On June 12, 1940, a man named Vannevar Bush walked into the Oval Office and presented President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a single sheet of paper. With a simple "OK—FDR" scribbled in the margin, the president handed Bush control over the entirety of American military scientific research. This pivotal meeting effectively weaponized the untapped brilliance of U.S. academia for the looming conflict, leading directly to the initiation of the Manhattan Project, the mass production of penicillin, and the permanent restructuring of how the federal government funds science. Despite his monumental impact, Bush remains a largely forgotten figure to the general public, overshadowed by the giants of history he helped organize.

Bush was a master of "organizing brilliance," an engineer who approached computing and management with a ruthless pragmatism t ...