Life and work

Vannevar Bush was born in Everett, Massachusetts to Richard Perry Bush (unrelated to the Bush political family) and Emma Linwood Paine. He was educated at Tufts College, graduating in 1913. From mid-1913 to October 1914, Bush worked at General Electric (where he was a supervising "test man"); during the 1914-1915 academic year, Bush taught math at Jackson College (the sister school of Tufts). After a summer working as an electrical inspector and a brief stint at Clark University as a doctoral student of Arthur Gordon Webster, Bush entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) electrical engineering program. Spurred by the need for enough financial security to marry, Bush finished his thesis in less than a year. In August 1916 he married Phoebe Davis, whom he had known since Tufts, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He received a doctorate in engineering from MIT (and Harvard University, jointly) in 1917—following a dispute with his adviser Arthur Edwin Kennelly, who tried to demand more work from Bush.

War Work

During World War I he worked with the National Research Council in developing improved techniques for detecting submarines. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1919, and was a professor there from 1923–32. He constructed a Differential Analyser, an analog computer that could solve differential equations with as many as 18 independent variables. An offshoot of the work at MIT was the birth of digital circuit design theory by one of Bush's graduate students, Claude Shannon. Bush became vice-president and dean of engineering at MIT from 1932–38. This post included many of the powers and functions subsumed by the Provost when MIT introduced this post in 1949 including some appointments of lecturers to specific posts.