Vannevar Bush was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, whose most important contribution was as head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II, through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. His office was considered one of the key factors in winning the war. He is also known in engineering for his work on analog computers, for founding Raytheon, and for the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web. In 1945, Bush published As We May Think in which he predicted that “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified”. The memex influenced generations of computer scientists, who drew inspiration from its vision of the future.
For his master’s thesis, Bush invented and patented a “profile tracer”, a mapping device for assisting surveyors. It was the first of a string of inventions. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1919, and founded the company now known as Raytheon in 1922. Starting in 1927, Bush constructed a differential analyzer, an analog computer with some digital components that could solve differential equations with as many as 18 independent variables. An offshoot of the work at MIT by Bush and others was the beginning of digital circuit design theory. Bush became Vice President of MIT and Dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938.
Bush was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1938, and soon became its chairman. As Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), and later Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), Bush coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. Bush was a well-known policymaker and public intellectual during World War II, when he was in effect the first presidential science advisor. As head of NDRC and OSRD, he initiated the Manhattan Project, and ensured that it received top priority from the highest levels of government. In Science, The Endless Frontier, his 1945 report to the President of the United States, Bush called for an expansion of government support for science, and he pressed for the creation of the National Science Foundation.
Harold Locke Hazen (August 1, 1901 – February 21, 1980) was an American electrical engineer. He contributed to the theory of servomechanisms and feedback control systems. In 1924 under the lead of Vannevar Bush, Hazen and his fellow undergraduate Hugh H. Spencer built a prototype AC network analyzer, a special-purpose analog computer for solving problems in interconnected AC power systems. Hazen also worked with Bush over twenty years on such projects as the mechanical differential analyzer
Hazen was born at Philo, Illinois in 1901 and attended high school at Three Rivers, Michigan. He went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an undergraduate student in 1920. When he graduated from MIT in 1924, he briefly worked for General Electric. In 1925 he returned to MIT as research assistant and instructor in 1926. he obtained his Master’s degree in 1929 and his doctorate in 1931. In 1934 Hazen published two papers on the theory and design of servomechanisms which provided clear descriptions of the operation of servos and a design methodology.
Fred Terman completed his undergraduate degree in chemistry and his master’s degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University. His father Lewis Terman, the man who popularized the IQ test in America, was a professor at Stanford. Terman went on to earn an ScD in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1924. His advisor at MIT was Vannevar Bush, who first proposed what became the National Science Foundation.
He returned to Stanford in 1925 as a member of the engineering faculty. From 1925 to 1941 Terman designed a course of study and research in electronics at Stanford that focused on work with vacuum tubes, circuits, and instrumentation. He also wrote Radio Engineering (first edition in 1932; second edition, much improved, in 1937; third edition in 1947 with added coverage of new technologies developed during World War II; fourth edition in 1955 with a new title, Electronic and Radio Engineering), one of the most important books on electrical and radio engineering, and to this day a good reference on those subjects. Terman’s students at Stanford included Oswald Garrison Villard, Jr., William Hewlett and David Packard. He encouraged his students to form their own companies and personally invested in many of them, resulting in firms such as Litton Industries and Hewlett-Packard. Terman was president of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1941.
During World War II, Terman directed a staff of more than 850 at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University. This organization was the source of Allied jammers to block enemy radar, tunable receivers to detect radar signals, and aluminum strips (“chaff”) to produce spurious reflections on enemy radar receivers. These countermeasures significantly reduced the effectiveness of radar-directed anti-aircraft fire.
After the war Terman returned to Stanford and was appointed dean of the School of Engineering. In 1951 he spearheaded the creation of Stanford Industrial Park (now Stanford Research Park), whereby the University leased portions of its land to high-tech firms. Companies such as Varian Associates, Hewlett-Packard, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and Lockheed Corporation moved into Stanford Industrial Park and made the mid-Peninsula area into a hotbed of innovation which eventually became known as Silicon Valley.
He served as Provost at Stanford from 1955 to 1965.During his tenure, Terman greatly expanded the science, statistics and engineering departments in order to win more research grants from the Department of Defense. These grants, in addition to the funds that the patented research generated, helped to catapult Stanford into the ranks of the world’s first class educational institutions, as well as spurring the growth of Silicon Valley.
