Lynwood Bryant, 1908-2005
Stuart W. Leslie · Technology and Culture · 2007
Lynwood Bryant, 1908–2005 Stuart W. Leslie (bio) Lynwood Bryant had one essential question: "So what's the bright idea here?" His gifted teaching, meticulous editing, dogged research, and graceful writing inspired generations of MIT undergraduates and colleagues to identify those bright ideas and give them forceful expression. First and foremost, he considered himself a teacher, and he measured his success by how much his students learned, not by how much he published. He took real pride in nurturing the ideas of other scholars, most notably as a founding director of MIT Press. Bryant recognized that asking the right questions could be as important as answering them, and that writing clearly and concisely mattered. His proposed study of the evolution of heat engines, had he found time to complete it, would undoubtedly have earned a place among the classics in the history of technology, right next to his friend Louis Hunter's magisterial A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930. Bryant "grandfathered" (a favorite expression of another close friend, Eugene Ferguson) Hunter's third volume and fully earned credit as its coauthor. What Bryant did publish on the origins of the internal combustion engine, the diesel engine, and on the thermodynamics of heat engines remains the definitive source on those subjects and an invaluable starting point for anyone sufficiently bold and ambitious enough to pick up where he left off. Like so many scholars of his generation, Bryant was an accidental scholar in the history of technology who ultimately found a congenial home there. Lynwood Bryant was born on 8 December 1908 in Keene, New Hampshire. He worked for a local Ford dealer during high school and for some reason took a special interest in brakes. When it came time to teach his own [End Page 236] children to drive, he insisted that using the brakes demonstrated insufficient attention to speed, downshifting, and the road ahead. Bryant learned a good deal of practical mechanics at the garage, but literature and drama were his first loves and to pursue them he entered Harvard University, graduating with honors in English in 1929 and winning several prizes for his writing. He then took what he called "two glamorous tutoring jobs," the first for a wealthy family on Cumberland Island, Georgia, and the second at the Carmel Valley Ranch School in California. Before taking up his next post at Boston's Roxbury Latin School, Bryant hopped on a freighter to join his older brother Royal for a bicycle tour of England. A surviving photograph shows Lynwood behind the typewriter at the stern of the steamer, looking a little like Ernest Hemingway, as the ship passed through the Panama Canal. In addition to teaching seventh-grade Latin, history, mathematics, and science at Roxbury, Bryant directed a community theater group where he met his future wife Louise "Dolly" Graham, who played the leading lady in the company's production of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. Lynwood and Dolly married in 1939 and had three children, son Peter and daughters Susan and Emily. Bryant took a leave of absence from Roxbury in 1937 to earn a master's degree at Harvard in English and education, which he completed a year later. In the meantime, to pay the bills, he accepted a temporary appointment at MIT, and there he stayed. He considered taking a Ph.D. from Harvard and completed his graduate course work—Frederick Merk's classes on the American West and Ralph Barton Perry's American philosophy being particular favorites—all while carrying a full teaching load at MIT. The war and the pressures of full-time teaching derailed plans for finishing his thesis, though what Bryant learned about the American West, constitutional law, and American economic history inspired many of his later courses at MIT. The war also gave Bryant an opportunity to discover that he had a remarkable talent for technical writing. MIT needed people to edit the flood of publications coming out of its wartime laboratories. At the invitation of Gordon Brown, future dean of engineering at MIT, Bryant became an editorial consultant for the Servomechanism Laboratory and helped Jay Forrester and Frank Reintjes, among other...