In the struggle to sustain the nation’s economy and society accompanying World War One, the concept of ‘applied science’ was widely deployed and further enriched. It gained new traction through wartime and post-war administrative developments and the debates over research amongst the military services, civilian agencies, and private industry. Generic issues of the time were highlighted by the 1917 Sothern Holland enquiry into the organisation of naval research. Subsequently, new establishments, such as the DSIR and the Committee of Civil Research, shaped applied science. The chapter shows the interpretation of applied science by individual institutions and the press by exploring the details of specific research projects in the military, the radio industry and, above all, coal-oil manufacture. Thus it treats research on converting coal to oil at ICI, the Low Temperature Carbonisation Company, and Powell Duffryn. Through their thinking over funding priorities, new bodies often formulated and promoted their own conceptions of applied science. They both responded to public opinion and helped shape widely shared understanding.

This chapter addresses the question: How did the term become familiar in society? Even the earliest uses demonstrate the integration of knowledge classification and engagement with large audiences. Derived from German usage, the term ‘applied sciences’ was coined early in the nineteenth century by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was key to underpinning a major new encyclopaedia project intended to structure knowledge and thinking. A succession of loyal editors realised his vision as the massive Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, advertised using Coleridge’s coinage. It would also be taken up by King’s College London seeking to describe its course teaching knowledge underlying engineering without claiming to be technical training. Meanwhile, the chemist J. F. W. Johnston used the term to promote the services he offered farmers. During and after debates over Corn Law Repeal, the press discussed Johnston’s applied science as a potential saviour of agriculture. The term’s use then snowballed.

This chapter addresses the post–World War Two reshaping of models of applied science and technology coexisting in education, research policy, and the management of innovation. The shortage of skilled personnel highlighted the questions of training and secrecy and the boundary between applied science and technology. In the years after World War Two, the United States held a hegemonic scientific and cultural place, which meant that its language and issues came to be influential across the Atlantic. However, British authorities, steeped in domestic experience and tradition, reconstituted as they ingested, and Bush’s Science – The Endless Frontier was read differently in London than in Washington, DC. The case study of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) highlights institutional tensions between those identifying with technology and those identifying with applied science, but also highlights how sharply rising investment in research sustained a variety of models of the knowledge required for industrial development, and temporarily eased their coexistence.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the dominant reference of applied science changed. This chapter addresses the question: How could research be discussed using the old language of applied science previously used principally for pedagogy? Where was the continuity? The term’s meaning was constructed and reconstructed with the new organisations, such as the National Physical Laboratory and the newly incorporated civic universities. Therefore, the hectic emergence of a host of new organisations and awareness of research is of particular interest. In an era of growing foreign competition, Liberal politicians such as R. B. Haldane put their faith in applied science. Three key themes structure the analysis: the challenge of foreign powers, the growth of institutions, and the attraction of applied science to governments committed to maximising national efficiency but minimal interference in the market. The focus is on the years between 1899 and the outbreak of war.

The rich diversity of industrial achievements at the Great Exhibition of 1851 stimulated debate about the factors making such developments abundant in the modern age. Campaigners for science education pointed to the superiority of international competitors, to the roots of relative decline, means of mitigation through their favourite measures, and the importance of new institutions – such as those promoting knowledge of applied science, foregrounding the term. The wish to emulate France led to new bodies, such as the government’s Department of Science and Art, which paid teachers across the land and ran examinations, and Birmingham’s private Mason College; to the substantial development of Manchester’s Owens College; and to widespread public debate. In Parliament, Bernhard Samuelson further popularised the term ‘applied science’, promoting and obtaining an enquiry into its teaching. Though Thomas Huxley famously condemned the term at the 1880 opening of Mason College, the donor’s spokesman warned that we should credit it for Mason’s philanthropy.