Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890–June 30, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor, and politician, known for his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and idea of the memex —seen as a pioneering concept for the world wide web. He was allegedly a member of the secret committee Majestic 12 investigating UFO activities.

Eponym

Vannevar Bush has an unfortunate eponym: vannevar http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/V/vannevar.html owing to his habit of overestimating technological challenges. He asserted that a nuclear weapon could not be made small enough to fit in the nose of a missile as in an ICBM. He also predicted "electronic brains" the size of the Empire State Building with a Niagara Falls-scale cooling system, although this could be considered a metaphor for systems such as Google's entire collection of Linux servers, whose collective size and thermal emissions may very well be on the same scale.

Related Topics:
Eponym - Nuclear weapon - Missile - ICBM - Empire State Building - Niagara Falls - Google - Linux

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