1890-1974

American Electrical Engineer and Computer Scientist

Vannevar Bush is known as "The Godfather of Information Science." In the early 1930s he and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) invented the first practical analog computer, the differential analyzer. During World War II he led the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. In 1945 he wrote a visionary essay that anticipated the Internet, hypertext, and the World Wide Web by over 40 years.

Bush was born in Everett, Massachusetts, into an old New England seafaring family. His father, Richard, was a Unitarian minister. At school in Chelsea, Massachusetts, he proved to be a genius at mathematics. He received both his B.S. and M.S. from Tufts University in 1913 and his doctorate in engineering from both MIT and Harvard in 1916. The same year he married Phoebe Davis.

After teaching mathematics and electrical engineering at Tufts...