A difference maker
‘150 years of MIT’ is a series that looks at specific people and moments from MIT’s 150-year history and explains their lasting effect on the Institute, the nation and the world. See the full interactive timeline at the MIT150 site.In January 1942, a month after the United States entered World War II, Japan launched a new series of attacks in the Pacific, while German submarines started a new wave of strikes in the Atlantic. Against this grim backdrop, Collier’s magazine ran a story for its 2.5 million readers about one vital person who, it claimed, could turn the tide: “Meet the man who may win the war,” the publication said. That man was Vannevar Bush PhD ’16, inventor, engineer, former professor and dean of the School of Engineering at MIT, and, as of 1942, head of President Franklin Roosevelt’s newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), where Bush...