The Endless Frontier

The Ice Age, The Bronze Age, etc., no one had ever the idea that we will have something called The Internet Era. What is next? But for brilliant and curious people every thing will be researched with Science – the Endless Frontier. Vannevar Bush of Chelsea Massachusetts, a Yankee inventor born in 1890 was a familiar figure in American history for beginning the Internet story. Adept with numbers and fascinated by gadgets, he studied engineering at Tuffs University, where, in 1913, he invented a device to measure distances over uneven ground and called it Prolific Tracer. During the interwar years, a series of revolutionary inventions transformed daily life. He invented a mechanical computer designed to mechanize the solution to differential equations, a mathematical problem that had tormented students. Kudos to him for making it easier for us. In 1945, Bush published Science – the Endless Frontier, in which he proposed federal financing of basic scientific research, especially in the fields of health and national security. This led to the creation of the National Science Foundation which became the main government agency for supporting most basic scientific research.

The biggest problem facing scientists after the war would be information overload. “The investigator is staggered by findings of thousands and thousands of other workers – conclusions which he can not find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. And then the explosion of potential solutions: microphotography and the cathode ray tube. The former could reduce the Encyclopedia Britannica to the volume of a matchbox. The latter could be used to display text pictures on glass screen. Put together, one can store all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized, so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. The proposed machine was called “Memex”. And the rest is history. (dot.con – from memex to internet)