John Bell Rae (1911–1988)

Abstract

Memorial JOHN BELL RAE (1911-1988) JAMES J. FLINK John Bell Rae succumbed on October 24, 1988, to complications fol­ lowing heart surgery. He was a founder and past president (1973-74) of the Society for the History of Technology and the recipient in 1980 of the society’s highest award, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. Rae was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on March 21, 1911. The Rae family emigrated to Providence, Rhode Island, when John was twelve. There he attended Classical High School and Brown University, from which he received his B.A. in history in 1932. After a year’s study at Yale, he returned to Brown to do graduate work in economic history under the supervision ofJames B. Hedges. In 1935—36 he was a Social Science Research Council Pre-Doctoral Field Fellow. He was awarded his M.A. degree in 1934 and his Ph.D. degree in 1936. A childhood fascination with trains culminated in a doctoral dissertation on railroad land grants. The continuing scholarly merit of that disserta­ tion is evident in its publication some 43 years later (1979) as Development of Railway Land Subsidy in the United States, in the Ayer Company Development of Public Lands Law in the United States Series, edited by Stuart Bruchey. After serving as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution (1936—37), and then as an administrative assistant to the president at Brown (1937—39), Rae began his teaching career as instructor in history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught English composition as well as general history, and then, during the war years, taught military and naval history for army and navy programs. He still considered himself an economic historian with a primary interest in railroads, but he had “not yet found a definite focus” and had little time for research. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1943 and to associate professor in 1947. Curriculum planning for the postwar period bore fruit in a textbook coauthored with Thomas D. H. Dr. Funk is a professor in the Program in Comparative Culture at the University of California at Irvine. Permission to reprint a memorial in this section may be obtained only from the author. 718 John Bell Rae (1911-1988) 719 John B. Rae Mahoney, The United States in World History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949, 1955, and 1964). Writing the text and compiling a collection of readings with Lynwood Bryant on the industrial history of Lowell, Massachusetts, made Rae “more aware of the impact of technology on the growth of our modern civilization” and took him “still closer to the history of technology.” Rae also came to associate with engineers at MIT and “absorbed information and ideas about what they did and how they thought.” 720 James J. Flink In 1953 Rae was invited to the Research Center for Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University to do research on the engineer as entrepreneur. To Rae, this was a “landmark” experience that he recalled as “one of the most intellectually stimulating of my life.” He exchanged ideas with Leland Jenks and Fritz Redlich; came to know Harvard Business School historians Ralph and Muriel Hidy and Henrietta Larson; worked closely with Hugh Aitken, then executive secretary of the center and editor of its pioneering journal, Explora­ tions in Entrepreneurial History; and “above all, came under the inspir­ ing and stimulating influence of Arthur H. Cole,” the center’s director. Two articles resulted that are classics for serious students of automotive history: “The Engineer-Entrepreneur in the American Automobile Industry,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 8 (Octo­ ber 1955): 1-11; and “The Electric Vehicle Company,” Business History Review 29 (December 1955): 298—311. “As I got more deeply into the study of the engineer,” Rae explained in 1981, “I became convinced that the best way to proceed was to select a single industry for intensive investigation, one that had a reasonably rapid pace of technological change and could be pre­ sumed to have engineers well represented in its management. . . . The automobile industry met my specifications, and I discovered that, at that time, a surprisingly limited amount of scholarly work had been done on it.” Indeed, at the time Rae began...