Co-Founder of SHOT President: 1977–78 da Vinci Medal: 1977 Abbott Payson Usher Award: 1969
Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1916 and reared in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, Ferguson earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1937. At that time, Carnegie Tech’s engineering program emphasized not only book learning but also practical experience, so the curriculum included regular plant tours—an exciting thing for a young engineer-in-training in a heavily industrialized region once described as “hell with the lid off.”
After graduating from Carnegie Tech, Ferguson held a variety of engineering positions, ranging from manufacturing planning engineer at Western Electric Company’s Baltimore plant, to refinery operator at Gulf Refining in Philadelphia, to repairs and construction engineer at DuPont’s high-explosives plants at Gibbstown and Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. In this latter position, Ferguson once said, one of his responsibilities was to map where projectiles, including body parts, landed following accidental explosions at the plants so as to understand better what had happened and how to improve both processes and equipment. Ferguson’s experience in touring numerous plants in the Pittsburgh region and his diverse experience in working in and running manufacturing plants provided him with a keen sense, throughout his career, of the need to know how things worked.
Moreover, Ferguson’s four years at DuPont’s high-explosives plants no doubt shaped the navy’s decision to assign him to Ordnance Supply after he enlisted and was commissioned a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve in September 1942. During the remainder of the war he saw action in the South Pacific and also worked at the Charleston Navy Yard. A chance encounter in early 1945 with a commander whose ship had recently been sunk by the Japanese in the Philippine Sea off Samar set Ferguson on a course that would eventually lead him to become a professional historian. The commander, Robert Copeland, who was also an attorney, had become enamored of naval history and its lessons, and he shared his excitement about the subject with Ferguson. Copeland’s enthusiasm rubbed off. Later, while in a navy hospital, Ferguson “found the shelf of American naval biography,” as he put it, and soon discovered that Captain Thomas Truxton, commander of one of the first vessels built by the U.S. Navy, the Constellation (launched in 1797), had never found his biographer. Ferguson determined to fill that gap. A little more than a decade later, during which time he taught mechanical engineering at Iowa State College, Ferguson’s Truxton of the “Constellation” appeared in print in 1956.
Ferguson often noted that he learned the hard way how difficult writing good historical prose is. As an engineer, he had smugly assumed that writing history would be easy. Several scholars—especially Iowa State’s distinguished historian of agriculture Earle Ross and Harvard’s naval and maritime historian Robert G. Albion—disabused him of this notion. They also provided him the criticism and guidance that proved to be crucial in his transition from engineering professor to professional historian. So did the encouragement and flexibility displayed by Ferguson’s department head (and eventual dean) at Iowa State, Henry M. Black, who allowed him to submit a study titled “Development of the Engineering Profession in America, 1815–1900,” to fulfill the thesis requirements for his 1955 master of science degree in mechanical engineering.
Not only did this thesis allow Ferguson to continue to advance his teaching career in mechanical engineering at Iowa State, but its “essay on sources” also became the basis for his Bibliography of the History of Technology. The text, with its penetrating analysis and critique of the engineering profession, its deep appreciation for and clear articulation of the development of technology in nineteenth-century American, its dry, sometimes acerbic humor, and its wonderful prose, is pure Ferguson. One of the thesis’s concluding sections, “History’s Message to the Engineering Profession,” provides as clear of statement of why engineers have never enjoyed the same autonomy as doctors and lawyers as one will find in later works by historians such as Edwin T. Layton and David F. Noble.
Ferguson’s growing command of the primary and secondary literature in the history of technology, his explorations as to how the subject could be incorporated into his teaching and research, and his memberships in both the American Society of Engineering Education and the History of Science Society soon brought him into contact with Melvin Kranzberg and likeminded others who determined to establish what became the Society for the History of Technology in 1958. This prehistory of SHOT has been told elsewhere. I would only emphasize here that Ferguson delivered one of the five papers given at SHOT’s first annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in late December 1958. He had been working in Washington since April of that year, having left Iowa State to become curator of mechanical and civil engineering at what became the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of History and Technology (MHT, now the National Museum of American History). During his relatively short stay at the Smithsonian (April 1958 to June 1961), Ferguson developed the basic story line for, identified and collected the artifacts for, and—unless he uncharacteristically curbed his instinctive, insistent sense of “good design”—contributed to the design of what became the Hall of Tools at MHT, which remained basically unchanged until the mid-1980s.
Owing largely to his formal training in mechanical engineering and his undergraduate teaching of heat and power subjects at Iowa State, Ferguson’s early scholarship in the history of technology centered on these topics. Two short monographs published in the early sixties, John Ericsson and the Age of Caloric and Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt, established his reputation as a serious historian of his discipline. In another early-and elegantly written-article, “The Origins of the Steam Engine,” Ferguson brought the deep insights of a mechanical engineer who had taught both thermodynamics and kinematics to bear on the invention of the Newcomen engine. This work later became part of a chapter-one of four-that he wrote for the first volume of Melvin Kranxberg and Carroll Pursell’s Technology in Western Civilization.
Through his rediscovery and subsequent annotated publication of the engineering reminiscences of one of the members of the Philadelphia-based Sellers dynasty, George Escol Sellers, Ferguson uncovered what he believed were some of the essential features of early American know-how. His research on Sellers and his world informed much of Ferguson’s subsequent scholarship in the history of technology in the United States. This work and his considerable accomplishments as a museum curator earned for Ferguson an invitation to participate (with Whitfield Bell, Daniel Boorstin, Brooke Hindle, Melvin Kranzberg, and Lucius Ellsworth) in what became one of the most successful conferences ever held at the Hagley Museum, the 1965 Conference on Technology in Early American History, which yielded the influential volume edited by Hindle, Technology in Early America: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Drawing from his personal experience of working at a national museum that focused on technological development, Ferguson also published an early and much-cited article in Technology and Culture that tied such museums to nineteenth-century world’s fairs and explained their “trade show” features.” This would be the first of several works in which Ferguson thought critically about technology museums in general and exhibition techniques more specifically.
Eugene Ferguson played many roles within the Society for the History of Technology during his years of active involvement. He served as associate editor of Technology and Culture from 1965 to 1975, a title that reflected his serious commitment to refereeing a large number of manuscripts for founding editor Melvin Kranzberg—something Ferguson did throughout Kranzberg’s editorship (and well into that of Robert Post). Ferguson was also a member of the society’s Executive Council (1967–71) prior to his election in 1976 as SHOT’S president. As president of SHOT, Ferguson worked to bring more professionalism to the management of the society’s financial assets. He also paid careful attention to SHOT’s membership demographics, believing that empirical data should help shape decisions, such as where to hold annual meetings and how to help the society grow.
Beyond his own pioneering scholarship, perhaps Ferguson’s greatest early service to SHOT and to the broader development of the history of technology came from his serial publication in Techology and Culture, beginning in 1962, of what became his landmark Bibliography of History of Technology. The book was published jointly by the Society for the History of Technology and the MIT Press in 1968. The breadth of reading and erudition displayed in this work remain stunning even after thirty years. Ferguson wrote in the book’s preface that he had targeted “the student who is trying to get his bearings in a new and largely uncharted field.” He also stressed that “The history of technology is viewed here as a strand of culture history. The relationships between technology and the culture in which it exists are of primary importance. . . As Lynn White, Jr., has observed, it is time that the history of technology began to explore the jungle of meaning.” When SHOT extended its Abbott Payson Usher award to Ferguson’s Bibliography of the History of Technology in 1969, most members of society remained students trying to get their “bearings in a new and largely uncharted field.” Ferguson’s Bibliography and his own scholarship, as well as his formal training of a generation of graduate students in the history of technology, would help to change this situation.
In 1969, following his return to Iowa State University for eight years as professor of mechanical engineering (teaching the history of technology exclusively), Ferguson moved to Delaware to assume a joint position as professor of history at the University of Delaware in Newark and curator of technology at the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation (now called more simply the Hagley Museum and Library) in Wilmington. At Delaware, Ferguson came to play a major role in the Hagley Program, a graduate program created in 1954 through a partnership between the Department of History at the University of Delaware and the Hagley Museum. Not only did he remain interested in the practical aspects of museum exhibition and material culture study, encouraging and tutoring students who entered the Hagley Program seeking careers in museums, but he also proved to be an important mentor to Ph.D. students who chose him to supervise qualifying examination fields in the history of technology and to direct their dissertations. The broad range of dissertations Ferguson supervised over a twenty-one year period reflected his openness as a mentor, his own increasingly eclectic interests as a scholar, and his desire to learn from his students. He was a superb mentor, not only to his own students but to many others as well.
Eugene Ferguson’s greatest contribution to the history of technology and to the history of engineering, more specifically—is his clear articulation of the role of nonverbal thinking in engineering since the early Renaissance. His grasp of this phenomenon emerged only gradually during his transformation from mechanical engineer to historian of technology; even then, its full realization came only after many birth pangs. Both formal analysis and historical study of engineering kinematics provided the basis for Ferguson’s innovation. Moreover, during his early bibliographic explorations Ferguson had spent considerable time with the “machine books” that began to appear in the late Renaissance and continued to be published through the first third of the eighteenth century, culminating with the appearance of Jacob Leupold’s ten-volume Theatrum Machinarum (1707-39), about which Ferguson published a cover article in Technology and Culture in 1971, citing “a need and an opportunity.” In addition, serious scholarship by a number of engineers, historians of technology, and art historians on late medieval and early Renaissance engineering—ranging from SHOT members Lynn White Jr., Bertrand Gille, Frank Prager, Ladislo Reti, Alex Keller, and Bert Hall to others including Gustina Scalia and Samuel Edgerton Jr.—made study of the visual aspects of Renaissance art and engineering an exciting area of reading, teaching, and research in the 1960s and 1970s.
Ferguson’s decision to team up with translator Margaret Teach Gnudi to produce a technically annotated English edition of Agostino Ramclli’s 1588 machine book, Le diverse et artificiose machine, proved to be the catalyst for what became his seminal article on nonverbal thinking, “The Mind’s Eye: Non-Verbal Thought in Technology,” published in Science in 1977. From about 1972 or 1973 Ferguson worked long and often frustrating hours during the final stages of getting the Ramelli manuscript ready to submit and then publish, a situation complicated by what proved to be a terminal illness for Gnudi, who died before the book appeared. Out of the process of figuring out how to convey analytically, historically, and visually the technologies and the fundamental elements of those technologies that appeared in Ramelli’s treatise and struggling to ensure that the eventual publisher would maintain the aesthetic integrity of both Ramelli’s and his own work, Ferguson realized the central thesis of “The Mind’s Eye” and the book that followed it in 1992. Ferguson’s article stuck a resonant chord not only within SHOT and the history of technology but also in a much larger world of research in engineering design, computer science, cognitive psychology, psychiatry, and the social studies of science. I believe that the dozens of letters that Ferguson immediately received in response to this article and the diverse citations to the article that soon followed confirmed, to his own way of thinking, that “The Mind’s Eye” represented his best work. Engineering and the Mind’s Eye, which appeared in English in 1992 and was soon translated into German (1992) and Japanese (1995), extended the basic ideas that appeared in the Science article and in his SHOT presidential address, “Elegant Inventions: The Artistic Component of Technology.”
Throughout his professional life, both as an engineering professor and as a historian of technology, Eugene Ferguson remained an uncommonly modest individual. In spite of his achievements as a museum curator, bibliographer, and professor of the history of technology, he often expressed self-doubts about the merits of his work and his effectiveness as a teacher. All the while, he proved to be a source of constant encouragement to anyone who showed interest in the history of technology, the history of engineering, or even the history of any discipline or subject. In his Da Vinci Prize “intellectual biography,” which T&C editor Melvin Kranzberg had to coax out of him, Ferguson used the term “grandfathered” as the motif that explained his success at every stage of his career, never acknowledging and probably never realizing—that his intellect, integrity, energy, and scholarly achievements had played no small role in the grandfathering that he said characterized his professional development.
Although modest and often self-deprecating, Ferguson possessed a keen sense of humor. Following a class lecture in which he argued that so much of technological change does not fit conventional economic theories about rationality, he took as much delight as his students when he learned that the abbreviation in one student’s notes of the example he had used to illustrate his lecture—an electric spaghetti fork (E.S.F.)—happened to correspond exactly to his own initials.
If Ferguson saw “grandfathering” as a motif of his career path and found much in life and work that was truly funny, his oeuvre complète carries a far more serious theme about technology and engineering. Whether writing about Renaissance engineers’ notebooks and machine books or the massive projects of the twentieth century, Ferguson believed that engineers ultimately were driven by a fascination with technological challenges and opportunities. These motivations—what Ferguson simply called “technological enthusiasm”—explained to him, at least, the basic nature of innovation and the shape of our technological world. Although certain technologies that emerged as a result might only be playful and innocuous (like the electric spaghetti fork), others visited high costs upon society. All the while, the engineers responsible professed that they were simply doing society’s bidding. That Ferguson developed such a critique of engineers and engineering culture is remarkable given that he began his professional career as an engineer.
Finally, and perhaps above all, Eugene Ferguson was a person of great integrity, moral conviction, and courage. He served his country during World War II but not without having explored personally the moral dimensions of war. When in March 1965 he saw on television and read in the newspapers accounts of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, Ferguson dropped what he was doing in Ames, headed immediately to Selma, and joined Martin Luther King Jr. and the other brave souls who set out on the march from Selma to Montgomery to demand civil rights for African Americans. During the Vietnam War, the killings—both at Kent State University in 1970 and in the jungles of Southeast Asia—outraged him, as did the published claims by one distinguished engineering professor that mainly students in the humanities and social sciences were the ones protesting in the 1960s and early 1970s, not engineering students who were on the true path to progress. In short, Eugene S. Ferguson was a remarkable man and a quiet scholar who led a good, abundant life and left a rich, enduring legacy.
David A. Hounshell
Originally published as David A. Hounshell, “Eugene S. Ferguson, 1916–2004,” Technology and Culture 45, no. 4 (2004): 911–21. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2004.0176.
Ferguson’s SHOT Presidential Papers (and more) are at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware.
Ferguson, Eugene S. Engineering and the Mind’s Eye (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1992).
Ferguson, Eugene S. “The American-ness of American Technology.” Technology and Culture 20 (1979): 3–24.
Ferguson, Eugene S. “Elegant Inventions: The Artistic Component of Technology.” Technology and Culture 19, no. 3 (1978): 450–60.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture 19, no. 3 (1978): 465–71.
Ferguson, Eugene S. “Toward a Discipline of the History of Technology.” Technology and Culture 15 (1974): 13–30.
Hughes, Thomas P. Review of Bibliography of the History of Technology, by Eugene S. Ferguson. Technology and Culture11, no. 2 (1970): 298–99. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1970.a894158.
Ferguson, Eugene S. Bibliography of the History of Technology (Society for the History of Technology, 1968). Technology and Culture published parts of this book in the following volumes as “Contributions to Bibliography in the History of Technology”: 3, no. 1 (1962): 72–84, vol. 3, no. 2 (1962): 167–74, vol. 3, no. 3 (1962): 298–306; vol. 4, no. 3 (1963): 318–30; vol. 5, no. 3 (1964): 416–34, vol. 5, no. 4 (1964): 578–94; vol. 6, no. 1 (1965): 99–107.
Ferguson, Eugene S. “Technical Museums and International Exhibitions.” Technology and Culture 6 (1965): 30–46.