“As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush

“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
-The telegram was a breakthrough in communication technology, which Vannevar Bush imagined could evolve in unprecedented ways.AP
-As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article, he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge

– He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge

-Like Emerson’s famous address of 1837 in “The American Scholar,” this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.

-Of what lasting benefit has been man’s use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence?
First, they have increased the control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health.

-Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

-the progression of photography over time from one phase to another