John Raymond Harris (1923–1997) of Birmingham, England, died of a heart attack on March 5, 1997. He was an extraordinary scholar and a beloved friend to many historians of technology in Great Britain, the United States, and France. His lovely wife, Thelma, died in 1994 of a brain tumor. They are survived by two sons: Paul, a military historian in London, and Philip, a barrister.
John was born on May 15, 1923, in St. Helens, one of those industrial towns in England that produced coal and a considerable range of industrial products, such as glass and copper, that require fire or high temperature in their production. When he went to college in Manchester, about twenty miles from home, one of his classmates was Theo Barker, who shared Harris’s interest in industrial St. Helens. The two decided that they would someday collaborate on a book about St. Helens.
World War II took both Harris and Barker out of college temporarily, but they returned to finish their degrees. In 1954, they published a substantial book, A Merseyside Town in the Industrial Revolution: St. Helens. It was reprinted twice, most recently in 1993. Edwin Layton, in a 1996 letter nominating Harris for the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, pointed out that although the two authors dealt extensively with St. Helens, the book is really a panoramic view of the social effects of the Industrial Revolution in the entire Manchester-Liverpool region, one of the two centers of the revolution (the other being Greater Birmingham).
In a university career spanning more than forty years, Professor Harris was chiefly concerned with British and French industrial history. Basing his published works on exhaustive research in primary sources both in Britain and in France, he substantially advanced our understanding of the history of technology in those countries. He questioned points of received wisdom—for example, the extent and significance of steam engine production in the latter part of the eighteenth century—and in so doing, enlarged the horizons of his chosen field. His studies of industrial espionage, which included the smuggling of machines proscribed by acts of Parliament and the export of workers skilled in the construction and operation of machines in the textile and allied industries, showed in detail how an established technology is in fact transferred from one industrial culture to another. His totally original interpretation of the nature of coal fuel technology demonstrated that the techniques of using coal as a heating fuel in such industries as glass and steel were much more difficult to transfer to other countries than were machines. The techniques for using coal as fuel rested on tacit and fingertip knowledge developed not by engineers or entrepreneurs but by nameless workers responsible for burning coal in those industries. He argued convincingly that England’s fifty-year lead in the Industrial Revolution depended crucially on those workers who gradually developed expertise in using coal as a fuel, because that expertise was exportable only in the heads and hands of experienced workers. As codirector of the Ironbridge Institute (formerly the Institute for Industrial Archaeology), Professor Harris also helped develop a graduate-level school for industrial archaeology and heritage management.
David Hounshell, now the Henry Luce Professor of Technology and Social Change at Carnegie Mellon University, recalls being in John Harris’s classes when Harris served as distinguished visiting professor at the University of Delaware. Hounshell, then a graduate student, told me recently, “I remember so clearly his wonderful teaching around your dining table in Newark my first year of graduate studies—the way he employed slides, and the depth of his knowledge about the metal trades, file-making, and other skilled work in Birmingham and other British cities. These were formative lectures for me, and his book with T. C. Barker . . . and his other writings on coal will forever be a part of the knowledge I gained.”
John Harris’s unique contribution to history was a critical study of how certain aspects of eighteenth-century British technology were transferred to the Continent, chiefly to France. His chief insight came as he studied British coal-using industries, in which he discovered the crucial technical contributions of historically nameless working men. In his research, he came to realize that the workers who made refined iron and glass had been taught the techniques of their trades by senior craftsmen. “The essence of a craft,” Harris wrote, “is its dependence on a precarious combination of manipulative skill embodying a physical training and a judgment requiring both experience and intelligence. The resulting almost unanalysable pieces of expertise constituted the ‘knacks’ of a trade, and the essence of a ‘knack’ is its difficulty of communication.” (Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century, 33.)
Harris’s example of original scholarship based on primary sources, his active involvement in technical museums, his scholarly contributions to industrial archaeology, and his unsettling thesis that much of a nation’s industrial genius lies in the knowledge and ingenuity of workers near the bottom of the pyramid rather than solely in canny entrepreneurs and heroic inventors—these attest to his influence in shifting the focus of technology’s history to fresh and important fields of study.
In January 1990, he was nominated a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French president. Shortly before he died, John completed the final draft of his last book, Industrial Espionage and the Transfer of Technology: Britain and France in the 18th Century. It is a major work, to be published by Scolar Press in London.
These summary observations about John’s intellectual contributions to the scholarly direction of our field hardly do justice to what was, doubtless, the most important thing his colleagues and friends will miss with his passing. John was an exceptional human being, blending warmth and integrity with uncommon intellectual acuity. I could not improve on the closing paragraphs of the obituary published in The Independent (London), May 16, 1997, and written by his longtime colleague, W. R. Garside:
John Harris was a kind man who detested pomposity and disloyalty. He openly displayed the characteristics of his Lancashire upbringing: diligence, integrity, but above all respect for those around him. With a raised eyebrow and a sly smile, he could distance himself from the worst manifestations of academic sensitivity, but when called upon to be tough and uncompromising in defence of matters of principle, not least when they affected students and staff, he was formidable and utterly dependable.
A devoted family man, he was especially proud of the achievements of his two sons. He was rarely seen at conferences at home or abroad save in the presence of his wife, Thelma, whose untimely death from a brain tumor in February 1994 proved a devastating blow. As Emeritus Professor he continued none the less to be active in Birmingham and overseas dispensing that blend of cheerfulness, common sense and devotion to scholarship that was so much part of the man.
Eugene Ferguson, Emeritus professor of history at the University of Delaware in Newark
Originally published as Eugene Ferguson, “John R. Harris (1923–1997).” Technology and Culture 39, no. 2 (1998): 368–71, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1998.0142.
Harris, John R. Industrial Espionage and the Transfer of Technology: Britain and France in the 18th Century. London: Ashgate, 1998. [e-book: London: Routledge, 2017.]
Harris, R. Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France. Brookfield: Ashgate, 1992.
Barker, T. C., and J. R. Harris. A Merseyside Town in the Industrial Revolution: St. Helens. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1954.