Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the idea of the memex, which was seen decades later as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web.
Bush was a prominent policymaker and public intellectual ("the patron saint of American science") during World War II and the ensuing Cold War, and was in effect the first presidential science advisor. Through his public career, Bush was a proponent of democratic technocracy and of the centrality of technological innovation and entrepreneurship for both economic and geopolitical security. He died on June 28, 1974.