Professor John Werner Abrams (1913-1981) died in Toronto on July 11, 1981. A long-time member of SHOT, who served on both its Advisory and Executive Councils, Abrams enjoyed a varied and distinguished career.
He was born in San Francisco in 1913, attended Lowell High School—an institution noted for the quality of its science curriculum—and then went to the University of California, Berkeley, from which he graduated cum laude with a degree in astronomy and astrophysics. Although Abrams also studied astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard and in Europe, he returned to California for his Ph.D., which was awarded in 1939.
In a life marked by distinct periods, Abrams’s career as a theoretical scientist ended at that point. His feelings about the war in Europe took him in 1940 to Canada w here he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. Ele taught navigation to flying officers in Manitoba for a brief time, hut then was posted to England where he became involved in operational research, a field that defined the next significant phase of his life. After the war he taught physics, first at the University of Manitoba and then at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, but in 1949 he went back to operational research, this time for Canada’s Defense Research Board. His new position took him once again to England as a consultant to the British Admiralty and, not incidentally as it turned out, he used the occasion to study the history and philosophy of science at University College, London, during the years 1949–51. Abrams achieved considerable eminence in the field of operational research, becoming chief operational analyst for SHAPE in France from 1958 to 1961 and subsequently chief of operational research for the Defense Research Board in Ottawa. Besides some important political connections, those experiences gave him an interest in the history of operational research that was rendered particularly vivid by his wartime work with the British pioneers in that exciting new field.
In 1962 Abrams returned to academic life, to teach operational research in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. While he remained associated with that department until his retirement, the move to Toronto gave him the chance to expand an avocational interest in the history of science, and that led to another of his life’s various segments.
As in many universities, there had always been individuals at Toronto who taught something of the history of their own discipline. But in the early 1960s the university’s senior administrators—several of whom Abrams had known from London and Ottawa days—became concerned to pull together the institution’s resources in the history of science. From the beginning Abrams was part of that effort. Two interesting features characterized the recommendations of the first presidential committee charged with the task, of which Abrams was a member, and of the second committee, which he chaired. Both committees strongly affirmed the proposition that the history of science should be taught by specialists in the field, and they also argued from the outset that the history of technology was an equally important part of the subject they wished to advance. The result was that the program at the University of Toronto came to life with a strong commitment to graduate teaching and original research—even though the rhetoric surrounding its creation was infused by C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” and by the vision of uniting them in undergraduate instruction—and by an interest in the history of technology unusual in North American history of science departments.
Yet Abrams himself was always attracted to the idea of an interdisciplinary role for the history of technology, which was reflected in his affiliation with Marshall McLuhan, who founded the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and by his great concern for making the history of technology a vital part of the engineering undergraduate curriculum.
Abrams moved logically from the chairmanship of the Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science to the directorship of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology when it was established in 1967. The fact that he enjoyed the confidence of the university’s administration insured funding for an ambitious series of public lectures, for a full-time staff, and in 1969 for degree-granting powers—all the elements necessary for long-term survival. Abrams wanted intellectual preeminence for the institute, but he also understood something about bureaucracies, and that insight assured a permanent place in the university for his creation.
John Abrams’s last years were spent in the Department of Industrial Engineering, to which he had returned at the end of his term as the institute’s founding director. As before, he found in that department a comfortable reception for his interest in the history of operational research, for his growing attraction to the philosophy of technology, and for his concern to fashion an undergraduate course in the history of technology especially suited for engineering students, which he hoped to use as the basis for a textbook.
In the last decade of his life Abrams had also become increasingly involved with national and international organizations devoted to the history of technology and the history of science. Thus, he served as president of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, president of the Canadian Humanities Federation, president of the International Commission on the Teaching of Histories of Science, and as secretary-general of ICOHTEC (International Committee on the History of Technology). In this last position, Abrams’s tact and diplomacy did much to keep ICOHTEC united in the pursuit of international cooperative efforts, and his concern for scholarly integrity guaranteed that there would be substantive historical content in its symposia.
Despite an innate shyness and modesty, there were robust aspects of Abrams’s personality. He liked good food and drink and had an international circle of friends who appreciated him as a good host and as a compassionate human being. Diffident about his own scholarly capabilities, he nonetheless left behind bulky manuscripts on the early history of operational research and on certain aspects of the history of technology which had remained unfinished because of his strong desire for comprehensiveness. Yet his shorter, published pieces demonstrate the acuity and breadth of his mind. His last paper— “Technology, Humanism, and Peace”—was presented posthumously at the Sixteenth International Congress of the History of Science in Bucharest in August 1981. It served as the keynote address for the ICOHTEC symposium held in conjunction with the congress, approaching with sensitivity and perceptiveness the human and social dimensions of technological developments in the past and the lessons derived from them that would be applicable to the problems of today and tomorrow.
His Bucharest paper and the congress at which it was presented exemplify Abrams’s major contributions to the history of science and technology. He saw our field of study as one with broad cultural implications that should encourage an adventuresome intellectuality, yet he recognized that disciplined scholarship also required effective institutions—national and international—dedicated to high professional standards. At Toronto we continue to enjoy the fruits of his labors in a very direct way, though in fact scholars everywhere benefit from his efforts to advance the history of technology.
Bruce Sinclair
Originally published as Bruce Sinclair, “John W. Abrams (1913–1981),” Technology and Culture 23, no. 3 (1982): 527–30, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1982.a891219.
Abrams, John W. “General Assembly and Symposium, Edinburgh, August 1977.” Technology and Culture 19, no. 3 (1978): 600–1. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/892161.