1. On the Radar Scope

One of the ironies of history is that war often lifts innovation to a higher level, and many beneficial inventions have roots in warfare. During World War Two, scientists and engineers on both sides of the battle lines advanced technology at a tremendous rate. In particular, the development of radar during and after the war was a catalyst for some of the technologies later incorporated into the Internet. One of the pioneers in radar, Vennevar Bush, was also the originator of an idea that would later evolve into the World Wide Web.

When the U.S. officially entered the war, Bush served as the top advisor to President Roosevelt on matters of technology in the war. He managed all the government's scientists, including the Manhattan Project. Even with this great responsibility, he also found time to keep up on his own research, including a machine intended to change the way people store and retrieve books, records, and notes. He called this machine a memex, because its purpose was to augment human memory.

Bush theorized that people didn't think well in the linear structures of alphabetic or numeric indexes, but instead in associative connections. Therefore, the memex would index everything with associative links and pieces of information that could be retrieved through paths of logical connections. He described the memex as a desk and camera that could record anything a user wrote and then link it to other pieces of information indexed in its storage space.

No memex machine was ever built, but Bush described his idea in an article for Atlantic Monthly titled "As We Think", published near the end of the war in 1945. It was obviously a revolutionary idea, but few people could grasp its potential impact. In the Philippines, a young Navy Radar Technician named Doug Engelbart picked up a copy of Atlantic Monthly at the Red Cross and became an early advocate for Bush's idea.

2. The Cold War Heats Up

In 1957, the Russians launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. The United States was near hysterics thinking of that little, metal ball orbiting the globe overhead. The U.S. didn't want the Russians to own outer space without a fight, so the old soldier, President Eisenhower, called up some new troops, the nation's scientists and engineers, to battle in the Cold War.

Above losing a space-race, the biggest fear for the world in the 1950's was the threat of a nuclear war. Dropping atomic bombs on Japan demonstrated the incredibly destructive power of nuclear weapons, and both sides had the bomb now. While some research centers worked on making weapons even more destructive, other researchers studied how to survive an atomic war. Protecting the nation's modes of communication was considered one of the most critical priorities.

Scientists at the RAND Corporation, a think-tank devoted to national defense, studied several possibilities. One of their scientists, Paul Baran, theorized that a decentralized network with several possible routes between any two points could keep the channels open for communication. If a few of the routes in the network were destroyed in a nuclear attack, messages would be rerouted automatically. In order to do this, though, he realized that the messages would need to be split up and sent as separate blocks. If the message was cut up into blocks, each could travel along any route that connected the source to the destination and at least part of the message would make it through.

In 1965, Baran found funding from the Air Force, but the project was plagued with bureaucratic problems. Baran was afraid that the project was doomed to fail because of the people put in charge of it, so he withdrew his request because he feared a failure would ruin any future prospects. He gave up on the idea, but he didn't know that other engineers were already working on the same idea.

Earlier in 1961, Leonard Kleinrock wrote his Ph.D. thesis at MIT on a similar block switching idea. Also, across the Atlantic in Britain, Donald Watts Davies was working on a block-switching scheme for the British National Physical Laboratory (NPL). However, Davies had a different name for it; he called the blocks "packets."

3. Acceleration

Eisenhower allotted over a billion dollars for U.S. research and development centers, including the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) located in the new Pentagon building. The success of the Manhattan Project also attracted money toward research in particle physics, including projects like the new Stanford Linear Accelerator.

Accelerators were big machines a country could brag about, and the Cold War foes liked to show them off. Not wanting to fall behind the super-powers, several European countries collaborated and built the biggest of them all at the new Counseil European pour la Recherche Nucleaire, or CERN. The same research center where the World Wide Web would be invented forty years later.

All this building was wonderful for the economies devastated from the war, but the scars of international conflict were still fresh in their minds. The United Nations was created as a grand experiment in preventing another global war. New York was picked to host the United Nations, and construction began on a UN Building for the hundreds of UN ambassadors and their staff.

Three acoustic engineers, Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, formed a partnership to work as consultants on the new UN Building. Their new company, BBN, was headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts near the engineers' alma mater, MIT. From there they recruited students from MIT and Harvard. BBN was soon known as the "third university in Cambridge."