Eugene S. Ferguson

Eugene Shallcross Ferguson (1916 – 21 March 2004) was an American engineer, historian of technology and professor of history at the University of Delaware, particularly known for his 1992 work Engineering and the Mind's Eye.

Ferguson was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and raised in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. He obtained his BS in mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1937. A part of the curriculum consisted of regular tours to the plants of heavy industry in the region. In 1955 he obtained MS in mechanical engineering at Iowa State College, with the thesis entitled "Development of the Engineering Profession in America, 1815–1900."

After graduation Ferguson started working in production planning at Western Electric Company in Baltimore. He was also refinery operator at Gulf Refining in Philadelphia shortly before in 1938 starting as construction and maintenance engineer at DuPont. Here he worked in chemical plants that were highly explosive. He later recalled that it was more or less his job "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." At DuPont he became head of the department, and continued working in numerous plants in the region of Pittsburgh.

From 1942 to 1946 Ferguson served as ordnance officer in the United States Navy in World War II. He was stationed in the South Pacific, and back in the States at the Charleston Naval Shipyard in North Charleston, South Carolina. In 1945 he encountered naval commander Robert W. Copeland, who lectured Ferguson in naval history and inspired him to turn to the history of technology. Later hospitalized in a navy hospital, he started studied American naval biographies. Here he got the idea to write the first biography on Thomas Truxton, commander of a number of famous US naval ships including USS Constellation and USS President, later in 1956 published as Truxtun of the Constellation: The Life of Commodore Thomas Truxtun, U.S. Navy, 1755–1822.

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