From Memex to Google

Something like this was a dream of Vannevar Bush, Ph.D., science advisor to President Roosevelt, former director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and a prominent intellectual figure of the mid-20th century.

In 1945, Bush (a distant relative of President Bush) published an article in Atlantic Monthly called “As We May Think.” In it, Dr. Bush called for the creation of a machine that would make high-quality, vetted information readily available to anyone. Being 1945, before the advent of PCs and the Internet, his idea entailed microfilm and mechanical gears — vestiges of the Industrial Era in which he lived, rather than the Information Age he helped to usher in.