It seems oh so romantic. A young man, whose fascination for controlling his model trains developed into an interest in computers, which in turn led him to find ways of pulling together information on separate computers, which in turn led to his developing what we know today as the World Wide Web.

Throw in the fact that the young man, Timothy Berners-Lee (now Sir Timothy Berners-Lee), did his work in the shadow of the Alps in oh, so romantic Switzerland and you have, well, an oh so romantic story.

Berners-Lee will always be remembered as the inventor of clicking; linking; and jumping over, under, around, and through information because most of us are suckers for an oh so romantic story.

Even if the story is wrong.

Credit for the what we call the web arguably belongs to an American electrical engineer and MIT professor whose first name rhymes with “beaver.”

Vannevar Bush.

Right away you can see the problem. Vannevar does not sound oh so romantic. And the MIT campus is a fairy-tale setting only if you’re a printed circuit board.

Nevertheless, that’s where, and with whom, the real story begins.

Professor Bush rose to prominence during World War II as chairman of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). There he oversaw the application of science to the war effort. If you’re looking for the man who shepherded radar and the atomic bomb into existence, Bush is your guy.

His management skills aside, Bush was genetically wired to be an inventor at a time when inventors tinkered with gears and pulleys instead of software.

Don’t scoff.

The ballistic tables army gunners needed to aim their heavy artillery were generated by analog computers, many of which Bush designed. These computers used gears, pulleys, motors, and rods to number-crunch those tables into existence.

After the War, Bush reflected on what he’d learned about science. He reached the same conclusion Berners-Lee would espouse 40 years later.

There was too much information, most of it spread out in too many places, and this situation was impeding what the 50s would call the “March of Science.”

Like Berners-Lee, Bush wrote a white paper about the problem. His was called, “As We May Think,” and, in 1945, it laid out the plans for a memex, a gear-and-rod-and-photographic forerunner of the World Wide Web.

Although it would resemble a traditional desk, the memex would include slanting translucent screens (for projected photographic images), a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers.

When Bush talked about having notes, papers, and information on your desktop, he did not mean one with pictures of your kids in the background.

“Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk,” he wrote.

And they assured me at Columbia that engineers didn’t have a sense of humor.

Bush may have described the memex as furniture, but when he envisioned it he saw the World Wide Web—a solution for accessing information in a way that mimicked the random, and deliciously mysterious, way the human mind, “…snaps instantly to the next [thought] that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.”

He went on to explain, “When the user is building a trail*, he names it…and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions…The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined.

“Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button…”

Today, the memex is remembered, if at all, with the same wistfulness as 8-track tapes. But don’t look for a memex on eBay. Nobody ever built one.

Ironically, that was all Bush’s fault.

His successes with analog computers during the War focused attention on how computing could be used to augment human capabilities—especially computing based on newly-emerging theories of digital mathematics.

The electron tubes needed to turn those theories into reality were readily available, thanks to the radio and radar projects Bush oversaw.

He inadvertently killed off his own idea by supplying a reason for science to eclipse it, and by supplying the tools to do the job.

Bush died in 1974. He never saw desktop computing, the Internet, the World Wide Web, or any of the other romantic realizations of his most famous idea.

He did, however, live long enough to see 8-track tapes.