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PART IV

Science and Industrial Civilization

Back in the mists of prehistory, two great technological revolutions utterly transformed human existence: the Neolithic and the Urban Bronze Age revolutions—the transitions from food collecting to food producing, and then to complex societies that began some 12,000 and 6,000 years ago, respectively. A third great technological revolution— the Industrial Revolution and the coming into being of industrial civi- lization—has unfolded only within the last three hundred years, a comparative blink of the eye. The result has been yet another world- historical transformation, as industrialization has irreversibly altered the course of history and fundamentally refashioned human societies. The social and economic consequences of industrialization have been as far-reaching as those of the earlier Neolithic and Urban revolutions.

The Industrial Revolution was a technological and socio-cultural transformation that began quietly in England in the eighteenth century. In essence, industrialization entailed a shift away from agriculture as the primary object of human labor and the main means for the creation of wealth to the mechanization of production of goods in factories. As a result, a new mode of human existence began to take shape, indus- trial civilization, and with industrial civilization the human species entered a new historical era. Today, we grow our food, raise our chil- dren, organize our economies, and plan our activities as individuals and as societies in ways that are vastly different from life prior to the onset of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England. An impos- ing list of these differences is not hard to compile: Production became mechanized and powered by engines burning fossil fuels; industrializa- tion revolutionized agriculture in many regions; a wholesale restruc- turing of societies brought us entire new classes of owners, workers, managers, political leaders, and consumers. Industrialization opened the door to a brave new world we have yet to master in full.

Paralleling developments in the realm of technology, dramatic intel- lectual and social changes unfolded in the world of science and natural

philosophy since the seventeenth century. From Newton to Einstein and beyond, from Darwin to DNA and beyond, the roster of great sci- entists and great scientific accomplishments has grown exponentially, and we know the world in different and vastly more sophisticated ways than ever before. In Newton’s day, the scientific enterprise was organizationally not that different from what it had been in ancient Alexandria. Today, supported to unprecedented levels by governments and by a new player on the historical stage—high-tech industry—the enterprise of science has moved from the periphery of society to the very heart of the economies and priorities of industrial and industrial- izing societies today.

As part of this dramatic socio-technological revolution, science and technology have forged new connections, and their full merger in the modern era represents another defining element of contemporary in- dustrial civilization. We have argued that historically science and tech- nology were overwhelmingly separate enterprises through the eight- eenth century. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and only slowly and grudgingly, did governments and an increasing number of industries come to recognize the full possibilities of applying theoreti- cal research in science to technology and industry. Led by key science- based industries, the result has been a dramatic expansion in the appli- cations of science to technology. In short, from their separate origins and historically occasional contact, thinking and toolmaking—science and technology—combined to give us the world we know today.

Industrialization brought a potent combination of new technologies in power production, transportation, military hardware, communica- tion, and entertainment that spread tentacles across the globe, that replaced many traditional technologies, and that effaced many of the barriers separating nations and peoples of the world. Modern science, particularly in the twentieth century and increasingly in the twenty- first, switched from being a narrowly European and “Western” insti- tution to becoming a dynamic and defining element of world culture. Unlike other cultural traditions, science today is fully ecumenical, a treasured part of the patrimony of world civilization, and high testi- mony to the achievement of humankind as a whole. In these ways sci- ence and technology have played essential roles in the historical trans- formations that go under the rubric of globalization.

Part IV pursues these themes and follows the evolution of the new world order wrought by industrialization. We use the term industrial civilization to characterize the new mode of existence that arose coin- cident with the underlying socio-technical revolution. While it is worthwhile to discriminate episodes in the history of industrialization, it is nonetheless essential to conceive of industrialization as a single world-historical phenomenon that originated in the eighteenth cen- tury, that has gained momentum, and that continues down to our own day. To think of this revolution otherwise misses its essential unity and

the grand historical sweep that puts it alone in a class with the Neo- lithic and Urban Bronze Age revolutions of earlier eras. Because we are still so close to it and because we experience its dynamism in our daily lives, industrialization might seem more disjointed than it does when one takes in the long sweep of human history. This wide-angle view is essential if we are to understand and deal rationally with the consequences of industrialization that we face today.

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Many factors have been at play in the making of the modern world over the last two or three hundred years, but changes in technology stand at the center of all accounts, notably the Industrial Revolution, that epoch-making technological transformation that took off in the eighteenth century and that gave birth to a whole new mode of human existence, industrial civilization.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the Scientific Revolu- tion receded into history, Europe remained the scene of agrarian soci- eties. The bulk of the population, more than 90 percent, lived in rural settings and engaged directly in agricultural activities. Of the urban dwellers few worked as factory labor. Manufactured goods were for the most part the products of either cottage industries in farming com- munities or of skilled urban craftsmen. The physical resources that char- acterized those traditional societies were wood, wind, and water. Then, a radical transformation began to sweep first England and, during the next century, Europe and North America.

The Industrial Revolution saw a demographic shift away from tra- ditional agriculture and trade to the mechanization of production, the elaboration of the factory system, and the development of global mar- ket systems to support industrial production. Iron, coal, and steam became the emblematic resources.

The changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution are of a magni- tude not seen since the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when hu- mans first turned from foraging to food-producing, or the great Urban Revolution that occurred with the rise of cities and fully civilized life in the pristine societies at the dawn of written history 5,000 years ago. Largely as the result of the Industrial Revolution, the technical, eco- nomic, political, and social bases of life have become transformed vir- tually everywhere in the last 200 years. The point applies not only to strictly industrial societies, but also to traditional agrarian societies, remaining groups of pastoral nomads, and surviving hunter-gatherers—

CHAPTER 14

Timber, Coal, Cloth, and Steam

all humanity has been affected by the coming of industrial civilization. Industrialization unleashed processes of fundamental social change

as well as technological innovation and economic growth. People mi- grated from the countryside to cities, expanding urban populations of low-paid factory workers; factory labor increased and class conflict intensified; new coercive institutions such as public schools and well- regulated prisons came into being as agents of social control; the fam- ily ceased to be a center of production, and a new division of labor took hold—typically men secured employment in factories while women were mainly restricted to domestic duties. A further demographic up- heaval accompanied industrialization as mass migration saw millions of Europeans head westward across the Atlantic and eastward into the expanding Russian empire. The process surged and became a global tidal wave that continues to transform every corner of the world, often with unsettling results.

Ecological Stimulus, Technological Response

The history of industry in Europe since the rise of European civiliza- tion in the tenth century is the history of long-term economic devel- opment and technological innovation against a background of envi- ronmental constraints and pressures. Indeed, the industrialization of Europe generally marched in step with a growth of population that produced a constant threat of scarcity. From a low of 2 million in the middle of the fifteenth century, after a hundred years of repeated rav- ages of the Black Death, the population of England and Wales rose to about 5.5 million by the end of the seventeenth century and, with increasing rapidity, to 9 million by the end of the eighteenth. (This increase resulted from a lowering of mortality rates, probably through improved hygiene, and from changing agricultural practices.) As the population quintupled during a span of 350 years, pressure on re- sources increased and in some cases became severe.

Perhaps the most serious shortage that developed was in land itself. In England, in many ways a typical agrarian society, land was put to many uses—as cropland, as pasture for cattle, horses, and sheep, as for- est for timber, and, increasingly, for expanding towns and cities as the burgeoning population sought nonagricultural means of subsistence in urban centers. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries English towns, trade, and industry had been growing, but by the mid– seventeenth century growth began to be checked as critical bottlenecks formed. Because economic life is a process of interlocked activities, a shortage or restriction in one area can disrupt the entire system. Dur- ing the eighteenth century several of these constraints were successively broken by technological innovations, and the British economy began to grow again at an unprecedentedly rapid pace. Iron-making, the tex- tile industry, mining, and transportation were all improved by the appli-

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cation of new techniques. Although most improvements were incre- mental, many of the innovations were radical and ingenious departures from traditional methods. The main effect of these technological nov- elties, however, was to expand the economy in the face of a population that was outpacing limited resources and inadequate methods. Behind the process of industrialization a growing population pressed against its economic and ecological limits.

Indicative of these pressures and constraints, the emergence of a set of new farming techniques known as the Norfolk system provided the necessary agricultural surplus to support the coming of industrializa- tion to England. The new practices replaced the medieval three-field system with a new four-field system of crop rotation; the added pro- duction of turnips and clover permitted the over-wintering of greater numbers of cattle, with subsequent and significant rises in meat pro- duction. The Norfolk system succeeded in part by enclosing public land (the Commons) and making it subject to cultivation and private ownership. The enclosure movement increased agricultural productiv- ity, but it also rendered landless sizable numbers of marginal villagers and farmers who were then “freed” for an industrial labor pool.

The English “timber famine” may also serve as an instructive case study of ecological and economic tensions that propelled change in eighteenth-century England. The British Isles were never heavily en- dowed with forest, and with the advent of Neolithic farming thousands of years earlier timber reserves became further depleted by the expan- sion of cropland and pasturage. In the early modern era military and naval requirements along with the beginnings of industrial intensifica- tion placed increasing strains on a dwindling supply of timber. Ship- building, for example, a major industry in a maritime nation, consumed vast quantities of timber. By the beginning of the eighteenth century construction of a large man-of-war devoured 4,000 trees. And just prior to the American War of Independence one-third of the British merchant marine had to be built in the American colonies where timber remained plentiful. The smelting of iron ore, another major industry, depleted whole forests, with each furnace annually consuming the equivalent of four square kilometers of woodlands. And, like the smelting and refin- ing of iron, the making of bread, beer, and glass likewise depended on wood as fuel in the form of charcoal (charred wood). In none of these production processes could coal be substituted since, using contempo- rary techniques, the fuel or its fumes came into direct contact with the product, which would then be ruined by coal’s impurities, notably sul- fur. Also, in the heating and lighting of buildings wood was preferred as fuel since coal fires produced noxious fumes. As the scarcity of tim- ber spread, its price inevitably rose. From 1500 to 1700 while general prices rose fivefold in England the price of firewood rose tenfold. As a result of this energy crisis, by the beginning of the eighteenth century British iron production actually declined, owing to a shortage of fuel.

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The increasing scarcity of wood created a bottleneck in several in- dustries. Under these conditions the incentive to conserve timber did not derive primarily from a desire to increase efficiency. Rather, it was a response to a threatening decline in the standard of living. It sprang from a problem whose roots lay in a wasting ecological imbalance, in- tensified by population growth and the conversion of woodland to other uses. The upshot of the timber famine and the outcome of the Industrial Revolution generally were neither foreordained or foreseen. The fundamental historical processes that unfolded in eighteenth-cen- tury England resulted from an unpredictable interaction of various industries and technologies, including the most important industry, the making of iron.

While iron-making consumed extravagant quantities of timber, it was an industry that seemed to lend itself to the substitution of plenti- ful coal for scarce wood. During the seventeenth century many attempts were made to smelt iron ore using coal as fuel, but all of them proved unsuccessful. In processes like cooking, for example, where the prod- uct could be separated from the fuel by the use of pots the substitution of coal for wood caused no problems. But in the traditional method of smelting iron the fuel and the ore had to be physically mixed for them to react chemically. In the eleventh century Chinese ironmasters had already developed methods of smelting that employed coal instead of wood as fuel, but in Europe a comparable development did not take place until the eighteenth century. In 1709 Abraham Darby, a Quaker ironmaster, succeeded in using coke (charred coal) instead of charcoal in the blast furnace, although not until midcentury did the new process come into common use.

Darby arrived at his discovery strictly through tinkering with con- temporary methods. Neither scientific theory nor organized or institu- tionalized science played any role in the process. Applicable theoreti- cal principles of metallurgy had not come into being, and even “carbon” and “oxygen” were entities yet to be defined. As a typical artisan- engineer, Darby left no record of his experiments or, rather, tinkering, and we can only guess at how he might have achieved his success. As both the size of the blast furnace traditionally used for smelting iron ore and the strength of the blast slowly and incrementally increased, higher temperatures may have proved capable of burning off the impu- rities in the coal which had ruined the iron in earlier attempts.

In 1784 the English inventor Henry Cort developed the “puddling” process for converting pig (or cast) iron to wrought iron using coal, a technique that involved stirring the melt. These changes rendered Eng- lish iron production geographically and materially independent of the forest. With the lag in iron production thus relieved, the world entered a new Iron Age. In the course of the eighteenth century British iron pro- duction multiplied more than tenfold from a low point of fewer than 25,000 tons per year. And from 1788 to the middle of the nineteenth

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century, with railroad construction booming production increased an- other fortyfold.

Another key industry of the Industrial Revolution, coal mining, dis- played a similar pattern of development. It too had been growing in step with population growth, and it too encountered a production bottle- neck. As superficial deposits became depleted, mine shafts were sunk deeper and therefore filled with groundwater at a more rapid rate. Tra- ditional methods of removing water from the mines employed pumps of various designs driven by animal power at the pithead. By the end of the seventeenth century it became clear that a more effective source of power was required to drive the pumps. “Fire engines” soon resulted— devices that would employ fire in one way or another to raise water. In 1712 an obscure English ironmonger, Thomas Newcomen, invented the first practical steam engine.

The steam engine was a technological innovation that changed the course of industrial development. The origin of the steam engine lies in independent craft traditions. Through intuition, tinkering, and a stroke of luck, Newcomen and his plumber assistant, John Cawley (or Cal- ley), hit on the method of condensing steam in a cylinder and creating a partial vacuum so that atmospheric pressure would drive the piston. Even if the idea of atmospheric pressure as a potential motor was, as it were, “in the air,” the actual design of the steam engine owed noth- ing to science. The complicated valve mechanisms, the technique of injecting cold water into the cylinder to condense the steam, and the mechanical linkages to the pump evolved through trial and error. The alternate heating and cooling of the large cylinder made the engine highly inefficient and a profligate consumer of coal; but, nonetheless, Newcomen engines proved sufficiently economical and were widely adopted because they operated primarily at coal mines where coal was cheap. The heavy consumption of coal, however, remained a shortcom- ing of the design, especially when employed in other applications, and it provoked attempts to increase the efficiency of the engine.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century two English craftsmen, John Smeaton and James Watt, using entirely different approaches, im- proved the Newcomen engine. Their work also remained essentially within the craft tradition without applying scientific abstractions. Smeaton, who later became president of the Society of Civil Engineers (“the Smeatonians”), employed strictly empirical methods and system- atically tested model steam engines, varying the dimensions of the parts without modifying the basic design; he thereby achieved a doubling of efficiency of the Newcomen engine. Watt, on the other hand, intro- duced a fundamental novelty that resulted in a radical improvement in efficiency. In a flash of insight during a Sunday stroll in 1765 he arrived at the idea of condensing the steam in a separate vessel kept cold out- side of the cylinder, thereby leaving the cylinder hot throughout the cycle. By eliminating the alternate heating and cooling of the cylinder,

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the saving in coal was considerable. Constructed and sold in a famous partnership with the Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, Watt engines were widely adopted and were soon used in industries other than coal mining. The success of the Watt engine stemmed in part from the commercial strategy of leasing the machines and charging only for a percentage of the savings in the cost of coal over traditional New- comen engines. Freed from a dependence on cheap coal at the coal mouth, the Watt engine could be set up and used to drive mills virtu- ally anywhere, thereby promoting the expansion of manufacture in urban centers. Five hundred steam engines puffed away in Britain in 1800, and the number rose rapidly after that.

Since the early steam engine relied on atmospheric pressure it was necessarily a large machine (sometimes called a “stationary” engine). By the end of the eighteenth century stationary engines were used to drive machinery in factories, and since boats were sufficiently large to hold them, early steamboats were also powered by atmospheric en- gines. But the railroad locomotive had to await the invention of a com-

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Fig. 14.1. Steam power. As mine shafts went deeper it became increas- ingly difficult to remove ground water. The prob- lem was initially solved by Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the atmos- pheric steam engine in 1712. Because it alterna- tively heated and chilled the cylinder Newcomen’s engine was inherently inefficient and was only cost-effective when deployed near coal mines where fuel was inexpensive.

pact, high-pressure design, developed in 1800 by another Englishman, Richard Trevithick. By employing pressures much higher than atmos- pheric, Trevithick’s engine was much smaller and could thus be placed on a carriage of reasonable size. At first Trevithick intended it as a replacement for the atmospheric engines used primarily in mines and mills, but he found that mine operators and manufacturers were unwill- ing to scrap their atmospheric engines for the still-questionable bene- fits of the new design, especially since the high-pressure engine was reputed to be unsafe (a reputation publicized by Watt who attempted to fend off the competition of the new design). Trevithick then took his invention to Peru where he hoped that at the reduced atmospheric pres- sures of high-altitude mining his engine would have a competitive advantage. When that venture failed he returned to London and did what inventors have often done before and since—he turned his inven- tion into a novelty by running a locomotive on a circular track as an amusement for which he charged admission.

But the railroad could not be denied. England was becoming the bustling workshop of the world, and the need to transport bulky goods was rapidly increasing. Despite contemporary efforts to build improved “turnpikes,” animal-drawn wagons on the primitive road system proved inadequate, especially for moving large quantities of coal on inland routes. At first, the solution seemed to be river and canal transporta- tion, and in 1757 and 1764 the first two canals were constructed to link coal fields with Manchester via the River Mersey. Canal mileage and the associated number of locks and crossings increased dramati- cally thereafter. But Trevithick’s high-pressure steam engine altered the economics of transportation by making the railroad possible. In 1814 British engineer George Stephenson unveiled his first steam locomotive. The railroads initially hauled coal for short runs from the mines, but the railroad age truly dawned with the first public line which opened between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. Indeed, a railroad mania ensued, as the world’s land areas began to be encrusted with a dense network of iron rails. In Britain, the railroad-building boom peaked in the 1840s; in 1847 alone nearly 6,500 miles of railroad track were under construction. As railroad transportation developed, it interacted with the iron industry in a pattern of mutual stimulation: the rapid growth of railways was made possible by the availability of cheap iron, and, in turn, rail transportation facilitated—indeed demanded—the further growth of iron production.

The multistage production of textiles represents a case where the interdependence of subsidiary technologies stimulated rapid growth. In a pattern of challenge and response, alternating technical innovations in spinning and weaving machinery propelled development. In 1733 John Kay, initially a clockmaker, invented the “flying shuttle,” which improved weaving but thereby created a lag in the spinning of thread. A combination of technical developments elaborated by a series of arti-

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sans and engineers in the 1760s and 1770s then mechanized spinning; these improvements left weaving as the constriction point in the pro- duction process, an imbalance intensified by the invention of cylinder carding in 1775 which made spinning even more efficient. After 1785, with the mechanically powered loom, to which the steam engine would ultimately be applied as an independent power source, weaving be- came mechanized. Not unexpectedly, therefore, between 1764 and 1812 worker productivity in the cotton industry increased by a factor of 200. In 1813 2,400 power looms operated; by 1833, the number had skyrocketed to 100,000. (The power loom replaced not only the hand loom but also hand-loom weavers.) The mechanization and industrialization of textile production marked the arrival of industrial civilization in England.

The process that began in Britain in the 1780s—what economic his- torians have called the “takeoff into sustained growth”—can be attrib- uted to the mutually reinforcing effects of major industries as they de- veloped separately and jointly. Thus, as iron began to be smelted with coal, it stimulated the growth of the coal industry, which led to the use

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Fig. 14.2. Watt’s steam engine. In 1765 James Watt hit upon a way to improve the efficiency of steam engines: condense the steam in a condenser separated from the main cylinder. That way the cylinder could remain hot through the entire cycle, thereby increasing effi- ciency and lowering oper- ating costs. As important as Watt’s technical inno- vation was, the success of his steam engine depended as much on the manufac- turing partnership he established with the early industrialist Matthew Boulton and the market- ing strategies they devised.

of steam engines to clear the mines, while the need to transport large quantities of coal led to the railroad, which then led back to an enor- mous increase of iron production in an upward-spiraling, symbiotic process. The result was a nation, and eventually a world, transformed. A population of rural farmers became a population of urban factory workers. Locomotives and iron tracks replaced horses and dirt roads. Iron increasingly replaced wood and stone as structural materials, and the steamship replaced the sailing ship. As with the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions previously, once these fundamental processes of change were under way, there was no going back to earlier modes of social or economic life.

Industrial Civilization

Not every aspect of emerging industrial civilization can be treated here, but four features require attention: new energy sources fueling the Industrial Revolution, the new organization of labor in the factory sys- tem of production, new means of financing industrial development, and ideological changes that accompanied industrialization.

Premodern societies depended overwhelmingly on human and ani- mal muscle power and to some extent on wind and water power. For fuels they used renewable resources, notably wood. In turning to the steam engine and nonrenewable fossil fuels like coal and, later, oil, the advent of industrial civilization brought about significant changes in available energy resources and patterns of energy consumption. The production of coal and then oil rose exponentially from the eighteenth century, to the point where per capita energy consumption in industri- alized societies today is 5 to 10 times greater than in traditional pre- industrial cultures. With its sharply increased consumption of energy, industrialization produced not merely a reordering of traditional soci- ety but, rather, a new type of society in which industrial production represents the major economic activity.

Factories were not unknown before the eighteenth century, but the predominant type of manufacturing remained the domestic or cottage system of production, which was household-based or sited in artisanal craft shops. The new factory system that arose with the Industrial Rev- olution came to involve centralized and standardized production using machines, wage labor, and an organization of the production process that involved rigid hierarchies of supervisors governing workers. A series of power-driven textile mills created by Richard Arkwright in the 1770s and 1780s, employing hundreds of workers, represents the com- ing into being of the first factories in the modern sense. The so-called American system of manufacturing with interchangeable parts—devel- oped in Britain, but widely applied in the United States—represents a key innovation that later emerged in the mid–nineteenth century. The formal assembly line, perfected by Henry Ford in the automobile indus-

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try in the second decade of the twentieth century, culminated the evo- lution of the modern factory.

The factory produced radical social transformations. An industrial, urban-based labor force formed a new working class that rivaled the traditional rural peasantry, while a money economy replaced traditional exchanges of goods and services. For workers, the factory imposed an unprecedented alienation of work from home and family life. Bosses were a novelty, and the clock, the medieval device to tell time, became the industrial master that governed time and the workplace. Especially in its early phases in England, the factory system entailed a severe exploitation of labor. Two-thirds of Arkwright’s 1,150 workers in 1789, for example, were children. The Parliamentary Act of 1799 made it illegal to unionize and prescribed a three-month prison sentence for anyone seeking to ameliorate working conditions by means of organ- ized action. The Bill of 1825 recognized worker “combinations” but severely restricted union activity; comparable restrictions on business organizations and price-fixing were not enforced. The doleful effects on labor are one of the traditional themes in the study of the Industrial Revolution. Quite apart from the political and moral issues, the ex- ploitation of labor formed a systemic component of industrialization. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, for example, as cotton production quadrupled and profits doubled, wages remained almost unchanged.

Like labor, capital and new means of financing were equally essen- tial for industrialization. The history of European capitalism extends back to the late Middle Ages, and the development of the new indus- trial capitalism emerged out of the background of merchant capitalism and the success of overseas trade in commodity products through the eighteenth century. Profits from British colonial trade in sugar and slaves provided, in large measure, the accumulated capital needed to fund industrial development. Although authorities created the Bank of England in 1694, the official state bank did little to promote industry. Rather, hundreds of private banks arose in the English Midlands to handle capital requirements of nascent industries. Interest rates fell steadily through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reaching a low of 3 percent in 1757 and remaining low thereafter, despite some ups and downs (as during the American war). A low interest rate made available large amounts of cheap money, without which the capital requirements of early factories could not have been met. Growing out of prior groups of commodity brokers and insurance agents, the Lon- don Stock Exchange opened in 1773, and in 1803 it offered its first list of traded stocks.

The ideological effects of industrialization proved no less powerful. Mercantilism, or the idea of a state-controlled economy restricting free trade in the interests of bolstering exports and accumulating gold and silver for the state’s coffers, had stood as the reigning economic theory

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and the basis of the economic policies of contemporary European gov- ernments. Not coincidentally, new ideas about open markets and free enterprise or “laissez-faire” capitalism emerged with the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Adam Smith’s pathbreaking work, The Wealth of Nations, appearing in 1776, signaled this new ideology of the marketplace. As the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, however, and as unanticipated labor strife and social costs emerged more clearly, other voices began to speak in opposition to free-market capitalism. In particular, the work of Karl Marx (1818–83), Das Kapital (three vol- umes from 1867), provided an analytical critique of the new economic relations. Marx underscored the inevitable exploitation of labor for profit by the owners of factories and the means of production; class warfare between workers and owners, according to Marx, would result in a transformation of society, just as the conflict between the land- owning aristocracy and merchant capitalist resulted in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this way Marx provided the ideolog- ical underpinnings of socialism and communism as political doctrines.

The later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also witnessed the flow- ering of the Romantic movement. In poetry, literature, music, and other of the fine arts artists turned away from classical styles of the preced- ing decades and toward themes associated with the simplicity of nature, the family, and matters of the human heart. This blossoming of roman- ticism needs to be seen first and foremost as a reactionary response to the ravages of industrialization.

The processes of industrialization continued to gain momentum in England in the nineteenth century. Worker productivity doubled from 1830 to 1850. Iron production jumped from 700,000 tons in 1830 to 4 million tons in 1860. Coal production soared from 24 million tons in 1830 to 110 million tons in 1870. In 1850 for the first time the urban population of England topped 50 percent. The first “world’s fair”—the Great International Exhibition—opened in London in 1851. The machines on display within the magnificent iron and glass “Crystal Palace” vividly exemplified the power of industrialization and the new technologies then transforming the world. Britain, at least, was a very different country than it had been a century earlier.

Science and the Early Industrial Revolution

All of the technical innovations that formed the basis of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth cen- turies were made by men who can best be described as craftsmen, arti- sans, or engineers. Few of them were university educated, and all of them achieved their results without the benefit of scientific theory. Nonetheless, given the technical nature of the inventions, a persistent legend arose that the originators must have been counseled by the great figures of the Scientific Revolution. During the eighteenth century John

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Robison, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, publicized the myths that Thomas Newcomen, the inventor of the steam engine, had been instructed by Robert Hooke, one of the leading savants of seven- teenth-century English science, and that James Watt had applied Joseph Black’s theory of latent heat in arriving at the separate condenser. These claims have been discredited by historical research. In fact, the French physicist Sadi Carnot, for example, produced the first scientific analy- sis of the operation of the steam engine in his work Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire published in 1824, long after steam engines had become commonplace. And Watt’s cleverly designed parallel motion could not even begin to be studied scientifically until kinematic synthe- sis developed the appropriate analytical techniques in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, partly in an attempt, in fact, to analyze Watt’s device. These examples rank among the many instances where, con- trary to the claims that eighteenth-century engineers benefited from sci- entific theory, technical developments provoked the interests of scien- tists and led to theoretical advances. In this context it is worth noting that industrialization spread to South Asia and the Far East long before the Western scientific tradition took hold in those regions.

The myth that the theoretical innovations of the Scientific Revolu- tion account for the technical inventions of the Industrial Revolution found reinforcement in the common belief, which has been challenged repeatedly in these pages, that technology is inherently applied science, a belief only partially true even today when research and development

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Fig. 14.3. The Industrial Age. The Crystal Palace, erected in 1851 for an international exposition in London, was a splen- did cast-iron and glass structure that heralded the new industrial era.

are indeed often conducted in close contact. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was almost never the case. This is not to say that science played no social or ideological role in promoting industrializa- tion. On the contrary, as the Industrial Revolution unfolded in Eng- land, science permeated the social and cultural fabric of European civ- ilization. Multitudes of learned societies and academies dotted the European map, where scientists and literate engineers occasionally rubbed shoulders. Public lectures alerted large, nonspecialist audiences to the triumphs of scientific discovery and the analytical potency of experiment and the scientific method. Natural theology, the doctrine that the study of nature is an act of piety, strengthened the concor- dance between science and religion and reinforced the notion of the useful exploitation of nature. Science raised the status of the reasoned life and was honored as a cultural and intellectual enterprise. The ra- tional sciences offered a new outlook and worldview. In this sense, sci- entific culture was important and perhaps essential to the Industrial Revolution. But the scientific enterprise itself continued to be shaped in a Hellenic mold, largely divorced from the practical applications, and technologists and engineers proceeded without tapping bodies of scientific knowledge.

Although technology developed along traditional lines without the benefits of scientific theory, several eminent craftsmen made social con- tact with the world of science in eighteenth-century Europe. In England, engineers James Watt and John Smeaton and the potter Josiah Wedg- wood became members of the Royal Society and contributed to its Philosophical Transactions. But, in fact, their publications had little or nothing to do with their contributions to industry. Watt published let- ters and articles on the composition of water and on the “medicinal use of factitious airs” in terms of phlogiston chemistry. None of these sci- entific contributions had any bearing on his steam engineering. Wedg- wood became keenly interested in chemistry, performed chemical ex- periments, discovered that clay shrinks when heated, and in 1782 invented the pyrometer based on that discovery. He also corresponded with eminent chemists, including Joseph Priestley and Antoine La- voisier. But his novel and successful ceramic ware, which goes under the name of Wedgwood, came before his entrance into the world of chemistry. His father and brother were potters, and Wedgwood him- self was unschooled. He came to pottery through a craft apprentice- ship in his brother’s factory, and his career as a potter led him to an interest in chemistry, rather than the other way around. And Smeaton, who coined the term civil engineer to distinguish civilian consultants from the military engineers graduating from the newly founded Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, distinguished himself as a builder of large-scale public works. He won the Copley Medal of the Royal Soci- ety for a paper he published in the Philosophical Transactions. The paper, a report on his empirical demonstration that overshot water-

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wheels are more efficient than undershot, contained a keen insight, and he applied it in his own hydraulic projects where he consistently pre- ferred the overshot wheel. (Other engineers continued to use undershot wheels because they were less costly to build.) But Smeaton’s scientific preference regarding waterwheels was not based on any theoretical principle and had no significant effect on the industrialization of Britain.

In 1742, the English government, recognizing the need for formally trained artillery (and, soon afterwards, engineering) officers, estab- lished the military academy at Woolwich. There, cadets were schooled in the “fluxions” (Newton’s form of the calculus) and the elements of statics, among other subjects. However, the scant knowledge of the graduates combined with their lack of craft experience disqualified them as working engineers, and during the eighteenth century only civilian engineers, unschooled in any science and untrained in any school, contributed to the program of industrialization. The period of the Industrial Revolution did indeed see a revision in the traditional affiliation between technology and the crafts in favor of new sociolog- ical links between technology and science: the perceived rational meth- ods of experimental science began to be applied in industry, and some of the leading engineers drew closer socially to the world of science. But the gulf between practical applications and theoretical research remained to be bridged.

An episode in Watt’s career reflects the dimensions of that gulf. Dur- ing the 1780s he performed experiments on the commercial applica- tion of the chlorine process for bleaching textiles, a process discovered by the French chemist C. L. Berthollet. For Berthollet the research was purely scientific, and he published his results without regard for com- mercial possibilities or financial gain. But Watt’s father-in-law, James MacGregor, was in the bleaching business, and Watt hoped that the three of them—Watt, MacGregor, and Berthollet—could, by keeping their improvements secret, acquire a patent and reap substantial prof- its. When Watt complained to Berthollet that by “making his discov- eries . . . publick” he undermined the possibility, Berthollet replied, “If one loves science one has little need of wealth.” Berthollet stood almost alone among scientists of the eighteenth century called upon to defend the ethos of pure science. For the others the occasion to apply theoret- ical research to practical problems almost never arose.

Almost never, but not quite. A curious instance occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century when English scientists were called upon to apply their knowledge to industry. The resulting failure points conclu- sively to the features of applied science that were still lacking. The Port of London determined that another bridge across the Thames was re- quired to serve the growing metropolis. Proposals were solicited, and among them Thomas Telford (who later became the first president of the Institution of Civil Engineers) submitted a spectacular design in the

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form of a single cast-iron arch with a span of 600 feet. Since cast-iron bridges were still a novelty, with only three or four having been built, no established tradition or rules of thumb existed to guide the design. Nor was there any theoretical science that could be brought to bear on the project, or any professorships of what would nowadays be called engineering science at universities. The parliamentary committee con- sidering plans for improvement of the port recognized the difficulty and proposed to consult “the Persons most eminent in Great Britain for their Theoretic as well as Practical Knowledge of such Subjects.”

Since such knowledge, theoretical and practical, was not combined in any individuals in 1800, Parliament created two committees, one of mathematicians and natural scientists and the other of practicing builders. Each was asked to respond to a questionnaire about Telford’s design in the hope that useful points would somehow emerge from the combined answers. The results illustrate the futility of the proceedings, based on the misconception that practical outcomes could be derived from the combined expertise of mathematicians who possessed little knowledge of building and builders who were largely ignorant of math- ematics and theoretical mechanics. Among the answers provided by the “practitioners” a few sensible suggestions emerged, but engineers were still defeated by their lack of any theory of structures (which had not yet been formulated) and by the complexity of the design, which would present a formidable theoretical problem even today. But the inability to bring contemporary scientific knowledge to bear on the solution of

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Fig. 14.4. Thomas Telford’s iron bridge across the Menai Straits (completed 1824). In the eighteenth century, iron was adapted to structural engineering. The cast-iron arch bridge was followed by wrought-iron suspen- sion bridges and wrought- iron tubular bridges. Organizational and man- agerial skills proved no less important for the suc- cess of bridge building than the technical mastery of iron as a construction material.

practical problems was especially evident in the replies of the “theo- reticians,” who included the Astronomer Royal and the Professor of Geometry at Oxford. The Astronomer Royal’s views on mechanical engineering were ridiculed not long afterwards as “a sentence from the lofty tribunal of refined science, which the simplest workman must feel to be erroneous.” The astronomer’s incompetent testimony was en- riched only by his knowledge of heavenly phenomena: he suggested that “the Bridge be painted White, as it will thereby be least affected by the Rays of the Sun” and that “it be secured against Lightening.” The contribution of the Savilian Professor of Geometry was equally silly: he calculated the length of the bridge to ten-millionths of an inch and its weight to thousandths of an ounce.

To their credit, some of the theoreticians on the committee recog- nized that science was not yet prepared to minister to technology. Isaac Milner, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (New- ton’s professorship), observed that theory would be useless in such applications until it was combined with practical knowledge. The the- oretician, he observed, “may . . . appear learned, by producing long and intricate Calculations, founded upon imaginary Hypotheses, and both the Symbols and the Numbers may be all perfectly right to the smallest Fraction, and the Bridge be still unsafe.” And John Playfair, professor of mathematics at Edinburgh, ended his report by noting that theoretical mechanics “aided by all the Resources of the higher Geom- etry, [has] not gone farther than to determine the Equilibrium of a Set of smooth Wedges.” At the beginning of the nineteenth century the design of a structure as complex as Telford’s fixed arch was still to be left to the intuition and experience of craftsmen—“Men bred in the School of daily Practice and Experience.” It would be another half cen- tury before John Rankine’s Manual of Applied Mechanics and similar works would show the way toward the engineering sciences.

Whatever cultural influence the Scientific Revolution exerted on the Industrial Revolution, it did not extend to the application of scientific theory to technical invention. Although the governments of Europe were rational in their Baconian hope that science would assist society, their interests were more narrowly focused on governance, while the technical dimension of the Industrial Revolution was left to be crafted by the ingenuity of unschooled artisans working without benefit of the- oretical knowledge. That knowledge was not yet compacted into text- books. The universities had no programs or even courses in the engi- neering sciences. There were no professional engineering societies. The physical constants and practical tables that would convert abstract mathematical principles into engineering formulas had not yet been determined and compiled. And no research laboratories had yet come into being. Those developments and applied science awaited a later day.

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CHAPTER 15

Legacies of Revolution

The movements historians label the Scientific Revolution and the Indus- trial Revolution were epochal in shaping the modern world, but it took many decades for their consequences, separately and jointly, to unfold fully and for science, technology, and society to assume their completely modern characters. Modern science did not emerge full-blown from the Scientific Revolution or full-fledged from the work and worldview of Isaac Newton. Global industrial civilization did not arise overnight in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution or developments sparked by James Watt and the steam engine. And, despite the ideology of the use- ful application of knowledge espoused by Francis Bacon and René Descartes in the seventeenth century, theoretical science did not imme- diately find applications in industry.

The close sequence of the Industrial Revolution following hard on the heels of the Scientific Revolution can easily confuse historical under- standing. In fact, in the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth century theoretical science and technology (the crafts) continued to go their traditional, separate ways. And when they began to merge in the nineteenth century it was as much institutional factors, along with intel- lectual and technical developments, that shaped the partnership. In this chapter we trace the intellectual trajectory of the physical sciences from Newton to Einstein, and we likewise follow the course of industrializa- tion through the nineteenth century. We then pick up the story of how engineering transformed itself into a profession and began to direct the traffic of history. As science and industry forged crucial new ties that established the pattern for applied science today, the application of sci- entific knowledge can, at long last, be clearly seen in the world of the toolmaker.

In the Wake of Bacon and Newton

The exponential growth of knowledge since the seventeenth century presents a problem in thinking about the history of science after the Scientific Revolution. The scale of the scientific enterprise and its out- put in the form of publications have increased by orders of magnitude since then, making it hard to review comprehensively the content of the sciences of the past three centuries. One way around this difficulty involves modeling the phenomena, that is, reducing a complex reality to a simpler model by identifying essential elements, linking them con- ceptually, and seeing how they interact.

It is thus possible to envision two distinct scientific traditions devel- oping in the aftermath of the Scientific Revolution. One, often labeled the “Classical sciences,” includes astronomy, mechanics, mathematics, and optics. These fields originated in antiquity; they matured as re- search endeavors in the ancient world; and they were, in fact, the sci- ences revolutionized in the Scientific Revolution. Prior to their refor- mulation in the early modern period, these sciences were already highly theoretical with research aimed at solving specific problems. All things considered, the Classical sciences were not experimental in approach. Instead, they built on mathematical and theoretical foundations, and they were clearly the province of the trained expert.

The other group of sciences, the “Baconian sciences,” developed par- allel to but largely separate from the Classical sciences during and after the Scientific Revolution. The name derives from the style of science advocated by Sir Frances Bacon. The Baconian sciences—primarily the systematic study of electricity, magnetism, and heat—were without roots as formal sciences in antiquity but sprang into existence as do- mains of empirical investigation more or less as a result of the ferment surrounding the Scientific Revolution. That is, as the Classical sciences became transformed in the Scientific Revolution, the Baconian sciences arose and took shape in the general intellectual excitement of the times. In contrast to the theory-dependent and more mathematical Classical sciences, the Baconian sciences were generally more qualitative in char- acter and experimental in approach, and they therefore depended on instruments to a much greater degree than their Classical counterparts. The Baconian approach was more empirical and only loosely guided by theory.

Newton’s Principia provided the exemplar for the Classical sciences in the technical details of its physics, in its general approach, and in dic- tating problems that the community of mathematical scientists worked on over the course of the eighteenth century. The predicted return of Halley’s comet, for example, in 1758–59 showed the awesome power of Newtonian mathematical science. In another confirmation and extension of Newtonian physics, other scientists measured the earth’s curvature. Then, in 1761 and again in 1769 international teams of ob-

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servers clocked the rare passage of Venus across the face of the sun and calculated the earth-sun distance reasonably well for the first time. On the Continent French and Swiss mathematicians extended research in theoretical mechanics into highly technical fields like hydrodynamics, the mathematics of vibrating strings, and elastic deformation.

Technical work of this sort continued into the nineteenth century. A famous example is the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846. Based on observed irregularities in the orbit of the planet Uranus—itself dis- covered in 1781 by William Herschel—British and French astronomi- cal theorists predicted the existence of Neptune, and German astron- omers in Berlin duly observed the planet the night after they received the prediction. This tradition of the Classical sciences may be fairly said to have culminated, at least conceptually, in the work Celestial Mechan- ics, by P. S. Laplace (1749–1837). Newton’s Principia with its abstruse geometrical diagrams seems quaint and antiquated in comparison with Laplace’s magisterial work (five volumes, 1799–1825) written wholly in the language of the calculus. And where Newton saw God’s presence in his physics, Laplace saw His absence. In a famous exchange, the emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, remarked that he found no mention of God in Laplace’s opus. “But, Sire,” Laplace reportedly re- plied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” The Classical sciences had progressed so far that Laplace could formulate a mathematically com- plete and ordered universe based on the fundamental laws of mechan- ics established by Newton and elaborated by his successors.

Newton’s Opticks (1704), on the other hand, provided the concep- tual umbrella beneath which the Baconian sciences developed in the eighteenth century. In a set of research questions that Newton appended to the Opticks the great man at one point posited a series of superfine, self-repulsive substances to account for phenomena. How can the heat of a warm room penetrate the glass of an evacuated receiver, Newton asked, except by means of such an ether? Similarly, Newton invoked various imponderable ethers and atomic powers to explain electrical, magnetic, certain optical, and even physiological phenomena.

Developments in eighteenth-century electricity illustrate the charac- ter of the Baconian sciences in the era following Newton. Static elec- tricity was, of course, known at least since antiquity. Its investigation took off in the eighteenth century, as new instruments were developed to generate and store static electricity and as scientists applied them- selves to studying a host of new facts relative to electrical conduction, insulation, attraction, and repulsion. (Before the invention of the bat- tery in 1800 current electricity did not yet exist in the world of science.) Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment—first performed in 1752—that identified lightning as a static electrical phenomenon—seems entirely typical of this manner of experimental, qualitative research. On the the- oretical side, in the spirit of the Opticks Franklin offered a single elec- trical ether to account, not entirely successfully, for the phenomena.

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Other theorists countered with a two-ether theory. Notably, there was no agreement. Much the same points emerge in considering the scien- tific study of several other fields, all of which took their lead from the Opticks. With regard to magnetism, for example, the German-Russian scientist F. U. T. Aepinus (1724–1802), working at the imperial science academy in St. Petersburg, articulated an ether theory to account for magnetic attraction and repulsion. The English physiologist, Stephen Hales (1677–1761), deployed a “vegetable” ether in experiments on plants. While Franz Anton Mesmer’s work on “animal magnetism” and early hypnotism may strike readers today as beyond the pale of science, quite the contrary is the case, because Mesmer (1734–1815) operated with the full authority of Newton’s Opticks and the tradition of ether- based research and scientific explanations. Mesmer’s sin was not in invoking a magnetic ether to explain the seemingly miraculous cures he produced in his medical patients; it was, rather, his refusal to share

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Fig. 15.1. Electrical equipment. The scientific investigation of static electricity blossomed in the eighteenth century aided in essential ways by the development of new experimental apparatus, such as glass or sulfur ball generators, shown here. These engravings are taken from the Abbé Nollet’s Lessons on Experimental Physics (1765). They illustrate something of the parlor- game character that often accompanied demonstra- tions concerning static electricity in the eight- eenth century.

the secrets of his discoveries with other members of the scientific and medical communities. The refusal led to his downfall and the repudia- tion of his mesmerizing ether.

One can extend the concept of the Baconian sciences to include re- search in eighteenth-century meteorology, natural history, botany, and geology, all of which were more observational and empirical than the- oretical. Regarding meteorology, the scientific societies served as cen- tral depots and published reports sent in by individuals, and they inde- pendently sponsored several large-scale meteorological data-collecting projects. Obviously instruments (such as thermometers and barome- ters) were required, and collecting weather data allowed a provincial amateur, say, to feel as if he (or in a few cases, she) was participating in the grand enterprise of European science in the eighteenth century. Analogous circumstances prevailed in botany and natural history, where the primary activity consisted in collecting specimens, often from far-

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flung corners of the world. Specimens found their way to central depots in London, Paris, or Uppsala in Sweden, where theorists such as the Count de Buffon (1707–88), Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), or Caro- lus Linnaeus (1707–78) attempted to develop rational systems of clas- sification. “Botanizing,” indeed, became something of a fad in the eight- eenth century, where, armed with simple manuals for identifying plants (and perhaps a bottle of wine), individuals would pass the time in sci- entific communion with nature. Progress in geology in the eighteenth century likewise depended on systematic collections of data. In all these instances research proceeded without sophisticated theory and the other trappings characteristic of the Principia-based Classical sciences.

In considering the different traditions represented by the Classical and Baconian sciences in the eighteenth century, chemistry seems the odd science out. With deep roots in traditional alchemy, chemistry underwent no revolutionary restructuring in the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and chemistry in the eight- eenth century does not fit well into either the empirical Baconian sciences or the problem-oriented research of the Classical sciences. Contemporary chemistry was highly experimental and instrument- dependent, yet in the early decades of the eighteenth century it devel- oped an agreed-upon theoretical structure known as phlogiston chem- istry, and at the end of the century chemistry underwent an independent conceptual revolution.

The history of the Chemical Revolution fits the pattern previously seen for scientific revolutions in general. The theoretical framework prevailing through the 1770s was that of phlogiston chemistry. Phlo- giston was envisioned as the principle of combustion, vaguely akin to the ancient Greek concept of “fire” that is active and released in com- bustion. Thus, for example, according to the theory, a burning candle releases phlogiston; the candle goes out when covered by a jar because the air contained within becomes saturated with phlogiston, a circum- stance that prevents further combustion. (Note that this is the very opposite of the view of combustion after the Chemical Revolution which postulated that the candle goes out because the air in the jar becomes exhausted rather than saturated.) Phlogiston theory gave a coherent account of a diverse range of phenomena—combustion, plant growth, digestion, respiration, smelting—and thus provided a solid the- oretical framework within which research in eighteenth-century chem- istry unfolded.

Several factors led to the downfall of phlogiston chemistry and its replacement by Lavoisier’s oxygen theory of chemistry and combus- tion. The discovery of “fixed air” (what we know as carbon dioxide) by Joseph Black in 1756 and its identification as a distinct gas repre- sents a major milestone. With its own specific properties, “fixed air” helped break down the traditional notion of “air” as a single element or entity, and with improved equipment chemists soon identified a series

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of other new “airs.” Finally, a string of anomalies, which at first ap- peared minor, posed problems for phlogiston theory, notably that mer- cury seemed to gain weight in combustion (under certain conditions), whereas with the release of phlogiston, according to the theory, it ought to have lost weight. Such problems became more and more acute for theoretical chemists. Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94), a young chemist, knew phlogiston theory well, yet he began his theoretical researches with the radical notion that in combustion something was taken out of the air rather than released into it.

That “something” proved to be oxygen, although we hasten to add that even Lavoisier’s mature views of oxygen were not the same as those taught in chemistry classes today. Nevertheless, with the discovery of oxygen gas and the identification of its role in combustion, Lavoisier effected a revolutionary reconceptualization of chemistry, aided in sig- nificant measure by his careful accounting for the inputs and outputs of the reactions he produced. Typical of revolutionary transformations in science, other chemists did not immediately subscribe to Lavoisier’s radical new views. Indeed, led by the older English chemist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), they modified phlogiston theory in ways that preserved satisfactory, rational accounts of chemical phenomena. Well into the 1780s chemists could still reasonably hold phlogistonic views, if only because the latter seemed more familiar. Indeed, Priestley never converted to the new chemistry and went to his grave in 1804 as vir- tually the last adherent of phlogiston chemistry.

If not through an irrefutable test or piece of evidence, why, then, did European chemists shift their allegiance to the new chemistry? Rhetoric and persuasion played crucial roles in the dynamic of the Chemical Rev- olution. Not only did Lavoisier and a band of like-minded colleagues make new discoveries and publish exciting experimental results, in 1787 they formulated an entirely new system of chemical nomenclature. In Lavoisier’s new system, “inflammable air” became hydrogen, “sugar of Saturn” became lead acetate, “vitriol of Venus” became copper sul- fate, and so on. The proponents of the new system wished to have lan- guage rationally reflect chemical realities. But, as a result, students schooled in the new chemistry could only speak the new language, and phlogiston chemists were left behind. This shift was compounded by a related step, the publication of Lavoisier’s textbook, the Elementary Treatise of Chemistry in 1789, which taught only his new chemistry. In this work, phlogiston is banished. As a result of the revolution ef- fected by Lavoisier, from being a central element of theory, phlogiston ceased to exist as an entity in the world, becoming a mere historical oddity.

One feature of Lavoisier’s book deserves particular notice in the present context. In the opening section of his Elementary Treatise, La- voisier is careful to separate heat phenomena from truly chemical phenomena. Thus, for Lavoisier water remains chemically water even

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though it may change its physical state from ice to liquid water to water vapor. To account for changes in state and other thermal phe- nomena, Lavoisier introduced a new ether, caloric. Like the other ethers we have encountered, caloric was a self-repulsive fluid-like material, much more fine than ordinary matter. Thus, caloric penetrated a block of ice, pushing its particles apart and melting the ice into water, the addition of more caloric transforming the water into water vapor. By introducing caloric Lavoisier normalized chemistry within the intellec- tual framework laid down by Newton in the Opticks, and so chemistry after all comes to fit the Classical-Baconian sciences model under dis- cussion here.

The Second Scientific Revolution

A “second” Scientific Revolution began to unfold at the turn of the nineteenth century. Two closely connected trends characterize this piv- otal historical transformation in the sciences: the mathematization of the previously more qualitative Baconian sciences and the theoretical and conceptual unification of the Classical and Baconian sciences. That is, previously separate traditions became conjoined in a new scientific synthesis familiar to us today as “physics.” As the Second Scientific Rev- olution unfolded and these processes of mathematization and unifica- tion proceeded, a single set of universal laws and a powerfully coher- ent scientific world picture began to emerge. By the last decades of the nineteenth century that world picture, known as the Classical World View, seemed at once to integrate all the domains of the physical sci- ences and to promise a complete understanding of the physical world and thereby the end of physics itself.

The pattern of mathematization and unification can be seen in many different specialties and areas of research in nineteenth-century science. Developments in electricity and their ramifications for magnetism and chemistry present a compelling example. Through the eighteenth cen- tury, the scientific study of electrical phenomena involved static elec- tricity only. The accidental discovery of current electricity opened the door to a whole new area of research. In experiments conducted with frogs’ legs in the 1780s, the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani (1737–98) did not set out to extend the range of electrical science but, rather, in the tradition of the Opticks he sought to investigate the ethereal “ani- mal electricity” that seemed to “flow” in an animal’s body. His com- patriot Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) built on Galvani’s work and in 1800 announced the invention of the pile, or battery, which could pro- duce flowing electricity. Volta’s battery and the ever-larger ones that soon followed manifested profound new connections between electric- ity and chemistry. The battery—layers of metals and cardboard in salt (later acid) baths—was itself a chemically based instrument, and so the

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generation of current electricity was self-evidently associated in funda- mental ways with chemistry. More than that, through electrolysis or using a battery to run electricity through chemical solutions, scientists, notably Humphry Davy (1778–1829), soon discovered new chemical elements, such as sodium and potassium, appearing at the poles of the battery. As a result, an electrical theory of chemical combination—that chemical elements were bound by electrical charges—predominated in chemistry during the first decades of the nineteenth century.

These discoveries in electrochemistry generally supported atomistic interpretations that had gained ground since the early nineteenth cen- tury. Following Boyle’s lead, Lavoisier had been content to describe chemical elements as merely the last products of chemical analysis with- out saying anything about the constitution—atomic or otherwise—of these elements. In 1803, out of a background in meteorology and pneu- matic chemistry, John Dalton (1766–1844) noticed that the propor- tions of elements entering into reactions were often ratios of small inte- gers, suggesting that chemical elements are in fact discrete particles. He thus became the first modern scientist to propose chemical atoms—or true indivisibles—in place of the more vague concept of chemical ele- ments. Atomism was not immediately accepted in all quarters, but by midcentury the doctrine had become a fundamental component of con- temporary chemistry. In advocating chemical atomism Dalton and his successors established a link with “philosophical” atomism that had been so prominent a feature of the new science of the seventeenth century.

While scientists suspected some unity between electricity and mag- netism, only in 1820 did Danish professor of natural philosophy Hans Christian Oersted (1777–1851) accidentally demonstrate the sought- after link. Repositioning an electric circuit and a compass after a class- room lecture, Oersted discovered that opening and closing the circuit produced a magnetic effect if the wire stood parallel to the compass needle (rather than perpendicular to it, as might have been expected). By showing the magnetic effect of current electricity to be motion, Oersted unveiled the principle later applied to the electric motor. New discoveries followed, including the electromagnet and the attraction and repulsion of current-carrying wires.

These developments culminated in 1831 with the discovery of elec- tromagnetic induction (or the creation of electricity by magnetism) by Michael Faraday (1791–1867), the self-educated experimentalist at the Royal Institution in England. Faraday generated an electrical current by plunging a magnet through a closed coil of wire. The significance of Faraday’s discovery stemmed only in part from its technical potential in the form of the dynamo (or electric generator) or its being the sought- after analog to Oersted’s production of magnetic effects through elec- tricity. On a deeper philosophical level Faraday proved the inter-

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connection of electricity, magnetism, and mechanical motion. After Faraday, given two of these three forces of nature, scientists could read- ily produce the third.

Faraday’s explanations of electromagnetic phenomena, although ini- tially idiosyncratic, proved highly influential in the long run. Lacking mathematical expertise, Faraday conceived the effects of electricity and magnetism visually as mechanical distortions in space. The case of iron filings distributing themselves around a magnet convinced Faraday of the reality of electromagnetic fields and “lines of force” emanating from magnets and electric currents. Faraday thus shifted attention from mag- nets and wires to the surrounding space and initiated field theory. Unmistakable in all this work is an incipient merger of scientific theory and technological applications, as the new science of electricity and novel electrical devices grew hand in hand.

Complementary developments in optics constitute a central compo- nent of the Second Scientific Revolution. In the eighteenth century the authority of Newton was such that his particle theory of light pre- dominated, even though scientists knew of an alternate wave theory espoused by Newton’s contemporary Huygens. In this case Newton’s influence was oppressive and significant work in optics did not take place in the eighteenth century. That situation changed radically with the work of Thomas Young (1773–1829) and Augustin Fresnel (1788– 1827). Dissatisfied with accounts of diffraction phenomena (or the slight bending of light around the edges of objects) Young proposed a wave interpretation in 1800. He envisioned light as a longitudinal pres- sure wave, something like sound. In France, the young Fresnel upset the established scientific community by proposing that light consisted of transverse waves, like waves in the ocean. Fresnel’s interpretation better accounted for the full range of optical phenomena, including

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Fig. 15.2. Faraday’s lines of force. Michael Faraday postulated that lines of force occur in a field sur- rounding a magnet. He illustrated this proposi- tion by observing patterns that iron filings form in the space around a magnet.

interference phenomena where one set of waves interacts with a sec- ond set. A peculiar consequence of Fresnel’s theory soon emerged, that under appropriate experimental conditions a white spot should appear at the center of the shadow cast by a circular disk. In a dramatic exper- iment Fresnel demonstrated that the predicted phenomenon in fact proved to be the case. He won the prize competition of the Paris Acad- emy of Science in 1819.

With the gradual acceptance of the wave theory of light, old prob- lems, such as polarization, had to be reevaluated, and new research areas opened up, such as determining wavelengths and analyzing the optical spectrum through spectroscopy. (The latter study, incidentally, showed unexpected ties between light and chemistry, with each chem- ical element emitting a distinctive light spectrum.) The wave theory of light also posed a major theoretical problem: what was the medium in which light waves propagated? The answer emerged that light con- sisted of waves in an all-pervasive cosmic ether. In the Second Scientific Revolution all the particular subtle fluids of the eighteenth-century Baconian tradition collapsed into this one unitary world ether.

The study of heat added to the conceptual innovations transforming the intellectual landscape of science in the nineteenth century. With his notion of caloric as a material substance Lavoisier had initiated a fruit- ful line of research in the measurement of heat. In his Analytical The- ory of Heat (1822), Joseph Fourier (1768–1830) applied the calculus to the investigation of various modes of heat flow, but without pro- nouncing on the nature of heat. In 1824 the young French theorist Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) published his landmark tract, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire. In this work Carnot analyzed the workings of the steam engine and elaborated what we know as the Carnot cycle, which describes what happens in the cylinders of all heat engines. For us, his Motive Power of Fire has another telling importance. Carnot’s became the first scientific investigation of the steam engine. By the time Carnot wrote, steam engines had been in use for more than 100 years, and the Industrial Revolution, propelled in large part by the applica- tion of steam power, was well under way in Europe. The case is pre- cisely the opposite of the cliché of technology as applied science. Car- not’s analysis of the steam engine provides the paradigm case, rather, of technology setting the agenda for scientific research.

The most remarkable development in heat studies—and, indeed, in all of the physical sciences in the nineteenth century—was the creation of an entirely new theoretical discipline, thermodynamics, which uni- fied the sciences of heat and motion. In the years leading up to 1847, the recognition arose from a variety of sources that the forces of nature—heat, light, chemistry, electricity, magnetism, and motion— might not simply interact with each other but might be mutually inter- convertible and manifestations of some underlying force. In the 1840s several individuals independently enunciated the first law of thermo-

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dynamics, the conservation of energy—the principle that the various forces of nature can change from one form to another and that an inde- structible entity called energy is conserved in the transformations. In the steam locomotive, for example, chemical energy stored in coal is released, some of which is transformed into heat, light, and the me- chanical motion that drives the piston that propels the train. What saves the first law of thermodynamics from being merely a metaphys- ical principle (although metaphysical principles concerning the unity of nature proved instrumental in its formulation) is that, quantita- tively, the transmutation of energy from one form to another takes place according to fixed exchange rates. The English experimentalist James Prescott Joule (1818–89) worked out the mechanical equivalent of heat to a high degree of exactitude, with the fall of a standard weight exactly equal to a specific rise in temperature of a given weight of water. Building on the work of the pioneers, in a series of fundamen- tal papers in the 1850s and 1860s the German physicist Rudolf Clau- sius (1822–88) formulated the second law of thermodynamics. This law concerns the behavior of energy over time; specifically, it postu- lates that in a closed, undisturbed system energy peaks and valleys will even out until no temperature differences exist in the system. The sec- ond law implies that energy, like water, naturally “runs downhill” and that, without additional work, reactions are not naturally reversible.

Thermodynamics was one of two entirely new scientific fields to emerge in the nineteenth century that fundamentally transformed our outlook on the natural world, the other being the theory of evolution. The concept of energy and the laws of thermodynamics united the physical sciences on a deeper and entirely unprecedented level and pro- vided the basis for the conceptually unified worldview that coalesced at the end of the century.

For the physical sciences, at least, the Classical World View (or Clas- sical Synthesis) of the latter half of the nineteenth century offered a comprehensive vision and a unified intellectual picture of the physical world unmatched historically since the Middle Ages and the heyday of the Aristotelian outlook. The unity of the Classical World View crys- tallized around the work of James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79). Maxwell mathematicized Faraday’s more qualitative notions of the electromag- netic field and gave the world the elegant mathematical expressions that describe the field in the form of wave equations, known as Maxwell’s equations. Two aspects of Maxwell’s achievement proved instrumen- tal in confirming the Classical World View. First, electromagnetic waves possessed a finite velocity, and a constant, c, appearing in Maxwell’s equations proved to be identical to the speed of light. When this under- standing emerged it seemed to confirm a deep connection between elec- tromagnetism (via Faraday-Maxwell) and optics (via Fresnel). Second, Maxwell’s equations seem to imply that under appropriate conditions electromagnetic waves might be generated and transmitted. When

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Heinrich Hertz (1854–94) proved the existence of these electric waves in 1887–88—we know them as radio waves—Maxwell’s equations and an integrated view of electricity, magnetism, light, and radiant heat seemed abundantly confirmed.

Taking its fundamental parameters from Newton and German phi- losopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the Classical World View thus began with notions of absolute space and time—space being uniform and Euclidean and time flowing inexorably and constantly. The vision that came into focus around Maxwell’s work then posited three enti- ties in the world: matter, a universal ether, and energy. Matter consisted of chemical atoms that had no interior parts, that were individually identical and distinct from one another; in this view all oxygen atoms, for example, were identical and categorically dissimilar from all hydro- gen atoms. The Russian chemist D. I. Mendeleev (1834–1907) arranged the elements into a chemical table of families, each atom with its own atomic number and weight. Although atoms could combine chemically, thus giving rise to the wealth of chemical substances evident in the world, the nature of the chemical bond remained obscure. Atoms, mol- ecules, and larger bodies are endowed with mechanical energy and move; the dynamical motion of atoms and molecules determines their degree of heat; for gases, that motion came to be analyzed by the new discipline of statistical mechanics.

The material stuff of the world—its atoms and molecules—also pos- sessed an intrinsic attractive force that allowed particles to agglomer- ate into larger and larger bodies. The force of gravity, therefore, pro- vided a bridge between the invisible atomic world and the macroscopic world known to mechanics and astronomy. (Scientists no more under- stood the nature of gravitational force at the end of the nineteenth cen- tury than they had in Newton’s day, or do in ours, but all experience confirmed such a force.) On the cosmic scale moving bodies like the earth, moon, planets, and comets obeyed the laws of classical physics, and in this way the Classical World View incorporated the tradition of the Classical sciences initiated by Newton and perfected by two cen- turies of problem-solving research.

The world ether complemented ordinary matter. This universal ether, as we have seen, provided the substratum for radiation: light, radiant heat, and the electromagnetic field, all of which embodied energy. Reg- ular matter, the ether, and energy were all interconnected and obeyed the laws of thermodynamics. Thus, mechanical, chemical, electrical, magnetic, and light energy can become transformed one into another. The second law of thermodynamics, in particular, by introducing what has been called the “arrow of time,” provided a major pillar on which the Classical World View rested. For seventeenth-century mechanics, for example, the laws of impact, say, were perfectly reversible—theo- retically billiard shots work the same in one direction or its reverse; in contrast, the second law of thermodynamics posited an irreversible

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direction to time and the behavior of energy. Although couched in ab- stract and highly mathematical terms, the second law envisioned the ultimate “heat death” of the universe with all energy equally diffused throughout the cosmos, with atoms and molecules ultimately vibrating with a uniform degree of heat just above absolute zero.

The Classical World View outlined here came together in the 1880s. It represented a powerful, coherent, and mathematically exact under- standing of the physical aspects of the cosmos and the interconnected- ness of natural phenomena. With the coalescence of the Classical World View, the enterprise of natural philosophy that had begun so long ago in ancient Greece seemed almost to draw to a close, at least as far as the physical sciences were concerned. Yet it would be a mistake to overemphasize the consensus that developed around the Classical World View or how much agreement the elaborate and esoteric claims of contemporary science actually attracted. In point of fact, serious and lively debates arose among scientists and philosophers as to whether the Classical World View represented the true and underlying reality of nature. Furthermore, a series of unexpected discoveries soon dispelled any overconfident sense of closure and set the stage for yet another rev- olution, the twentieth-century revolution in physics launched by Albert Einstein.

The focus on the physical sciences in the foregoing analysis should not obscure important developments to be noted in the history of the life sciences in the nineteenth century. That the term biology (or science of life) was coined only in 1802 signals how much biology was a char- acteristically nineteenth-century field, particularly in the coming-into- being of laboratory-based and experimental approaches to investigat- ing the chemistry and physiology of life. Although Robert Hooke had coined the term cell in the seventeenth century, cell theory did not emerge until the 1830s when German scientists M. J. Schleiden (1804– 81) and Theodor Schwann (1810–82) looked through their micro- scopes and identified the cell as the basic unit of plant and animal tis- sue and metabolism. Claude Bernard’s Lessons in Experimental Phys- iology (1855) and his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) provided exemplars for the new style of research, out of which emerged the germ theory of disease, articulated by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur in the 1870s. The germ theory reinforced the claims and status of science-based medicine and medical research, and it eliminated once and for all the ancient view of humoral pathology as well as competing environmental explanations for the cause of disease. Experimental medicine and biology, like so much else of contemporary science, evolved under changed institutional and professional circum- stances. We turn next to this new institutional basis for science in the nineteenth century.

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Science Reorganized, Again

The professionalization of science and careers in science represents a milestone along the route to today’s scientific culture. Who is a scien- tist and how does one become a scientist? Historically, individuals who pursued investigations into nature have occupied many disparate social roles: the priests and anonymous scribes of the first civilizations; Greek natural philosophers; Islamic doctors and astronomers; Chinese man- darins and officials; medieval European university professors; Renais- sance artists, engineers, and magi; and Enlightenment academicians. What needs emphasis here is that the modern social role of the scien- tist first appeared in the nineteenth century coincident with the Second Scientific Revolution.

A major element involved in the creation of the modern scientist as a recognizable social type was the establishment of a new institutional base for science in the nineteenth century, a second “organizational rev- olution” comparable to the first that formed part of the initial Scien- tific Revolution. The mainstays of organized science in the eighteenth century—state-sponsored learned societies—continued in the nine- teenth, but less as centers for original research and more as honorary organizations rewarding past scientific achievement. In their place a complementary set of more vital institutions emerged for the practice of science. Established in 1794 in revolutionary France, the École Poly- technique provided a key institutional setting where France’s leading scientists taught advanced theory to an exceptional generation of stu- dents who made France the leading scientific nation through the 1830s. (It also became the model for West Point and polytechnic colleges in the United States and elsewhere.)

In England the Royal Institution, founded in 1799, provided a home for such luminaries as Davy and Faraday. A revealing institutional nov- elty and sign of the times was the creation of hundreds of Mechanics Institutes throughout Great Britain and North America, which at their height in the nineteenth century provided instruction in the sciences to over 100,000 artisans and interested middle-class amateurs.

The reform of the German university system represents the most thoroughgoing manifestation of this new organizational basis for nineteenth-century science. Beginning with the foundation of the Uni- versity of Berlin in 1810, the natural sciences gradually gained a pow- erful new position within the network of universities in the German- speaking states. Nineteenth-century German universities became secular state institutions, and science instruction fulfilled a service function for the state in helping to train secondary-school teachers, physicians, pharmacists, bureaucrats, and other professionals.

An unprecedented emphasis on scientific research distinguished sci- ence education in this new context. That is, the role of a science pro-

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fessor was not merely to transmit old knowledge to students, but to lead the way in the production and dissemination of new knowledge. Several new pedagogical modes emerged to facilitate the new research agenda within universities, including the now-familiar teaching labo- ratory (inaugurated in 1826 by Justus von Liebig’s chemistry lab at Geissen), graduate-level scientific seminars and colloquia, and special- ized institutes within universities equipped for advanced research. The formal textbook as a medium for instruction in the sciences emerged for the first time as part of these developments, and the Ph.D. became a requirement for a career in science. The decentralized nature of the German university system spurred competition among the separate German states for scientific talent and thereby raised the level of re- search in science. The advent of polytechnic schools in later nineteenth- century Germany—the Technische Hochschulen—strengthened these trends by elevating pure science research in the university above ap- plied-science training in the Technische Hochschulen. And the impor- tance of science and scientists within the context of German higher education grew further as connections to technology and industry de- veloped in the second half of the century, notably in the chemical industry, electrotechnology, and precision optics. The model of the research university soon spread outside of Germany, as the example of the Johns Hopkins University (1876) illustrates.

A characteristic feature of the first Scientific Revolution had been the social and intellectual turning away from the medieval university by the vanguard of science. After two centuries in the background the uni- versity once again became the leading institution for the natural sci- ences as part of the Second Scientific Revolution of the nineteenth cen- tury. Even in England, where the universities were slow to respond to the upsurge in scientific research, by the third quarter of the century the two oldest universities, Oxford and Cambridge, along with newly founded ones in London (1826) and elsewhere in Great Britain, estab- lished new scientific professorships and sponsored research, some of it in fields bordering on technology and industry. None of these develop- ments, however, changed the essentially male-dominated character of nineteenth-century science. As in the past, a mere handful of women became directly involved in science, usually exercising subsidiary func- tions. Some nontrivial exceptions include the American astronomer Maria Mitchell (1818–89) and the Russian mathematician Sonya Kovalevsky (1850–91) who received a Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 1874. The American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932) became president of the Association of American Geog- raphers but was not permitted to matriculate when she studied at the University of Leipzig in the 1890s and, when attending lectures, was required to sit alone in an adjoining room.

In a separate set of developments the hospital likewise became reor- ganized as a locus of medico-scientific research as well as practice. Par-

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ticularly large urban hospitals provided cadres of patients for system- atic autopsies, clinical trials, and statistical compilations. The hospital has provided an institutional mainstay for medical science and scien- tific research since the nineteenth century.

The professionalization of science also came to entail specialized institutions. While the traditional learned societies, such as the Royal Society in London or the French Academy of Sciences, generally repre- sented all of the sciences, in the nineteenth century specialized organi- zations devoted to single disciplines gradually supplanted the former as the primary seats for the identity of scientists and the presentation of their research. England led the way in new institutions of this sort with the Linnaean Society (1788), the Geological Society of London (1807), the Zoological Society of London (1826), the Royal Astronom- ical Society (1831), and the Chemical Society of London (1841). New publication patterns also emerged, wherein specialized journals com- peted with the general journals of the traditional scientific societies as the loci of original publication in the sciences. Among the noted early specialized journals one might mention Lorenz Crell’s Chemische Jour- nal (1778), Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (1787), the Annales de Chemie (1789), and the Annalen der Physik (1790), with similar specialized journals proliferating as the nineteenth century progressed. Finally in this connection, the nineteenth century saw the appearance of societies representing the professional interests of scientists, including the Asso- ciation of German Researchers (the Deutsche Naturforscher Versamm- lung from 1822), the British Association for the Advancement of Sci- ence (from 1831), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1847).

That the English word scientist was coined in 1840 is powerful tes- timony to the profound social changes surrounding science and scien- tific investigators at the time. Obviously, science and its practitioners had been part of the learned world at least since the dawn of civiliza- tion in ancient Mesopotamia. Yet it is telling of the changed circum- stances of organized science in the nineteenth century that only then did the “scientist” emerge full blown as a social and professional entity.

The Spread of Industrial Civilization

Coincident with these developments in the world of science and nat- ural philosophy in the nineteenth century, industrialization accelerated its impact on the landscape of human existence. What had begun hap- hazardly in the coal, iron, and textile industries in England in the eight- eenth century coalesced into a mighty new mode of production, con- sumption, and social organization. Yet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century industrialization had still made only limited impact even in England, and its effects had hardly been felt elsewhere in the world. But from that point in time industrialization spread outward

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from England in waves across the globe, and by 1900 the world had become a very different place than it was in 1800, as industrialization worked its transforming effects. But this deep technological and social metamorphosis occurred unevenly and in stages down to today. Fur- thermore, unlike the Neolithic and Urban Bronze Age revolutions of prehistory, industrialization has unfolded with amazing rapidity.

The eruption of industrialization on the world scale may be said to have begun in the period 1820–40. Belgium, Germany, France, and the United States were the first countries outside of England to be affected. Germany reached the landmark of 50 percent urban population in 1900, France and the United States by 1920. While the Netherlands, Scandinavia, parts of Spain, and northern Italy joined the core area of industrial civilization, the spread of industrialization over the Euro- pean continent and North America was not uniform. Most of Eastern Europe, for example, and pockets within industrialized countries (such as Ireland and the American South and Southwest) remained over- whelmingly agrarian and pastoralist well into the twentieth century, as did much of the rest of the world into the twenty-first century.

Although notable national and regional differences characterize the process, industrialization in each case centered primarily on the iron industry, textiles, the railroad, and, later, electrification. As industrial intensification continued, new areas of activity arose in construction, food processing, farming, and housework. By the end of the nineteenth century, whole new science-based industries began to emerge coinci- dent with advances in electricity and chemistry. An expanded service sector complemented the core industries, often employing women as clerks, schoolteachers, nurses, secretaries, and, following the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, telephone opera- tors. And where industrial development took root, higher education eventually reflected its progress. Engineering, nursing, teaching, and architecture became professions in the nineteenth century through the establishment of university programs. In the case of engineering such programs leaned heavily (and increasingly) on the basic sciences, even when they were not fully applicable.

By the 1870s these developments transformed Europe and the United States into the dominant powers in the world. A new era of colonial development unfolded, and the so-called new imperialism of the nine- teenth century ensued with the solidifying of English rule in India, the creation of a new French colonial empire in Southeast Asia and Africa, the spread of Russian power eastward across Asia, Western incursions into China, the forcible opening of Japan to the United States in 1853– 54, and the “scramble for Africa” by European powers after 1870. The point that deserves emphasis is that Europe and the United States dom- inated other countries and peoples in large measure because they monopolized the process of industrial intensification. Other countries did not possess the resources or technical capabilities to match the

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nations of Europe or America in output of armaments, railroad track, electricity, or shipping. By the nineteenth century Europeans had been making themselves felt on the world scene for three centuries, but at least the traditional high civilizations in India, China, and Japan had more or less successfully resisted succumbing. That changed as the nine- teenth century unfolded, and by 1914 the global empires of the West- ern powers enveloped 84 percent of the world.

The spread of industrialization is thus intimately linked to the his- tory of European colonialism and imperialism. Imperialism fostered industrialization by spurring production in Europe, by securing cheap sources of raw materials overseas, and by creating new markets for the products of industrial production. India provides a relevant example. Prior to the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the formal takeover of India by the British government in 1858, India ranked as one of the most technically advanced regions of the world. With the loss of its political independence, what followed amounted to the deindustrial- ization of a flourishing traditional economy. In short, British rule brought Western-style industrialization but undermined the traditional economy. Railroads, of course, proved essential to effective British con- trol over India, and railroads spread rapidly over the subcontinent. The first railroad began operations in India in 1853. By 1870 engineers had laid over 4,500 miles of track; by 1936 mileage had risen to 43,000 miles, creating the fourth largest railroad system in the world. Hardly a decade after Morse’s first telegraph line in America, a telegraph sys- tem arose in India literally alongside the railroad. By 1857 4,500 miles of wire had been strung, and in 1865 India became connected to Britain by telegraph cable. But notably, these technologies did not spur indus-

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Fig. 15.3. Industrial pol- lution. In developed soci- eties today scenes such as this one from the 1920s are less and less common, as industries and nations begin to take care to con- trol their emissions and preserve a healthy envi- ronment. Such concerns are less strongly felt in developing regions where the expense of pollution controls is less easily met. It remains to be seen if industrial civilization can achieve a sustainable bal- ance with the earth’s ecology.

trial development in India itself. Rather, they served as instruments of colonial control and as transportation and communications conduits to extract raw materials and commodity products and to bring British manufactured goods to Indian markets. Thus, for example, India went from being the world’s largest exporter of textiles to a net importer. The traditional shipbuilding industries that flourished in India through the nineteenth century—often fulfilling European contracts—became completely outmoded and outdated once the shift to steamships began. Although indigenous Western-style industrial activity developed in India later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the initial effect of con- tact with industrial Europe resulted in increasing poverty through tech- nological displacement, unemployment, and neglect of the traditional agricultural infrastructure. The pattern of colonial and imperialist ex- ploitation seen in India repeated itself in virtually every other European encounter with the nonindustrialized world. That is, the success and power of the Western industrial economies virtually precluded the in- dependent development of industrialization elsewhere. Poorer and less- developed nations hardly stood a chance against the technical and economic power of the European onslaught, soon followed by an American second act.

A constellation of new technological practices provided the basis for further European dominance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and for the imposition of European imperialism on an even greater worldwide scale, particularly in Africa and Asia. At the heart of the matter is what has been labeled the “industrialization of war,” that is, the application of industrial methods to the production of war materiel. Consider, for example, the steamship. Developed in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the steamship quickly and reliably moved goods and people and furthered the penetration of river systems around the world. As a military vessel, the flat-bottomed steamship was introduced into the Royal Navy in 1823, and it secured British victories as early as the 1840s in the Opium Wars in China. Development of the steam- ship culminated in the steel-hulled coal-fired ship armed with breech- loading rifled artillery firing high-explosive shells. Floating citadels like the massive HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, allowed the projec- tion of Western power to virtually any coastal area in the world. Ulti- mately, with 15-inch guns and elaborate sighting, loading, and recoil systems, they could strike targets within a 20-mile range. Explosive shells, in place of cannonballs, spelled the end of the wooden warship. Only those nations with the resources and know-how to produce steel could play the deadly new game

A word needs to be said about steel. Although the term steel was used loosely prior to the nineteenth century, the material, an alloy of iron and carbon, was first produced in quantity after the spectacular invention in the 1840s of an inexpensive method of producing wrought iron. What became known as the Bessemer process was hailed at the

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time as “the greatest invention ever made.” The product of the tradi- tional blast furnace is cast, or pig, iron, a material with the brittle char- acteristics of stone but with the advantage of being able to be cast in intricate shapes. Chemically, it is iron with around 2 percent carbon. To produce wrought iron, molten cast iron was laboriously stirred, whereby the carbon was reduced and a one- to two-hundred–pound “bloom” of wrought, or malleable, iron was produced. This was the blacksmith’s iron, malleable under the hammer. The replacement of this laborious and time-consuming process was totally unforeseen. First an American ironmaster, Thomas Kelly, and soon afterward a British experimental entrepreneur, Henry Bessemer, accidentally hit on the sur- prising discovery that if air is blown through the molten cast iron a vio- lent, explosive reaction occurs and in less than half an hour a large vat of cast iron is converted to wrought iron. (The carbon in the cast iron combines with oxygen in the air and passes off as a gas.) The Age of Wrought Iron had arisen, symbolized by the Eiffel Tower (1889) and numerous other structures, including the armature of the Statue of Lib- erty in New York City. But this age was short-lived, soon to be suc- ceeded by the Age of Steel as British ironmasters and chemists learned to produce true steel, with a carbon content intermediate between that of cast and wrought iron. The new material was malleable, like wrought iron, but with a tensile strength much higher than wrought or cast iron. If the Eiffel Tower in Paris is the symbol of the Age of Wrought Iron,

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Fig. 15.4. The Industrial- ization of War. Launched in 1906, the HMS Dread- nought was the most for- midable armored battle- ship of its day. With a main battery of ten 12- inch guns, driven by a steam turbine power- plant, and capable of a speed of 21 knots, this revolutionary vessel surpassed every previous warship in design and military capability and was testimony to the might of industrial civi- lization in Britain.

the Empire State Building in New York City—built in 1930—is the sym- bol of the Age of Steel.

Steel provided the raw material for the armaments of industrialized warfare. The arms race that developed in the second half of the nine- teenth century in Europe among England, Germany, and France esca- lated military developments and led to the creation of machine guns, rapid-firing bolt-action rifles, new types of bullets, submarines, self- propelled torpedoes, destroyer battle groups, and the full armamentar- ium of modern warfare, including the “gunboat diplomacy” so char- acteristic of Western relations with the non-Western world. In the 1860s the American Civil War presaged the effects of the industrialization of land warfare, mainly through the use of railroads to move military units, and the victory of the United States over Spain in the Spanish- American War in 1898 signaled the beginnings of extraterritorial Amer- ican imperialism. The industrialization of war expanded in World War I, with combatants dependent on heavy industry, submarines, tanks, railroads, nascent air power, and poison gas, the last clearly indicating the participation of scientists, science, and the chemical industry in the war effort. Indeed, World War I has been called the “chemists’ war.” And, finally along these lines, in the interwar period the rapid develop- ment of the warplane and motorized military vehicles gave European imperialism and colonial powers new weapons with which to enforce their rule and to compete among themselves. Military technologies and industrial development stimulated each other at the end of the nine- teenth century, in a manner akin to the effects of the steam engine and the railroad over the previous century.

The industrialization of Russia extended industrial civilization east- ward from its European base. Only partly a European nation, nine- teenth-century Russia preserved a traditional, agrarian economy. The Tsarist government prevented the outright colonization of the country by foreign powers, but industrialization in Russia depended on outside expertise and capital (mostly from England). At the same time, railroad building provided a mechanism for Russia’s own imperialist expansion across Asia. The Moscow–St. Petersburg line opened in 1851, and the number of railroad miles mushroomed from 700 in 1860, to 12,500 in 1878, to 21,000 in 1894, and to over 36,000 in 1900. The first leg of the Trans-Siberian Railroad opened in 1903. By 1913, with over 43,000 miles of railroad, Russia possessed the fifth largest industrial economy in the world.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Soviet government speeded the industrialization of the nation, achieving during the 1930s the most rapid rate of industrial development in history. By the late 1940s, despite the heavy toll of World War II, the Soviet Union emerged as the second largest manufacturing economy in the world (the United States was first), with leading heavy industries in coal, iron, and steel production, chemicals, oil production, and electric power generation;

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as always, industrialization brought massive urbanization. Officials achieved the transformation of the Soviet economy with heavy-handed state planning, extraordinary inefficiencies, and great human cost, but also with more attention to worker issues, including concern for edu- cation, medical and child care, and recreation. From the point of view of the history of industrialization, the case of the Soviet Union stands out, especially insofar as developments there took place largely inde- pendent of industrialization elsewhere and in the face of hostile reac- tions in the West, including an American embargo on trade that lasted, at least officially, until 1933. The future of industrial development in the former Soviet Union is a question that historians will be keen to judge.

But, inevitably, industrialization spread beyond its European and American homeland. Japan presents a notable case in the elaboration of the world industrial economy today. Through 1870, industrial in- tensification remained confined to the West, and Japan became the first country to break the European stranglehold. Forcibly opened to out- side trade in 1854, Japan, unlike India, managed to maintain its po- litical independence and never became subjected to outright foreign control. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 signaled the end of feudal gov- ernment in Japan, and a combination of traditional merchant classes and progressive government civil servants began to promote industrial development. Created in 1870, the Ministry of Industry set an endur- ing pattern for state planning and the financing of Japanese industry. Initial investments went into railroads, and the first line, linking Tokyo and Yokohama, opened in 1872. Japanese shipbuilding also received early government support to promote trade and to compensate for the lack of raw materials in Japan itself. Mechanizing silk production was another arena of early industrial policy by the government. A demo- graphic spurt from 30 million in 1868 to 45 million in 1900 (and to 73 million in 1940) provided a population base for an industrial work- ing class. In stark contrast to Europe, a large proportion of women in the workforce (above 50 percent) was a unique feature of early indus- trialization in Japan. Paternalism and the group-identity characteristic of Japanese culture generally helped ease the transition to an industrial economy, with less social and political strife than seen in the West. In the twentieth century Japan, too, became an imperial power with the victory of the Japanese in their war with the Russians in 1904–5 and their expansion in East Asia and the Pacific in the 1930s and 1940s. Regarding the scientific underpinnings of Japanese industrial develop- ment, the first university in Japan was founded only in the 1880s.

In the twentieth century Japan led the way in breaking the industrial monopoly of Europe and America, and especially after World War II industrialization has proceeded on a truly multinational and global basis. We will return to this point, but in the meantime the scientific and industrial developments surveyed thus far in this chapter brought about

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another transformation of great historical moment: the modern merger of science and technology in the context of industrial civilization.

Applying Science in Industry

Science and industry and the cultures of science and technology gener- ally began their historical unification in the nineteenth century. The main thesis of this book has concerned the historically limited degree of applied or practically oriented science prior to the nineteenth cen- tury. In the earliest civilizations and state-level societies thereafter, gov- ernments patronized useful knowledge and science in the service of administration. In Europe, state support for what were deemed useful sciences appeared slowly after the Middle Ages, as noted in the case of cartography, for example, or somewhat later as an outgrowth of the Scientific Revolution in the creation of state scientific societies. The conviction that natural philosophy ought to be turned to public utility became an ideological commonplace in the seventeenth century. More readily apparent, however, are the intellectual and sociological disjunc- tions between the sciences and the vast body of technology as these have developed throughout history. One measure alone illustrates the scope of the separation—in Europe scientists were university educated, engineers and craftsmen were not. In the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England the worlds of science and technology drew closer together, but we were hard-pressed to find historical evidence to support the view of contemporary technology as applied science. In the nineteenth century, however, several important novelties appeared that began to recast the age-old separation of science and technology that originated in Hellenic Greece. Firm connections came to link theoreti- cal science and the key new player on the scene, large-scale industry. To be sure, much of science and technology remained separate, but the new dimensions of applied science that arose in the nineteenth century in the context of industrialization represent historical departures of great consequence that solidified in the twentieth and twenty-first cen- turies on a global scale.

The new nineteenth-century science of current electricity spawned several new applied-science industries, of which the telegraph repre- sents a prime example. Following the discovery of electromagnetic induction by Michael Faraday in 1831, the scientist Charles Wheat- stone and a collaborator invented the first electric telegraph in 1837. Wheatstone and other European and American scientists and inventors worked to create a telegraph industry, spurred in part by the utility of the telegraph as an adjunct to railroad development. These efforts quickly culminated in the system patented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1837 and field-tested in 1844, incorporating Morse’s renowned alpha- betic code using dots and dashes. London and Paris became connected by telegraph in 1854, the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was laid

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in 1857–58, the first transcontinental telegraph in North America linked New York and San Francisco in 1861, and the telegraph and the railroad spread across the world together thereafter. The upshot was something of a communications revolution.

The telegraph tapped a body of preexisting scientific knowledge, but the development of the new technology of telegraphy involved the solu- tion of a myriad of problems—technical, commercial, and social—that had little or nothing to do with contemporary scientific research or the- ory. In other words, the coming into being of a science-based technol- ogy usually involves the creation of a complex technological system to the point where it is misleading to think of such systems as merely “applied science.”

The telephone was a potent new technological system that emerged out of this same complex of science and industry. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, but it took some time before tele- phony challenged the telegraph as an effective communications me- dium. An infrastructure of wires, central switching stations, manu- facturing operations, telephone operators (mostly women), and social behaviors had to evolve. The first commercial exchange opened in 1878, telephone lines linked Boston and New York in 1884, and Bell himself placed the first transcontinental phone call in 1915. The diffu- sion of the dial telephone and automatic switching after 1905 proved keys to the elaboration of the telephone system, as were government subsidies for extending telephones lines into rural areas.

Much the same point regarding technological systems is evident in considering the electric lighting industry that also arose in the last quar- ter of the nineteenth century. Such an industry clearly derived from prior work in the new science of electricity. As celebrated in traditional biographies of great inventors, Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) in New Jersey and Joseph Swan (1828–1914) in England independently created the incandescent light bulb through elaborate empirical trials in 1879. By the 1880s and 1890s the science involved in the develop- ing electric lighting industry was hardly new. Some of it, with regard to insulators, for example, harked back to the eighteenth century. This example brings home that in considering applied science it can be ana- lytically fruitful to distinguish between whether the science involved is, say, “boiled down” science or whether it represents the application of more recent and cutting-edge theory. Furthermore, the light bulb itself hardly constitutes the establishment of a practical electric lighting in- dustry. Again, a large and complex technological system had to be brought into being before an electric lighting industry could be said to have existed, a system involving generators, power lines to distribute electricity, appliances, meters to measure consumption, and methods of billing customers, to name only a few of its many elements.

Another of the early instances where science and up-to-date scien- tific theory became applied to technology and industry was the case of

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radio communications, where practical application followed closely on the heels of theoretical innovation. Seeking to confirm Maxwell’s the- ory of electromagnetism, Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the reality of radio waves in 1887. Hertz worked exclusively within the tradition of nineteenth-century theoretical and experimental physics, but when the young Italian Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) first learned of Hertz- ian waves in 1894, he immediately began to exploit them for a practi- cal wireless telegraphy, and by the following year he had produced a technology that could communicate over a distance of one mile. Mar- coni, who went on to build larger and more powerful systems, received his first patent in England in 1896 and formed a company to exploit his inventions commercially. In 1899 he sent his first signal across the English Channel, and in a historic demonstration in 1901 he succeeded with the first radio transmission across the Atlantic. The creation of this new technology involved much more than the application of sci- entific theory, however direct, and, although Marconi’s contribution

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Fig. 15.5. Invention with- out theory. Thomas Edi- son was a prolific inven- tor (with more than 1,000 patents) who had little education or theoretical knowledge. His ability to tap “boiled down” sci- ence and his organiza- tional skills in institution- alizing invention in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, proved essential to his success.

was essentially technical, in this instance the line between science and technology became so blurred that in 1909 Marconi received a Nobel Prize in physics for his work on wireless telegraphy. The case is also noteworthy because it illustrates that the outcome of scientific research and technological change often cannot be foreseen. What drove Mar- coni and his research was the dream of ship-to-shore communications. He had no prior notion of what we know as radio or the incredible social ramifications that followed the first commercial radio broadcasts in the 1920s.

The growth of applied science in the nineteenth century was not lim- ited to physics or industries connected solely to the physical sciences. In the realm of scientific medicine, for example, the introduction in the 1840s of anesthesia in dentistry and surgery, and the antiseptic mea- sures developed in the 1860s by Joseph Lister (1827–1912) proved boons for humanity. The germ theory of disease and ideas about mi- crobes in the 1850s led the great French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822– 95) to his studies of fermentation. The resulting process of pasteuriza- tion produced practical and economically important consequences for a variety of industries, including dairy, wine, vinegar, and beer produc- tion. Related work on silkworm diseases produced similar effects for the silk industry, and Pasteur’s later medical experiments to develop inoculations against anthrax, rabies, and other diseases represent the advent of a truly scientific medicine.

Chemistry was another a domain where important practical appli- cations in nineteenth-century industry were forthcoming from science. Through the middle of the century the dye industry in Europe remained a traditional craft activity with no contact whatsoever with the world of science. Then, in 1856, following some German advances in organic chemistry, the English chemist William Perkin discovered an artificial dye producing a purple color. The economic value of bright, synthetic dyes became immediately apparent, and mastery of the chemistry of dyes and dyestuffs derived from coal tar became essential to the textile industries. Until the various German states adopted a uniform patent code in 1876 competition between firms amounted largely to the reci- procal raiding of expert chemists. After 1876, however, with patent rights assured, the emphasis shifted to the research and development of new dyes. A new institution uniting science and technology—the industrial research laboratory—emerged as a result. The Friedrich Bayer Company created a research division and hired its first chemistry Ph.D. in 1874. In 1896 the number of its salaried staff scientists reached 104.

The style of applied research undertaken at the Bayer research labo- ratory deserves emphasis. The story hinges on the fact that the German chemical industry established close contacts with research universities. Industry supplied universities not only with materials and equipment for advanced studies in chemistry but also with students and with

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opportunities for consulting. Universities reciprocally offered industry- trained graduates and prospects for scientific cooperation. In a further division of labor, fundamental research became the province of the uni- versities, while industry undertook mainly empirical research and rou- tine experiments to test dyes and their fastness on different materials in the hope of developing commercial products. For example, in 1896 the Bayer Company subjected 2,378 colors to an assortment of tests but marketed only 37. As this case indicates, even where theory was applicable, “research” often still took the form of trial and error, albeit conducted by scientists in a research environment. The reality of ap- plied science was (and is) often far removed from the assumption that technology is merely the translation of scientific theory into practice.

The model of the research laboratory spread widely in late nine- teenth- and early twentieth-century industry. Thomas Edison’s labora- tory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, established in 1876, represents an early example. Others include Standard Oil (1880), General Electric (1901), DuPont (1902), Parke-Davis (1902), Corning Glass (1908), Bell Labs (1911), Eastman Kodak (1913), and General Motors (1919). Today thousands of such labs operate in the United States alone. The advent of industrial research has been hailed as the “invention of invention,” although this view is somewhat misleading in that research labs are generally not innovators of new technologies. For the most part re- search labs concern themselves with the development and extension of existing technologies, and they often function as part of a business strat- egy to develop and control patents to ward off competitors. But even today, as we will see, pathbreaking inventions like xerography and the personal computer may still be the work of independent inventors rather than established scientists or engineers working in industry.

But these theoretical and technical developments were not alone in transforming the landscape of European science and culture in the nineteenth century. As Britain expanded her empire and spread her eco- nomic tentacles across the globe, she sent ships to its far corners to map wind and ocean currents, to search out resources and markets, and to collect specimens of plants and animals. An utterly unexpected result of these efforts was the theory of evolution.

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