A revolution in science, 1859–74

Simon Kuznets has stated that “the epochal innovation that distinguishes the modern economic epoch is the extended application of science to problems of economic production” (1966, p. 9). Although there is general agreement with the view that the dependence of technological progress on science has increased substantially in the course of industrialization, there is considerable disagreement, or at least considerable difference in emphasis, concerning the extent of that dependence. On the one hand, A. E. Musson and E. Robinson (1969) have argued forcefully that technological progress was already heavily dependent on science in the early stages of the British industrial revolution. Their research has provided a wealth of evidence showing, in the British case, the intimate and multitudinous networks that linked the business community to scientists. Robert Schofield has advanced the claim, based on a careful study of the Lunar Society in Birmingham, that the society was really an eighteenthcentury “industrial research group” (Schofield, 1963, p. 437).

On the other hand, a long and influential tradition in the history of technology stresses the crude, trial-and-error, hit-or-miss nature of technological progress (Gilfillan, 1935, 1970). During the preindustrial period, this interpretation argues, scientific and technological research and advancement were social processes that were almost hermetically sealed off from one another.