The Autobiography of Vannevar Bush

“So Stripe, the payments company, actually started their own publishing division, and what they're doing is they're bringing back These lesser known and sometimes out of print or hard to find books, and they're updating them and then publishing them.”

“Because he was the conceptual architect of what we now call the innovation pipeline, in which basic research leads to applied research, which is then commercialized.”

“Van Bush is the first person to see Claude Shannon for who he was, which was a near universal genius. And he picked up on that when Claude was like 21 or 22 years old.”

“Douglas Engelbart explicitly cited it as the inspiration for the work that led to his mother of all demos, Which you can actually watch on YouTube, which in turn laid out the agenda for almost every aspect of the personal computing environments that now pervad…”

“You need to realize that formal relations of men, what we think is professional relationships are actually intertwined with the personal relationships behind the professional relationships. And he'll remark time and time again, how malleable the world is when …”

“There are two primary ways in which to lose a battle or a campaign, assuming nearly equal antagonists. One is to have confused lines of authority. And says the other is to have a top, this is how you lose, is to have a top commander with poor judgment.”

“One of the best lines I've ever heard him say is that people are really a power law and that the best ones can change everything.”

“The key ideas arose in the special groups that were working for months and years with the problems, and they arose from nowhere else.”

“There should never be, throughout an organization, any doubt as to where authority for making decisions resides, or any doubt that they will be promptly made.”

“You can drive away great people by making the speed of decision-making really slow.”

“Putnam had some of the characteristics of the best type of promoter in industry. He was well liked by men with lots of drive and often disliked by those with less.”

“Alfred Lee Loomis is on record saying, hey, out of every single American that if they died, their death would cause the greatest setback to the American war effort in World War II. Number one is FDR, and he says Van Busch would be second or third.”

“A man of intelligence, and only such will fit the need, can become well acquainted with the subject in a surprisingly short time if he puts his mind to it. This is not to master it, but to arrive at a point where he speaks the language and can judge whether a …”

“I made plenty of mistakes, and the worst one was that I got mad. It is alright to get mad, and it is all wrong to show it. I showed it.”

“Industries can get bogged down and stagnate, and so to ensure that things move forward, the rise of small independent companies is essential.”

“In an industry that has become closely standardized, where nearly all competing companies are comfortably making profits, minor improvements can readily be introduced, but major improvements are up against a stone wall. The prosperous company sees no need to c…”

“When picking an industry to enter, my favorite rule of thumb is this. Pick an industry where the founders of the industry, which is the founders of the important companies in the industry, are still alive and actively involved.”

“The point is that an invention is valueless unless it is joined with a number of other accomplishments. Promotion, financing, development, engineering, marketing, and so on. If the independent inventor believes otherwise, his invention will turn out to be a li…”

“We make progress, lots of progress, in nearly every intellectual field, only to find that the more we probe, the faster our field of ignorance expands.”