Robert H. Cushman

Robert (Bob) Herman Cushman (16 January 1924 in Evanston, Illinois – 27 January 1996 in Essex, Connecticut) was an American trade magazine journalist who had written extensively across several engineering disciplines, two in particular during the vanguard of rapid technological advances and ensuing market boom of their respective technologies. In the late 1950s, at the beginning of the Space Race, Cushman had been an editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology. From 1962 to the late-1980s, he was an editor for Electronic Design News. He started out at EDN as the East Coast editor and soon rose to Special Features Editor covering microprocessing. Cushman was widely known within the microprocessing industry for his influential writings in Electronic Design News about microprocessors during its infancy in the early 1970s, through its period of rapid growth and development in the 1980s. His articles, collectively, chronicle the birth and early milestones of microprocessors and, at the time, helped bridge technical development with applications. Citations of his work are prevalent in documents produced by academicians, engineers, the military, and NASA.

At the time of Cushman's death, he and his wife were residents of Old Lyme, Connecticut. Before retiring, he and his wife had been a long-time residents of Port Washington, New York.

Cushman earned a high school diploma in 1942 from the Professional Children's School in Manhattan. After the start of World War II, he entered the U.S. Navy as a Lt. J.G.. Upon earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he served in China. After the war, Cushman, an avid sailor, spent two years as a yacht designer with Philip L. Rhodes, who later designed the Weatherly. In 1959, after serving as Associate Editor of Automatic Control, Cushman accepted a position as Public Relations Director of Daystrom, Inc., San Diego, which was acquired by Schlumberger in 1962, but continued to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary. Cushman had retired as Senior Editor at Cahners Publishing, a longtime division of Reed Elsevier and, at the time, parent of EDN.

Cushman had been a child actor. At the age of fifteen — from January 21, 1939, to June 1, 1939, and from July 17, 1939, to September 23, 1939 — Cushman had acted in the Broadway play, The American Way, in the role of Young Alex Hewitt at that RKO Roxy Theatre. The play ran for 244 performances.

––––––––––––––––––––

––––––––––––––––––––

• Member, International Society of Automation, since the late 1950s
• Cushman filed several patents and copyrights

• Judson Mansions or The Barbarians, A melodrama in three acts, 30 March 1950
• The Scientific Approach to Getting Married in a Hurry, a filmplay by Robert Herman Cushman, 7 November 1963

Cushman, by way of his father, Clifford Howell Cushman (1891–1974), was a tenth-generation lineal descendant of Thomas Cushman (1608–1691) and wife, Mary Allerton (1616–1699) — settlers of the Plymouth Colony. The lineage is all paternal, hence the same surname. Mary Allerton was a passenger on the Mayflower, the first ship to arrive in Plymouth in 1620. Thomas Cushman was a passenger on the Fortune, the second ship to arrive in 1621. Cushman was also an eleventh generation lineal descendant of Francis Eaton, also a passenger on the Mayflower and settler of Plymouth — a fourth generation female descendant of Francis Eaton married a third generation descendant of Robert and Mary Cushman.

Nowadays, tens of millions of Americans have at least one ancestor from the Plymouth Colony, many of whom affiliated with the Mayflower Society. But, according to Galton-Watson probability, only a fraction of that number have an unbroken chain of paternal lineage maintaining the same surname.

Cushman married Rose Katherine Clausing October 4, 1952, in Butler County, Ohio. They had a daughter and a son and remained married forty-three years, until his death.

––––––––––––––––––––