Human effort can not add or subtract an atom of the matter of the universe. It can only shift and move matter so as to make it serve man’s wants, — make it useful, or create utilities in it.
F.W. Taussig, Wages and Capital: An Examination of the Wages Fund Doctrine (1897), p. 3.
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While the word “utility” was originally a synonym for “usefulness”, Benthamites and others equated usefulness — called “utility” — with a felicity, and British economists followed in this equation. Losing sight of the verbal transitivity here, most neo-classical economists have lost sight of the synonymy, and don’t recognize that economists of the 19th Century were writing of usefulness as such when they wrote “utility”. Unwinding the confusion is made more difficult, because very few English-speaking economists used the word “usefulness”, and the German “Nutzen” has been misread in the 20th and 21st Centuries even by German economists.
But Taussig not only used the word “usefulness”, but across at least two works explicitly treated “utility” as a synonym.