Escalante
Image: Vannevar Bush, from the Office of Scientific Research and Development Collection.
So let’s start joining some threads. I want to have a picture of the foundations of our society, to look for long change. Levittown was built in the 1940s. That’s post war. Track back to the beginning of the decade, 1940 itself.
Germany has invaded Poland. A fellow named Vannevar Bush persuades Franklin Roosevelt to set up what became the Office of Scientific Research and Development to channel government money into civilian scientific R&D.
Bush ran it, and it put a half billion dollars into technology development over the next five years. This is the group that spun out the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, for example.