For this reason, Roosevelt established a National Defense Research Committee in nineteen forty to support and organize research on weapons.

The new committee included some of the top scientists in America. Among its members were the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bell Laboratories. The committee did its work so well that Roosevelt later formed an even more powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development.

The leader of both groups was Vannevar Bush -- no relation to the future presidents. He had long experience as a professor of electrical engineering and as an inventor. Many scientists knew him.

Vannevar Bush put together a hard-working team. And in the years that followed, American scientists and engineers developed one invention after another to help the war effort.

Scientists developed new devices to help the Navy find German submarines. They improved methods for bombers to find their targets. And they developed more powerful rockets to protect American troops when they landed on foreign beaches.

American scientists and doctors also made great progress in improving the methods of wartime medicine. World War Two may well have been the first war in history in which a wounded soldier was more likely to survive than to die.

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But, in many ways, the most important scientific development of the period was the atomic bomb.