John Bell Rae succumbed on October 24, 1988, to complications following 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 of James 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 dissertation 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. 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.”
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, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History; and “above all, came under the inspiring 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 (1955): 1–11; and “The Electric Vehicle Company,” Business History Review 29 (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 presumed 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 his research in automotive history, the scholarly literature on the topic consisted of a handful of specialized articles, the revised doctoral dissertations of Ralph C. Ep stein and Lawrence H. Seltzer, published in 1928, and the first volume, published in 1954, of Allan Nevins and Frank E. Hill’s monumental trilogy on the Ford Motor Company, which covered events at Ford only to 1915. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to credit Rae’s subsequent work with creating and legitimizing automotive history as a specialized field of scholarly inquiry that combines business, social, and economic history with the history of technology. And all who have written or will write in that field must acknowledge their deep debt to Rae’s pathbreaking books and articles.
In its fall 1958 issue, Business History Review published Rae’s “The Fabulous Billy Durant,” the first (and until 1974 the only) scholarly treatment of GM’s colorful founder. Support from MIT’s Sloan School of Industrial Management enabled Rae to complete American Automobile Manufacturers: The First Forty Years, published by Chilton in 1959. Here he traced the origins and interrelationships of all companies of importance among more than 500 that entered into automobile manufacturing in the United States. Few had left any company records, so his reconstruction was largely based on a painstaking page-by-page search of the automobile trade journals of the day. Only one who has followed in his footsteps can appreciate the magnitude of his task. The book won the Thomas McKean Memorial Award in Automotive History.
The University of Chicago Press correctly stated on the dust jacket of Rae’s 1965 The American Automobile: A Brief History that the book was “the first complete, authoritative treatment of the whole span of the automobile industry, which has given modern American society its pace and direction and stimulated an amazing number of related industrial and social changes.” Sponsored by the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association, The Road and the Car in American Life went even further in surveying the influence of highway transportation on American life and was the first study to consider the motor vehicle and highway development in conjunction as an integrated mode of transportation. It remains both the best defense of highway transportation against its critics and the best introduction to highway development. In my review for Business History Review, I called it Rae’s most controversial and important book and referred to him as the dean of automotive historians.
In addition to his contributions to our understanding of highway and rail transportation, Rae wrote a history of the American aircraft industry, Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920–1960. The book resulted in his appointment to the NASA Historical Advisory Committee (1970–72) and an invitation to the Kennedy Space Center for the launch of Apollo 14. Rae had decided to study the aircraft industry because it appeared to be technologically related to the automobile industry. However, his major discovery was that “the relationship between the two industries is far more tenuous than is generally assumed.”
Rae’s work on the aircraft industry had been facilitated by relocation to southern California. In 1959 he left MIT to join as a full professor the faculty of newly founded Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, where he was given a free hand to organize courses in the history of technology and industry. He retained a strong lifelong commitment to the liberal arts education of engineers and in both 1962–63 and 1968–69 served as chairman of the Liberal Studies Division, American Society for Engineering Education. He spent his 1965–66 sabbatical, supported by a National Science Foun dation senior postdoctoral fellowship, at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and at Oxford University doing research on the British automobile and aircraft industries. The fall of his 1973-74 sabbatical he spent as a visiting lecturer at the Queen’s University of Belfast, and the winter and spring as Senior Resident Scholar at the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation, Wilmington, Delaware, doing research on the engineer as a historical figure. The results of the latter research appeared in Rae’s 1974 SHOT presidential address, “Engineers Are People.”
Rae reported in 1981 that his 1976 retirement had proved to be “less retiring than I had anticipated.” He continued to teach in the Executive Management Program of the Claremont Graduate School as a colleague of Peter Drucker, briefly did research on the social acceptance of new technologies for the Electric Power Research Institute, and worked for two years on an oral history of Atlantic Richfield Corporation. He was commissioned to write the twentieth- anniversary history of Nissan Motor Corporation in the United States, Nissan-Datsun: A History of Nissan Motor Corporation in USA, 1960-1980. His last book, The American Automobile Industry, was published in 1984 in the Twayne Evolution of American Business Series, edited by Albro Martin. At the time of his death, he was working with Rudi Volti on a study of engineers.
Rae was already committed to the history of technology as his primary academic identification when he went to the Case Institute of Technology as an exchange professor in 1956–57. There he met Mel Kranzberg and Carl Condit. A year later, at a meeting sponsored by the Case administration, an original group that also included Lynn White, Jr., Thomas P. Hughes, and Robert Woodbury founded SHOT.
The Reverend Homer D. Henderson, the Raes’ Congregationalist pastor, asked Florence [A. Urquhart, his wife] how she would summarize her husband’s life. She wrote out this sentence: “He was a very lovable man with a marvelous sense of humor and a consuming, serious dedication to his life’s work.”
James J. Flink
Originally published as James J. Flink, “John Bell Rae (1911–1988).” Technology and Culture 30, no. 3 (1989): 718–22. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1989.0119.
Lucsko, David N. “John Bell Rae and the Automobile 1959, 1965, 1971, 1984.” Technology and Culture 50, no. 4 (2009): 894–914. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.0.0357. [Classics Revisted]
Rae, John B. “What Did We Expect SHOT to Wrought?” Technology and Culture 25, no. 4 (1984): 731–34. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/889943.
Rae, John B. The American Automobile Industry. Boston: Twayne, c. 1984.
Rae, John B. Nissan/Datsun, a History of Nissan Motor Corporation in U.S.A., 1960–1980.New York: McGraw-Hill, c. 1982.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture 22, no. 3 (1981): 563–69. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890891.
Rae, John B. “The Herbert Hoover Collection of Mining and Metallurgy.” Technology and Culture 21, no. 4 (1980): 614–16. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890752.
Rae, John B. The Development of Railway Land Subsidy Policy in the United States. New York: Arno Press, 1979.
Rae, John B. “Engineers Are People.” Technology and Culture 16, no. 3 (1975): 404–18. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891563. [SHOT Presidential Address]
Rae, John B. The Road and the Car in American Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.
Rae, John B., ed. Henry Ford. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Rae, John B. Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920–1960. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.
Rae, John B. The American Automobile. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
Rae, John B. “Commentary.” Technology and Culture 4, no. 2 (1963): 174–76. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895001.
Rae, John B. “The “Know-How” Tradition: Technology in American History.” Technology and Culture 1, no. 2 (1960): 139–50. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895249.
Rae, John B. “Science and Engineering in the History of Aviation.” Technology and Culture 2, no. 4 (1961): 391–99. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895437.
Rae, John B. “Automotive and Aeronautical Technology.” Technology and Culture 1, no. 4 (1960): 411–14. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895622.
Rae, John B. American Automobile Manufacturers. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1959.
Rae, John B. and Thomase H. D. Mahoney. The United States in World History: From its Beginnings to World Leadership. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949.