Directing Wartime Research.

"I'm no scientist, I'm an engineer," Vannevar Bush claimed late in his life. Yet as head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II, he presided over the development of the atomic bomb and made a major impact on the course of scientific research in the United States both during and after the war.

Education.

Born in Boston to a Universalist minister and his wife, Bush put himself through Tufts University by tutoring football stars in mathematics. Bush earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in engineering from Tufts in 1913, and in 1916 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University jointly awarded him a doctorate in electrical engineering.

Early Career.

Bush returned to the faculty at Tufts, where he had taught before pursuing his doctorate. In 1917, when the United States entered World War I...