The sudden passing-away on June 18, 1965, of Professor Abbott Payson Usher at his home in Salem, Massachusetts, occasions words here that emphasize anew the impossibility of capturing the vivid life of the mind-his mind-on the printed page. Yet none would have been more tolerant of this failure than he, so unconscious of self-involvement and self-importance was he in his enjoyment of the pursuit of ideas.
Easily catalogued in this day of specialization as an economic historian specializing in technology, by his more than sixty-five publications in technology and economics, he was at heart a theoretician and a generalist in his mature years, ranging in history and philosophy with profound insight and powerful originality. While his family and friends have lost a wise and gentle spirit, the world of letters has lost a creative synthesist of the first rank.
He was a lifelong scholar and teacher, a “Harvard product,” who returned to Harvard before he was forty by way of Cornell and Boston University. In his emeritus years he showed himself to be singularly untouched by the occupational hazard of the subtle provincialism that can manifest itself in the circumscribed world of the pedigreed intellectually able. With the snobbery or the arrogance of that world or of its fringe population of the unpedigreed ambitious, he would have nothing to do. Life was too short (all eighty-two years of it) and the intellectual challenges too enthralling to permit his energies to be diverted in such paltry causes.
As has been pointed out in Architects and Craftsmen in History (1956), a Festchrift honoring Professor Usher and containing a bibliography of his writings, his scholarly research was devoted to several apparently unrelated historical topics intensively investigated, most notably his longer monographs: The History of the Grain Trade in France, 1400–1710 (1913), The Early History of Deposit Banking in Mediterranean Europe (1943), and A History of Mechanical Inventions (1929; rev. 1954).
In addition to many articles, his two ventures into general textbook treatments of economic history were also limited in scope. All his writings demonstrate his unwillingness either to plunge into grand syntheses or to indulge in superficial, broad-brush interpretations of the past. Yet he felt an abiding responsibility to develop a considered theoretical position that would give the monographic bills of particulars hem and his fell ow professionals were producing a wider significance and a more general meaning in the fabric of history.
Early in his professional career he became committed to a fundamental methodological problem of historical writing that took the form of explaining in explicitly analytical historical terms how new things occur, both in the small and in the large. It is not surprising to find that he worked with provocative success on the Baconian-von Rankean level of the microscopic monograph and on the level of what, for lack of another term, we may call the Usherian level of empiricist examination of the historical process.
Thus, the history of technology told only in terms of the singular accomplishments of great men failed, he saw, to examine those events that make the progress of mechanical invention understandable. The standard myths of inexplicable inventive genius, of shrewd “mother wit” and rustic, untutored, native virtue, or of empirical and social necessity ( e.g., “necessity is the mother of invention,” “the time was ripe”) served only to eclipse the essentially social process involving many men, whereby traditional historical strands of mastered know-how converged with each other and with fresh individual insights to produce the bewildering array of technological products and skills chronicled in so-called histories of technology.
The proper history of technology, he felt, was that which recognized not just a larger number of “heroes” but rather the continuous, pervasive nature of the inventive process in time. He considered the history of technology to be especially appropriate in assisting historians “to proceed to develop,” as he expressed it, “the techniques of analysis that will reveal the grosser features of the processes by which man makes himself.”
He used his analysis of the nature of mechanical invention as a springboard from which to proceed to the analysis of creativity in general. His concern as a historian was not with the psychological elements of creativity but rather with the identification of creativity as the historical process, in its personal and its social forms, by which the activities of the remote past generated the activities of the recent past, and those of the recent past the configurations of the present. For him the function of history was, after all, to give meaning to the past and the present. Philosophical empiricist that he was, he would compose that meaning out of the associations he would make or would find (he knew the difference) among the particulars, not out of the imposition of a preconceived framework or an esthetically attractive dialectic to which the particulars ought, a prior~ to be made to conform. In this respect his researches exhibit a lifelong philosophical unity and an impressive historical integrity.
In a period when so much that is novel is uncritically welcomed by so many as a presumed good, he preferred to examine the new with extreme care. Here he was not cautiously conservative, timid, and apprehensive of his reputation when addressing his professionally conservative and skeptical colleagues. He simply preferred to embark on the thankless, lonely, truly scholarly, tough-minded task of systematically proffering genuine innovations in historical methodology and interpretation by both word and deed.
The disarming way in which he used customary words in alien context, the utter unpretentiousness of his style, the lack of the sort of dramatic “dressing-up” of expression that inveigles unwary readers to mistake glitter for brilliance all have helped to conceal the formidable unorthodoxy of his unusual views of history and of the way to make value judgments when examining and writing about the past. As a consequence, few give signs of understanding what he was about and of distinguishing threat from promise and truth from error in his ideas. Fewer still, among historians, have joined issue with his methodological and epistemological positions upon which his views of the historical process rest. So the full measure of his meaning is still to be taken; it lies ahead of us.
He knew this and was content to wait, for by intellect he recognized how slowly spun has the web of thought taken shape through the ages. He would be profoundly dismayed if his views received future acceptance as uncritically as this eulogy may seem to imply, but the occasion of his death is not the time to enter into the controversy essential to the hammering out of ideas. Rather it is the time to consider this man who by temperament and inclination preferred the journeying to the arriving, the exercise of reflective thought to the conditioned acceptance of traditional opinion, and the dynamism of questing to what he felt was the specious stasis of the “established conclusion.” His was truly, richly the life of the mind, and our world is the poorer for his departure.
Thomas M. Smith
Originally published as Smith, Thomas M. “Abbott Payson Usher (1883–1965).” Technology and Culture 6, no. 4 (1965): 630-632. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894645.
Usher, Abbott Payson. “The Industrialization of Modern Britain.” Technology and Culture1, no. 2 (1960): 109-127. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895247.
Usher, Abbott Payson. Review of History of the Milling Machine: A Study in Technical Development, by Robert S. Woodbury. Technology and Culture2, no. 1 (1961): 43-44. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895579.
Usher, Abbott Payson. History of Mechanical Inventions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954.
The Abbott Payson Usher Prize was established by the Society for the History of Technology in 1961 to honor the contributions of Dr. Usher to the history of technology and to encourage the publication of original research of the highest standards in this field. Consisting of $100 cash and a certificate, this prize is given annually on the recommendation of the Committee on Honors to the author of the best work published by the Society in the preceding three years.