July 1945 Atlantic Monthly by Vannevar
Bush As We May Think
As Director of the Office
of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar
Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American
scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant
article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased.
He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making
more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have
extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip
hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new
results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush,
instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to
and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these
pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they
emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on
"The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new
relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. —THE EDITOR - - - This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war
in which all have had a part. The
scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a
common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating
to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be
approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next? For the biologists, and
particularly for the medical scientists, there can be little indecision, for
their war has hardly required them to leave the old paths. Many indeed have
been able to carry on their war research in their familiar peacetime
laboratories. Their objectives remain much the same. It is the physicists who
have been thrown most violently off stride, who have left academic pursuits
for the making of strange destructive gadgets, who have had to devise new
methods for their unanticipated assignments. They have done their part on the
devices that made it possible to turn back the enemy, have worked in combined
effort with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves
the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now, as peace
approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy of their best. 1 Of what lasting benefit has
been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research
brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his
material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter;
they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of
bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological
processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an
increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his
physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved
mental health. Science has provided the
swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas
and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so
that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than
that of an individual. There is a growing mountain
of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down
today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the
findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he
cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet
specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to
bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial. Professionally our methods
of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and
by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent
in writing scholarly works and in reading them could
be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be
startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current
thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might
well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous
month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of
genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did
not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this
sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly
significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential. The difficulty seems to be,
not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of
present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far
beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of
human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use
for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item
is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships. But there are signs of a
change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use. Photocells
capable of seeing things in a physical sense, advanced photography which can
record what is seen or even what is not, thermionic
tubes capable of controlling potent forces under the guidance of less power
than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings, cathode ray tubes rendering
visible an occurrence so brief that by comparison a microsecond is a long
time, relay combinations which will carry out involved sequences of movements
more reliably than any human operator and thousands of times as fast—there
are plenty of mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in
scientific records. Two centuries ago Leibnitz
invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features
of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The
economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in
constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be
saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by
sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to
frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that
time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous. Babbage, even with remarkably
generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical
machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs
were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs
of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed
the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a
single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Machines with
interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort. In
spite of much complexity, they perform reliably. Witness the humble
typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile. Electrical contacts have
ceased to stick when thoroughly understood. Note the automatic telephone
exchange, which has hundreds of thousands of such contacts, and yet is
reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire
heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic
tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages,
plugged into sockets—and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location
and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master
craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The
world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability;
and something is bound to come of it. 2 A record if it is to be useful to science,
must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be
consulted. Today we make the record conventionally by writing and
photography, followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks,
and on magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not
appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of modification and
extension. Certainly progress in
photography is not going to stop. Faster material and lenses, more automatic
cameras, finer-grained sensitive compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all imminent. Let us project this
trend ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the
future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes
pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after
all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of
universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply
because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the
walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically
adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination. There is film in the
walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for operating its shutter and
shifting its film is wound once for all when the film clip is inserted. It
produces its result in full color. It may well be stereoscopic, and record
with two spaced glass eyes, for striking improvements in stereoscopic
technique are just around the corner. The cord which trips its
shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within easy reach of his fingers. A
quick squeeze, and the picture is taken. On a pair
of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where
it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that
square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves
about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of
the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible
click. Is this all fantastic? The only fantastic thing about it is the idea
of making as many pictures as would result from its use. Will there be dry
photography? It is already here in two forms. When Brady made his Civil War
pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time of exposure. Now it has to be
wet during development instead. In the future perhaps it need not be wetted
at all. There have long been films impregnated with diazo
dyes which form a picture without development, so that it is already there as
soon as the camera has been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the
unexposed dye, and the picture can then be taken out into the light and
examined. The process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no
grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy. Often it
would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the
picture immediately. Another process now in use
is also slow, and more or less clumsy. For fifty years impregnated papers
have been used which turn dark at every point where an electrical contact
touches them, by reason of the chemical change thus produced in an iodine compound
included in the paper. They have been used to make records, for a pointer
moving across them can leave a trail behind. If the electrical potential on
the pointer is varied as it moves, the line becomes light or dark in
accordance with the potential. This scheme is now used in
facsimile transmission. The pointer draws a set of closely spaced lines
across the paper one after another. As it moves, its potential is varied in
accordance with a varying current received over wires from a distant station,
where these variations are produced by a photocell which is similarly
scanning a picture. At every instant the darkness of the line being drawn is
made equal to the darkness of the point on the picture being observed by the
photocell. Thus, when the whole picture has been covered, a replica appears
at the receiving end. A scene itself can be just
as well looked over line by line by the photocell in this way as can a
photograph of the scene. This whole apparatus constitutes a camera, with the
added feature, which can be dispensed with if desired, of making its picture
at a distance. It is slow, and the picture is poor in detail. Still, it does
give another process of dry photography, in which the picture is finished as
soon as it is taken. It would be a brave man who
would predict that such a process will always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty
in detail. Television equipment today transmits sixteen reasonably good
pictures a second, and it involves only two essential differences from the
process described above. For one, the record is made by a moving beam of
electrons rather than a moving pointer, for the reason that an electron beam
can sweep across the picture very rapidly indeed. The other difference
involves merely the use of a screen which glows momentarily when the
electrons hit, rather than a chemically treated paper or film which is
permanently altered. This speed is necessary in television, for motion
pictures rather than stills are the object. Use chemically treated film
in place of the glowing screen, allow the apparatus to transmit one picture
only rather than a succession, and a rapid camera for dry photography
results. The treated film needs to be far faster in action than present
examples, but it probably could be. More serious is the objection that this
scheme would involve putting the film inside a vacuum chamber, for electron
beams behave normally only in such a rarefied environment. This difficulty
could be avoided by allowing the electron beam to play on one side of a
partition, and by pressing the film against the other side, if this partition
were such as to allow the electrons to go through perpendicular to its
surface, and to prevent them from spreading out sideways. Such partitions, in
crude form, could certainly be constructed, and they will hardly hold up the
general development. Like dry photography,
microphotography still has a long way to go. The basic scheme of reducing the
size of the record, and examining it by projection rather than directly, has
possibilities too great to be ignored. The combination of optical projection
and photographic reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for
scholarly purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with
microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and still
produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for examination. The
limits are set by the graininess of the film, the excellence of the optical
system, and the efficiency of the light sources employed. All of these are
rapidly improving. Assume a linear ratio of
100 for future use. Consider film of the same thickness as paper, although
thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there
would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on
books, and its microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia
Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a
million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race
has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form
of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence,
having a volume corresponding to a Compression is important,
however, when it comes to costs. The material for the microfilm Britannica
would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would
it cost to print a million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large
edition, costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the Britannica
in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and one-half by eleven
inches. Once it is available, with the photographic reproduction methods of
the future, duplicates in large quantities could probably be turned out for a
cent apiece beyond the cost of materials. The preparation of the original
copy? That introduces the next aspect of the subject. 3 To make the record, we now
push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then comes the
process of digestion and correction, followed by an intricate process of
typesetting, printing, and distribution. To consider the first stage of the
procedure, will the author of the future cease writing by hand or typewriter
and talk directly to the record? He does so indirectly, by talking to a
stenographer or a wax cylinder; but the elements are all present if he wishes
to have his talk directly produce a typed record. All he needs to do is to
take advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter his language. At a recent World Fair a
machine called a Voder was shown. A girl stroked its keys and it
emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal chords entered into the procedure
at any point; the keys simply combined some electrically produced vibrations
and passed these on to a loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the
converse of this machine, called a Vocoder. The
loudspeaker is replaced by a microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it,
and the corresponding keys move. This may be one element of the postulated
system. The other element is found
in the stenotype, that somewhat disconcerting device encountered usually at
public meetings. A girl strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room
and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed
strip which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what
the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped into
ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible only to the
initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder
run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to. Our present languages are
not especially adapted to this sort of mechanization, it is true. It is
strange that the inventors of universal languages have not seized upon the
idea of producing one which better fitted the technique for transmitting and
recording speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue, especially in the
scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become still less
intelligible to the layman. One can now picture a
future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not
anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time
is automatically recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into
the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over
his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His
typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that
he projects them for examination. Much needs to occur,
however, between the collection of data and observations, the extraction of
parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new
material into the general body of the common record. For mature thought there
is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive
thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be,
powerful mechanical aids. Adding a column of figures is
a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the
machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by a keyboard, and thought
of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys,
but even this is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed
figures by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are
combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits for
sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for interpreting the
result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys down. All this complication is
needed because of the clumsy way in which we have learned to write figures.
If we recorded them positionally, simply by the
configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic reading mechanism
would become comparatively simple. In fact if the dots are holes, we have the
punched-card machine long ago produced by Hollorith
for the purposes of the census, and now used throughout business. Some types
of complex businesses could hardly operate without these machines. Adding is only one
operation. To perform arithmetical computation involves also subtraction,
multiplication, and division, and in addition some method for temporary
storage of results, removal from storage for further manipulation,
and recording of final results by printing. Machines for these purposes are
now of two types: keyboard machines for accounting and the like, manually
controlled for the insertion of data, and usually automatically controlled as
far as the sequence of operations is concerned; and punched-card machines in
which separate operations are usually delegated to a series of machines, and
the cards then transferred bodily from one to another. Both forms are very
useful; but as far as complex computations are concerned, both are still in
embryo. Rapid electrical counting
appeared soon after the physicists found it desirable to count cosmic rays.
For their own purposes the physicists promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment capable of counting electrical
impulses at the rate of 100,000 a second. The advanced arithmetical machines
of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100
times present speeds, or more. Moreover, they will be far
more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be
adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a
control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in
accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex
arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record
results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later
further manipulation. Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them
will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with
simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every
few minutes. There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed
affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. 4 The repetitive processes of
thought are not confined however, to matters of arithmetic and
statistics. In fact, every time one
combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes,
the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the
data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is
repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine.
Not so much has been done along these lines, beyond the bounds of arithmetic,
as might be done, primarily because of the economics of the situation. The needs of business and the
extensive market obviously waiting, assured the advent of mass-produced
arithmetical machines just as soon as production methods were sufficiently
advanced. With machines for advanced
analysis no such situation existed; for there was and is no extensive market;
the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of
the population. There are, however, machines for solving differential
equations—and functional and integral equations, for that matter. There are
many special machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which predicts the
tides. There will be many more, appearing certainly first in the hands of the
scientist and in small numbers. If scientific reasoning
were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in
our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp
the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. The
abacus, with its beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional
numeration and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the
world; and it was a useful tool—so useful that it still exists. It is a far cry from the abacus
to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the
arithmetical machine of the future. But even this new machine will not take
the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious
detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are
to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed
transformations in accordance with established rules. A mathematician is not
a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a
man who can readily perform the transformations of equations by the use of
calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic
logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in
the choice of the manipulative processes he employs. All else he should be able
to turn over to his mechanism, just as confidently as he turns over the
propelling of his car to the intricate mechanism under the hood. Only then
will mathematics be practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge
of atomistics to the useful solution of the
advanced problems of chemistry, metallurgy, and biology. For this reason
there still come more machines to handle advanced mathematics for the
scientist. Some of them will be sufficiently bizarre to suit the most
fastidious connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization. 5 The scientist, however, is
not the only person who manipulates data and examines the world about him by
the use of logical processes, although he sometimes preserves this appearance
by adopting into the fold anyone who becomes logical, much in the manner in
which a British labor leader is elevated to knighthood. Whenever logical
processes of thought are employed—that is, whenever thought for a time runs
along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal
logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying
of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will
manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use
of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the
crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in
accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of
a keyboard adding machine. Logic can become enormously
difficult, and it would undoubtedly be well to produce more assurance in its
use. The machines for higher analysis have usually been equation solvers.
Ideas are beginning to appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange
the relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and
rather advanced logic. Progress is inhibited by the exceedingly crude way in
which mathematicians express their relationships. They employ a symbolism
which grew like Topsy and has little consistency; a
strange fact in that most logical field. A new symbolism, probably
positional, must apparently precede the reduction of mathematical
transformations to machine processes. Then, on beyond the strict logic of the
mathematician, lies the application of logic in everyday affairs. We may some
day click off arguments on a machine with the same assurance that we now
enter sales on a cash register. But the machine of logic will not look like a
cash register, even of the streamlined model. So much for the
manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the record. Thus far we seem
to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the record; yet even
in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter
than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research;
it involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of
acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we are
halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of
the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of
acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week
by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current
scene. Selection, in this broad
sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a cabinetmaker. Yet, in a narrow sense
and in other areas, something has already been done mechanically on
selection. The personnel officer of a factory drops a stack of a few thousand
employee cards into a selecting machine, sets a code in accordance with an
established convention, and produces in a short time a list of all employees
who live in This process, however, is
simple selection: it proceeds by examining in turn every one of a large set
of items, and by picking out those which have certain specified
characteristics. There is another form of selection best illustrated by the
automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and
connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all.
It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, then only to a
subclass of this given by the second digit, and so on; and thus proceeds
rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station. It requires a few
seconds to make the selection, although the process could be speeded up if
increased speed were economically warranted. If necessary, it could be made
extremely fast by substituting thermionic-tube
switching for mechanical switching, so that the full selection could be made
in one one-hundredth of a second. No one would wish to spend the money
necessary to make this change in the telephone system, but the general idea
is applicable elsewhere. Take the prosaic problem of
the great department store. Every time a charge sale is made, there are a
number of things to be done. The inventory needs to be revised, the salesman
needs to be given credit for the sale, the general accounts need an entry,
and, most important, the customer needs to be charged. A central records
device has been developed in which much of this work is done conveniently.
The salesman places on a stand the customer's identification card, his own
card, and the card taken from the article sold—all punched cards. When he
pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery at a central
point makes the necessary computations and entries, and the proper receipt is
printed for the salesman to pass to the customer. But there may be ten
thousand charge customers doing business with the store, and before the full
operation can be completed someone has to select the right card and insert it
at the central office. Now rapid selection can slide just the proper card
into position in an instant or two, and return it afterward. Another
difficulty occurs, however. Someone must read a total on the card, so that
the machine can add its computed item to it. Conceivably the cards might be
of the dry photography type I have described. Existing totals could then be
read by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam. The cards may be in
miniature, so that they occupy little space. They must move quickly. They
need not be transferred far, but merely into position so that the photocell
and recorder can operate on them. Positional dots can enter the data. At the
end of the month a machine can readily be made to read these and to print an
ordinary One can consider rapid
selection of this form, and distant projection for other purposes. To be able
to key one sheet of a million before an operator in a second or two, with the
possibility of then adding notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It
might even be of use in libraries, but that is another story. At any rate,
there are now some interesting combinations possible. One might, for example,
speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech
controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat
the usual file clerk. 6 The real heart of the
matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of
mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use.
Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the
artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in
storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is
found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in
only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which
path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item,
moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not
work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it
snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts,
in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the
brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not
frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the
intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond
all else in nature. Man cannot hope fully to
duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able
to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have
relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy
concerns selection. Selection
by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One
cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind
follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind
decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected
from storage. Consider a future device
for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library.
It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex"
will do. A memex is a device in which an individual
stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so
that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an
enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be
operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he
works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be
projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons
and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk. In one end is the stored
material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm.
Only a small part of the interior of the memex is
devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000
pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the
repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely. Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for
insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are
thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same
path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed
longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in
place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next
blank space in a section of the memex film, dry
photography being employed. There is, of course,
provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If
the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard,
and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto
one of his viewing positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he
seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key
projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting
one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page
in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at
each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10
pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left
gives him the same control backwards. A special button transfers
him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library
can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were
taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one
item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and
comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it
could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is
now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad
waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him. 7 All this is conventional,
except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It
affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea
of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select
immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the
important thing. When the user is building a
trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his
keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent
viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on
each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined.
In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code
space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item
these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item. Thereafter, at any time,
when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled
merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when
numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be
reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for
turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had
been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to
form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into
numerous trails. The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and
properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short
Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes
of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in
his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia,
finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it
projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the
two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he
inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or
joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that
the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the
bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on
elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand
analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze
of materials available to him. And his trails do not fade.
Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the queer ways in which
a people resist innovations, even of vital interest. He has an example, in
the fact that the outraged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow.
In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few
keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will,
stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an
interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in
action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for
insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into
the more general trail. 8 Wholly new forms of
encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails
running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex
and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and
decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and
authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents,
with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician,
puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying
an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories,
with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology.
The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all
the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following
the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical
behavior. The historian, with a vast
chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops
only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails
which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new
profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of
establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.
The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the
world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they
were erected. Thus science may implement
the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race.
It might be striking to outline the instrumentalities of the future more
spectacularly, rather than to stick closely to methods and elements now known
and undergoing rapid development, as has been done here. Technical
difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are
means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress
as violently as did the advent of the thermionic
tube. In order that the picture may not be too commonplace, by reason of
sticking to present-day patterns, it may be well to mention one such
possibility, not to prophesy but merely to suggest, for prophecy based on
extension of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown
is only a doubly involved guess. All our steps in creating
or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses—the
tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when
we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more
directly? We know that when the eye
sees, all the consequent information is transmitted to the brain by means of
electrical vibrations in the channel of the optic nerve. This is an exact
analogy with the electrical vibrations which occur in the cable of a
television set: they convey the picture from the photocells which see it to
the radio transmitter from which it is broadcast. We know further that if we
can approach that cable with the proper instruments, we do not need to touch
it; we can pick up those vibrations by electrical induction and thus discover
and reproduce the scene which is being transmitted, just as a telephone wire
may be tapped for its message. The impulses which flow in
the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information
which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to
strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in
the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the
marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand? By bone conduction we
already introduce sounds: into the nerve channels of the deaf in order that they
may hear. Is it not possible that we may learn to introduce them without the
present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to
mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the
electrical form? With a couple of electrodes on the skull the encephalograph
now produces pen-and-ink traces which bear some relation to the electrical
phenomena going on in the brain itself. True, the record is unintelligible,
except as it points out certain gross misfunctioning
of the cerebral mechanism; but who would now place bounds on where such a
thing may lead? In the outside world, all
forms of intelligence whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the
form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be
transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs.
Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one
electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly
warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness. Presumably man's spirit
should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more
completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization
so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push
his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down
part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more
enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things
he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can
find them again if they prove important. The applications of science
have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein.
They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with
cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and
to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he
learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of
science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly
unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to
the outcome.
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