The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 58

I.?A sample of Doc Smith’s prose, from his novel Triplanetary (1948): “Nerado’s vessel was completely ready for any emergency. And, unlike her sister-ship, she was manned by scientists well-versed in the fundamental theory of the weapons with which they fought. Beams, rods and lances of energy flamed and flared; planes and pencils cut, slashed and stabbed; defensive screens glowed redly or flashed suddenly into intensely brilliant, coruscating incandescence. Crimson opacity struggled sullenly against violet curtains of annihilation. Material projectiles and torpedoes were launched under full-beam control; only to be exploded harmlessly in mid-space, to be blasted into nothingness or to disappear innocuously against impenetrable polycyclic screens.”

II.?Three years later, in 1975, when Atari decided to build a home version of Pong, the venture capital industry had caught fire, and Bushnell was able to get $20 million in funding from Don Valentine, who had just founded Sequoia Capital. Atari and Sequoia helped to launch each other.

J. C. R. Licklider (1915–90).

Bob Taylor (1932– ).

Larry Roberts (1937– ).

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE INTERNET

VANNEVAR BUSH’S TRIANGLE

Innovations often bear the imprint of the organizations that created them. For the Internet, this was especially interesting, for it was built by a partnership among three groups: the military, universities, and private corporations. What made the process even more fascinating was that this was not merely a loose-knit consortium with each group pursuing its own aims. Instead, during and after World War II, the three groups had been fused together into an iron triangle: the military-industrial-academic complex.

The person most responsible for forging this assemblage was Vannevar Bush, the MIT professor who in 1931 built the Differential Analyzer, the early analog computer described in chapter 2.¹ Bush was well suited to this task because he was a star in all three camps: dean of the MIT School of Engineering, a founder of the electronics company Raytheon, and America’s top military science administrator during World War II. “No American has had greater influence in the growth of science and technology than Vannevar Bush,” MIT’s president Jerome Wiesner later proclaimed, adding that his “most significant innovation was the plan by which, instead of building large government laboratories, contracts were made with universities and industrial laboratories.”²

Bush was born near Boston in 1890, the son of a Universalist minister who had begun his career as a cook on a mackerel smack. Both of Bush’s grandfathers were whaling captains, which instilled in him a salty and forthright manner that helped make him a decisive manager and charismatic administrator. Like many successful technology leaders, he was an expert in both engineering products and making crisp decisions. “All of my recent ancestors were sea captains, and they have a way of running things without any doubt,” he once said. “That left me with some inclination to run a show once I was in it.”³

Also like many good technology leaders, he grew up loving both the humanities and the sciences. He could quote Kipling and Omar Khayyam “by the yard,” played the flute, loved symphonies, and read philosophy for pleasure. His family, too, had a basement workshop, where he built little boats and mechanical toys. As Time later reported in its inimitable old style, “Lean, sharp, salty, Van Bush is a Yankee whose love of science began, like that of many American boys, in a passion for tinkering with gadgets.”⁴

He went to Tufts, where in his spare time he built a surveying machine that used two bicycle wheels and a pendulum to trace the perimeter of an area and calculate its size, thus being an analog device for doing integral calculus. He got a patent on it, which became the first of forty-nine that he would accumulate. While at Tufts, he and his roommates consulted with a series of small companies and then, after graduating, founded Raytheon, which grew into a sprawling defense contractor and electronics firm.

Bush earned a PhD in electrical engineering jointly from MIT and Harvard, then became a professor and dean of engineering at MIT, where he built his Differential Analyzer. His passion was elevating the role of science and engineering in society at a time, the mid-1930s, when not much exciting seemed to be happening in either field. Televisions were not yet a consumer product, and the most notable new inventions put into the time capsule at the New York 1939 World’s Fair were a Mickey Mouse watch and a Gillette Safety Razor. The advent of World War II would change that, producing an explosion of new technologies, with Vannevar Bush leading the way.

Worried that America’s military was lagging in technology, he mobilized Harvard president James Bryant Conant and other scientific leaders to convince President Franklin Roosevelt to form the National Defense Research Committee and then the military’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, both of which he headed. With an ever-present pipe in his mouth and a pencil in his hand, he oversaw the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb as well as the projects to develop radar and air-defense systems. Time dubbed him “General of Physics” on its cover in 1944. “If we had been on our toes in war technology ten years ago,” the magazine quoted him as saying as he banged his fist on his desk, “we would probably not have had this damn war.”⁵

With his no-nonsense style tempered by a personal warmth, he was a tough but endearing leader. Once a group of military scientists, frustrated by some bureaucratic problem, walked into his office to resign. Bush couldn’t figure out what the snafu was. “So I just told them,” he recalled, “?‘One does not resign in time of war. You chaps get the hell out of here and get back to work, and I’ll look into it.’?”⁶ They obeyed. As MIT’s Wiesner later observed, “He was a man of strong opinions, which he expressed and applied with vigor, yet he stood in awe of the mysteries of nature, had a warm tolerance for human frailty, and was open-minded to change.”⁷

When the war ended, Bush produced a report in July 1945 at Roosevelt’s behest (which ended up being delivered to President Harry Truman) that advocated government funding of basic research in partnership with universities and industry. Bush chose an evocative and quintessentially American title, “Science, the Endless Frontier.” His introduction deserves to be reread whenever politicians threaten to defund the research needed for future innovation. “Basic research leads to new knowledge,” Bush wrote. “It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn.”⁸

Bush’s description of how basic research provides the seed corn for practical inventions became known as the “linear model of innovation.” Although subsequent waves of science historians sought to debunk the linear model for ignoring the complex interplay between theoretical research and practical applications, it had a popular appeal as well as an underlying truth. The war, Bush wrote, had made it “clear beyond all doubt” that basic science—discovering the fundamentals of nuclear physics, lasers, computer science, radar—“is absolutely essential to national security.” It was also, he added, crucial for America’s economic security. “New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.” By the end of his report, Bush had reached poetic heights in extolling the practical payoffs of basic scientific research: “Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”⁹