In July 1945, as World War II drew to a close, Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think” (included at the end of this article) in The Atlantic Monthly, offering scientists a new mission. As director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Bush had coordinated 6,000 American scientists in creating weapons of war. Now he posed a pressing question: what should these researchers do when peace returns? His answer was transformative—scientists must redirect their talents from instruments of destruction to tools that expand human intellect.
Bush observed that wartime collaboration had been exhilarating, but physicists especially had been diverted from academic pursuits to build “strange destructive gadgets.” The challenge now was to create “pacific instruments” that would give humanity “access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages.” This was both practical and moral: science had extended physical powers for centuries; it was time to amplify the powers of the mind.
Bush wrote with a sense of urgency. The urgency stemmed from a crisis of information management. Scientific specialization had generated a “growing mountain of research” that overwhelmed investigators. Researchers were “staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers,” unable to find time to grasp discoveries outside their narrow fields. Bush cited Mendel’s genetic laws, lost to science for a generation because his publication never reached the right readers—a catastrophe being repeated constantly. Current methods of recording, transmitting, and reviewing knowledge were “generations old and by now are totally inadequate.” The summation of human experience expanded at a “prodigious rate,” yet the tools for navigating it remained primitive.
Bush argued that new technological foundations made revolutionary solutions possible. The war had accelerated development of cheap, reliable, complex devices. Thermionic tubes—vacuum tubes with gossamer parts—could be mass-produced for thirty cents. Photocells, cathode ray tubes, and relay combinations could perform operations “thousands of times as fast” as human operators. The economics of complexity had shifted; what was once prohibitively expensive and unreliable was now feasible.
From these foundations, Bush projected specific technologies. Future scientists would wear walnut-sized cameras on their foreheads, automatically photographing observations with dry, instant-developing film. Voice-operated typewriters would transcribe speech directly into text. Microfilm compression would shrink a million-volume library into a desk drawer, with the Encyclopaedia Britannica reduced to a matchbox. Advanced computing machines would operate at speeds 100 times faster than current devices, performing complex mathematics and logical operations automatically.
The centerpiece of Bush’s vision was the memex—a mechanized private file and library that would serve as “an enlarged intimate supplement to [man’s] memory.” This desk-sized device would store books, records, and communications on microfilm, consulted through translucent projection screens. But the memex’s revolutionary feature was associative indexing: users could permanently link any two items by creating “trails” of connection, mirroring how the human mind actually works. Unlike rigid alphabetical or numerical filing, these associative trails allowed information to be organized by conceptual relationships. A researcher studying Turkish bows could build a trail connecting encyclopedia entries, historical accounts, elasticity textbooks, and personal notes—then share this trail with colleagues by photographing it for their memexes.
Bush envisioned professional applications across disciplines. Lawyers would access associated opinions; physicians could follow trails through case histories; chemists would navigate compound analogies; historians could create “skip trails” through chronological accounts. A new profession of “trail blazers” would emerge, establishing useful pathways through humanity’s collective record.
Most remarkably, Bush speculated about direct neural interfaces. Since all sensory information reaches the brain as electrical vibrations, he asked whether we might someday intercept these currents directly, bypassing mechanical intermediaries. While cautioning that this risked “losing touch with reality,” he noted that encephalographs already recorded brain electrical phenomena. This was 1945—decades before brain-computer interfaces became a serious research field.
Bush concluded with philosophical reflection. Humanity had built a civilization so complex that mechanized records were essential to “push [the] experiment to its logical conclusion.” The goal was not merely efficiency but wisdom: to “grow in the wisdom of race experience” by truly encompassing humanity’s accumulated knowledge. Science had given humanity weapons of mass destruction; it could yet provide tools for collective understanding.
“As We May Think” essentially predicted personal computers, hypertext, the World Wide Web, search engines, digital photography, wearable technology, voice recognition, and Knowledge Ecosystems like The SpiritWiki. Its influence shaped the work of Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee—architects of the digital age Bush envisioned while the atomic age was just beginning.