Ewbank, Thomas

Born: 1792-03-11 England, United Kingdom

Died: 1870-09-16 New York, New York

Ewbank was an inventor, ethnographer, historian of technology, and U.S commissioner of patents. During his youth, his parents apprenticed him to a "Tin and Coopersmith, Plumb and Shot Maker" for seven years. In 1812, he moved from his birthplace in Durham to London, where he joined several literary societies devoted to liberal reform. Ewbank emigrated to New York City in 1819, and in 1826, his wife Mary and the first of their six children followed. He commenced a career as an inventor and manufacturer of tin and copper tubing, occupying the late Robert Fulton's factory at Paulus Hook. During the 1830s and 1840s, Ewbank established a national reputation as an inventor and expert on applied science, obtaining six patents and authoring numerous articles, many on methods to prevent steam-boiler explosions. His publication of A Descriptive and Historical Account of Hydraulic and Other Machines for Raising Water, Ancient and Modern (1842) established his credentials as an authority of applied science, and this volume, plus the financial success of his manufacturing business and moderate Whig politics, brought him to the attention of President Zachary Taylor, who appointed him U.S. commissioner of patents in 1849. Ewbank's tenure was marked by continual controversy in the Patent Office, as his advocacy of science and technology in a commercial republic clashed with the financial and political interests of the Northern farmers and the Southern slave economy. President Millard Fillmore requested Ewbank's resignation in 1852, and the latter complied, returning to New York, where he soon engrossed himself in the fledging fields of ethnology and the history of technology. In 1855, Ewbank published his most important work, The World a Workshop; or, the Physical Relationship of Man to the Earth. An extensive treatise on the relationship between man, nature, and technology, Ewbank offered an elaborate vision of a new social order of continual progress where the engineer and inventor became lynchpins for an ever expanding industrial civilization. Perhaps his most important contribution to contemporary American life came in 1860 with his treatise of slavery, Inorganic Forces Ordained to Supersede Slavery. Ewbank argued that the sectional crisis was at its core a labor crisis, and that slavery, an evil inimical to progress, would simply fade from use as machine technology would render use of enslaved people's labor inefficient and obsolete.

William A. Bate, "Ewbank, Thomas," American National Biography, ed. by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 7:637-38.