As a young man, with a doctorate in engineering behind him jointly from MIT and Harvard earned in one intense year, Bush in 1917 had gone patriotically to work for a research corporation developing a magnetic submarine detector. The device was effective, and one hundred sets got built; but because of bureaucratic confusion they were never put to use against German submarines. “That experience,” Bush writes in a memoir, “forced into my mind pretty solidly the complete lack of proper liaison between the military and the civilian in the development of weapons in time of war, and what that lack
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