This 1945 Essay Predicted Google, Wikipedia, and Your Smartphone

In July 1945, the same month the atomic bomb was first tested at Trinity, an engineer named Vannevar Bush published a 12-page essay in The Atlantic Monthly. It was titled 'As We May Think.' While the world was focused on the end of one war, Bush was quietly describing the next revolution.

Bush imagined a device he called the 'memex', a mechanized desk that would store all of a person's books, records, and communications on microfilm. Users could retrieve any document instantly. More importantly, they could create 'trails', links between related pieces of information that could be followed, shared, and built upon.

“Consider a future device... in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory., Vannevar Bush, 1945”

He described it with striking specificity: 'Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them.' He was describing Wikipedia, 56 years before it launched.

Bush also imagined a wearable camera that could photograph anything the user looked at, a voice-controlled recording system, and a way to share your research trails with colleagues. He was describing Google Glass, Siri, and social bookmarking, from 1945.

The essay had profound influence. In 1963, Ted Nelson read 'As We May Think' and coined the term 'hypertext', links between documents, exactly as Bush envisioned. In 1968, Doug Engelbart built the first working hypertext system and demonstrated it in what became known as 'The Mother of All Demos.'

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, proposed a 'web' of linked documents. He explicitly cited Bush's essay as foundational to his thinking. The World Wide Web was, in a very real sense, the memex made global.

Every hyperlink you click today is a 'trail' that Vannevar Bush imagined on a summer day in 1945. Every Wikipedia article is part of the encyclopedia he described. Every smartphone is the memex he sketched, shrunk from a desk to a pocket.

The most remarkable thing about 'As We May Think' isn't what Bush predicted. It's that he understood why it mattered: not the technology itself, but the human ability to connect ideas, build on each other's work, and extend collective memory. The technology was the means. The purpose was human thought.

Eighty-one years later, we have the technology he imagined. The question he posed, whether we'd use it to think better, remains unanswered.