittle’s thesis for the RAF College suggested that piston engines and propellers were inadequate for fast flight at high altitudes. In 1929, he suggested that gas turbines be used, and he obtained a patent in 1932. While serving as an RAF officer, Whittle founded a company, Power Jets, in 1935, to build an engine for a high-altitude, fast-mail plan.
¹²

Meanwhile, Ohain, ignorant of Whittle’s work, obtained the backing of industrialist Ernst Heinkel, along with Herbert Wagner of Junkers and Helmut Schelp of the German Air Ministry.
¹³
Ohain’s engine was tested by the experimental Heinkel-178 on August 27, 1938. Whittle’s engine was tested by the experimental Gloster on May 15, 1941.

Under Bush’s supervision, GE developed Whittle’s engine for the United States. With two GE engines, the Bell XP-59A became the first American jet aircraft to fly, on October 1, 1942.
¹⁴

Jets went into military service only in the summer of 1944. After 1945, the Allies studied captured German aeronautical research. German swept-wing designs inspired Boeing to put swept wings on the B-47 jet bomber of 1947.
¹⁵

Britain led the world into the jet age with the DeHavilland Comet. After three Comets disintegrated in midair in 1953 and 1954, all Comet flights stopped, resuming only in 1958. The vacuum was filled by the United States with the Boeing 707 and the Soviet Union with its Tupolev Tu-104. Boeing followed up the 707 with the 727, which could use shorter runways. The global jet era started in 1958, when Boeing 707s began regular commercial flights across the Atlantic. Boeing’s 737 and its jumbo jet, the 747, used a turbofan rather than a turbojet engine. Turbofans maximized their peak thrust at lower speed, making wide-bodied passenger jets and cargo jets possible.
¹⁶

THE SPACE AGE

In October 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Americans were shocked to find that they had fallen behind in what became known as “the space race.” In response, in 1958 the Defense Department created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) was turned into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The development of missile and rocket technology for both military purposes and the exploration of space has been an important part of the third industrial revolution. In consulting the memex, we learn that Bush’s main role in this area was that of naysayer. For example, Bush predicted that the ballistic missile “would never stand the test of cost analysis. If we employed it in quantity, we would be economically exhausted long before the enemy.”
¹⁷

In 1960, Bush told Congress: “Putting a man in space is a stunt: the man can do no more than an instrument, in fact can do less. There are far more serious things to do than indulge in stunts. . . . [T]he present hullabaloo on the propaganda aspects of the program leaves me entirely cool.”
¹⁸
Bush’s opinion eventually was shared by the American government, which abandoned the Apollo program in the 1970s and then, in the 2010s, shut down the space shuttle without having any other method of sending astronauts to space except for reliance on, ironically, Russian rockets.

Along with exploration of the planets by robotic probes, the most important products of the space program have been satellites, used for military purposes, environmental monitoring, and communications. The United States created the US-dominated Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat) in 1962, and the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat) in 1964, a multigovernment consortium that was privatized in 2001. The United States controlled 61 percent of Intelsat’s original ownership, compared to 30.5 percent for Western Europe and 8.5 percent for Canada, Australia, and Japan. In order to be less dependent on the United States, the Europeans eventually founded the European Space Agency in 1971.
¹⁹

As the basis of global communication, submarine cables were eclipsed by communications satellites in the years following Sputnik. By 2000, the majority of international telephony took place by means of satellites.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

One trail leads us back to Bush’s differential analyzer, from which we follow another trail to the earliest origins of the computer. The US federal government bore paternal responsibility for the infant computer industry. In 1886, Herman Hollerith, an employee of the US Census Office, invented an electrical punch-card reader that could be used to process census information and other data. The company that Hollerith formed in 1896, the Tabulating Machine Company, evolved by 1924 into International Business Machines (IBM). In 1911, another Census Office employee, James Powers, devised an automatic card-punching machine and founded the Powers Tabulating Machine Company which, in 1927, merged with Remington Rand. In the decades that followed, Remington Rand and IBM dominated much of the private-sector development of information technology.

At MIT, Bush advanced the technology of computing with his electromechanical device. An early model of the analyzer inspired a front-page headline in the
New York Times
in 1930: “ ‘Thinking Machine’ Does Higher Mathematics; Solves Equations That Take Humans Months.”
²⁰
Inspired by Bush, others built differential analyzers at Aberdeen Proving Ground, General Electric, and the universities of Pennsylvania, Texas, California, and Cambridge. Other analyzers were constructed in Germany, Russia, Norway, and Ireland. Beginning in 1935, the Rockefeller Foundation invested in the analyzer’s development.
²¹

But the future of the computer would be electronic and digital, not electromechanical. In 1939, IBM funded Howard Aiken, a graduate student at Harvard, on the basis of a memo that Aiken had written about digital computing. By 1944, IBM had developed the automatic sequence controlled calculator.

Bush’s analog approach to computing would be superseded by the far more efficient binary approach. Here, too, there is a link. One of Bush’s graduate students at MIT, Claude Shannon, in his master’s thesis, explored the idea of using electrical circuits to replace the clumsy mechanical components of Bush’s differential analyzer. Shannon proposed using a binary system based on Boolean algebra. When he went to work for Bell Labs, he influenced the evolution of telephone technology. His 1948 work, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” developed his binary system, which became the basis of modern telecommunications and computing. It has been called the Magna Carta of the information age.

During World War II, Bush turned down an application to the NDRC for funding a project on digital computers from Norbert Wiener, a leading mathematician at MIT, for fear that it would divert resources from the war effort for a long-term project. For the same reason, Bush also refused to fund the electric numerical integrator and calculator (ENIAC), which was funded instead by the army.

The role of the US military in nurturing information technology began in the 1930s, when the army needed a computer capable of calculating artillery-firing tables. The Army’s Aberdeen Ballistics Research Laboratory provided funding for a team at Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering led by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. Inspired by theoretical work done earlier by Iowa State’s John V. Atanasoff, the Pennsylvania team in 1946 built the first all-purpose electronic computer, ENIAC. The army was joined in its sponsorship of the computer industry by the Office of Naval Research, NACA, and the Census Bureau, with its perennial interest in rapid data processing.
²²

The initiative then shifted back to Remington Rand and IBM. In 1950, Remington Rand acquired the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, along with its contract with the US Census Bureau. Then, in 1952, Remington Rand acquired another company, Engineering Associates, formed by veterans of work done for the navy on the use of computers in cryptology.

Meanwhile, in 1950, the head of IBM, Thomas Watson Sr., boasted that a single IBM computer on display in New York could “solve all the important scientific problems in the world involving scientific calculations.”
²³
Work done by IBM for the attempt of the US and Canadian governments to build a Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense against Soviet missiles for North America led to major breakthroughs. By the mid-1950s, IBM was responsible for two-thirds of all computer sales and, after it introduced its System 360 in 1960, it dominated the mainframe computer industry for a generation.