W.B. (William Bates) Ferguson was born in Manchester and took a degree at Oxford in 1874 in Natural Science. In 1882 he was called to the Bar and made Queen's Counsel in 1900 but had to retire shortly afterwards because of his wife's ill health.

He joined the Royal Photographic Society in 1895 and was made a Fellow in 1900 following the publication of his paper on copper toning.

For the sake of his wife's health Ferguson moved to Switzerland and established a small laboratory in Arosa to study photographic development times. He published his first paper on this subject in 1905 "Control of the Development Factor at Various Temperatures". After his return to England in 1906 he became interested in the measurement of photographic density and developed the Ferguson Read reflection density meter in 1934. He was involved in the British National Committee for standardisatin of Photographic Sensitometry and was invited to produce the Hurter and Driffeld memorial volume of the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society.