ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Falling out of Science and into Technology: Robert Erskine, FRS and … Hydraulic Engineer and Ironmaster?

• In Event: Spaces of Science in the Enlightenment

English Abstract

Robert Erskine (1735–80) is best known as George Washington's "geographer", providing him with numerous surveyed maps during the Revolution, yet his career trajectory does not indicate that this applied branch of science would become his contribution to posterity. At the time he was an ironmaster at the Ringwood Ironworks in the northern New Jersey mountains, yet he had begun his career as a mathematician (and perhaps natural philosopher and instrument inventor, based upon a unique navigation instrument dear to his heart preserved in his papers) in Scotland, who then fell into hydraulics engineering by way of trying to study tidal effects in the Thames. Elected FRS in 1770 for his work on hydraulics (which is not quite to say fluid mechanics) and his pumping engine, Erskine then fell laterally into the management of the Ringwood ironworks in New Jersey, making a tour of important foundries in Wales and Scotland before departing for America in 1771. Once here, his insights on metallurgy as well as his geographical contributions have been explored, his earlier work on navigational instruments and engines (as well as an extensive, though perhaps somewhat confused, treatise on the tides) have not. These earlier endeavors are however what opened the doors to his later success in America. Erskine’s career demonstrates the fluid intersections between natural philosophy, mathematical practice, and the emergent analytical engineering fields in the late eighteenth century. Further, his story helps explore the relationship of science and technology just before modern engineering appeared and the relation between treatise, instrument, and engine.

Author

• Steven A Walton, Michigan Technological University