+ AS WE MAY THINK
+ by VANNEVAR BUSH
+
+ THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, JULY 1945
+
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+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 many 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 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 work 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. They 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 thousand 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 Giza.
+
+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 hundred 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 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 could predict that such a process will
+always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail. Television
+equipment today transmits sixteen reasonably good images 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 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 billion books, the
+whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a
+moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not
+only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and
+this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library
+is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.
+
+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
+cords entered in 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 the 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 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 roomful of girls
+armed with simple keyboard 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 machines. 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 transformation 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 will 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 a 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 Trenton and know Spanish. Even such devices are
+much too slow when it comes, for example, to matching a set of
+fingerprints with one of five millions on file. Selection devices of
+this sort will soon be speeded up from their present rate of reviewing
+data at a few hundred a minute. By the use of photocells and
+microfilm they will survey items at the rate of thousands a second,
+and will print out duplicates of those selected.
+
+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, 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-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 bill. With
+tube selection, in which no mechanical parts are involved in the
+switches, little time need be occupied in bringing the correct card
+into use - a second should suffice for the entire operation. The
+whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet
+if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the
+scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire. This
+method has the advantage of simplicity and ease of erasure. By using
+photography, however, one can arrange to project the record in
+enlarged form, and at a distance by using the process common in
+television equipment.
+
+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 by 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 sort 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 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
+outranged 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 its
+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 at 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 the 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 record 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 excursion 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 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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diff --git a/main/world1/p80.html b/main/world1/p80.html
index 14da7eb..f2a9a8a 100644
--- a/main/world1/p80.html
+++ b/main/world1/p80.html
@@ -13,7 +13,10 @@
-Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up a new reality. A glimpse of truth, flashed out from an accidental chaos.
+Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up a new reality. A glimpse of truth, flashed out from an accidental chaos, and certainly, if I live, I must knowingly supply a link in so impossible chain...
+
+Ilinx is the way you can go but isn’t the real way.
+Ilinx is the name you can say but isn’t the real name.