The theory of chemical structure was developed in the 1850s and 1860s, a product of the efforts of a number of leading European chemists. By the late 1860s it was regarded as a mature and powerful conceptual scheme that not only gave important insight into the details of molecular architecture in an invisibly small realm of nature, but also furnished heuristic guidance in the technological manipulation of those molecules, providing assistance in the creation of an important fine chemicals industry. The theory continued to develop in its power and subtlety throughout the following decades, until by the end of the century, it was by all measures the reigning doctrine of the science of chemistry, dominating investigations in both academic and industrial laboratories. Consequently, the story of the rise of this theory is an important component of the history of basic science, and also of the manner in which scientific ideas are applied to industry.

EARLY STRUCTURALIST NOTIONS

Speculations concerning geometrical groupings of the imperceptible particles that make up sensible bodies go back to the pre-Socratics. However, for our purposes, it is expedient to begin the story with the rise of chemical atomism, since structural ideas presuppose atoms in the modern chemical (post-Lavoisien) sense. The founder of the chemical atomic theory was John Dalton (1766–1844), and it is suggestive that immediately following the proposal of chemical atoms, Dalton and others began to speculate how they might be arranged into molecules (often then called “compound atoms”). As early as 1808 – about the time Dalton’s ideas first began to be known in the chemical community – William Wollaston was “inclined to think … that we shall be obliged to acquire a geometric conception of [the] relative arrangement [of the elementary atoms] in all the three dimensions of solid extension.”

Until the 1980s, it was usual to tell the story of the developments in physics during the twentieth century as “inward bound” – from atoms, to nuclei and electrons, to nucleons and mesons, and then to quarks – and to focus on conceptual advances. The typical exposition was a narrative beginning with Max Planck (1858–1947) and the quantum hypothesis and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and the special theory of relativity, and culminating with the formulation of the standard model of the electroweak and strong interactions during the 1970s. Theoretical understanding took pride of place, and commitment to reductionism and unification was seen as the most important factor in explaining the success of the program. The Kuhnian model of the growth of scientific knowledge, with its revolutionary paradigm shifts, buttressed the primacy of theory and the view that experimentation and instrumentation were subordinate to and entrained by theory.

The situation changed after Ian Hacking, Peter Galison, Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, and other historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science reanalyzed and reassessed the practices and roles of experimentation. It has become clear that accounting for the growth of knowledge in the physical sciences during the twentieth century is a complex story. Advances in physics were driven and secured by a host of factors, including contingent ones. Furthermore, it is often difficult to separate the social, sociological, and political factors from the technical and intellectual ones.

Scientific methods divide into two broad categories: inductive and deductive. Inductive methods arrive at theories by generalizing from what is known to happen in particular cases; deductive methods, by derivation from first principles. Behind this primitive categorization lie deep philosophical oppositions. The first principles central to deductivist accounts are generally taken to be, as Aristotle described, “first known to nature” but not “first known to us.” Do the first principles have a more basic ontological status than the regularities achieved by inductive generalization – are they in some sense “more true” or “more real”? Or are they, in stark opposition, not truths at all, at least for a human science, because always beyond the reach of human knowledge?

Deductivists are inclined to take the first view. Some do so because they think that first principles are exact and eternal truths that represent hidden structures lying behind the veil of shifting appearances; others, because they see first principles as general claims that unify large numbers of disparate phenomena into one scheme, and they take unifying power to be a sign of fundamental truth. Empiricists, who take experience as the measure of what science should maintain about the world, are suspicious of first principles, especially when they are very abstract and far removed from immediate experience. They generally insist on induction as the gatekeeper for what can be taken for true in science.

This chapter explores the impact of science and technology research capacity and educational change on industrial performance in the century and a half since 1850. Analysis covers four countries remarkable for their industrial achievement, England, France, Germany, and the United States. It is important to note that for each of these countries, economic growth has often been organized around contrasting systems of education and research.

Today, most scholars agree that education, as a general phenomenon, does not constitute a linear, direct determinant of industrial growth. For example, Fritz Ringer has shown that although German and French education had numerous parallels in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as per capita size of cohorts, the economic development of the two nations was extremely different. Peter Lundgreen, who has compared the size of France’s and Germany’s engineering communities and the character of training, has come to much the same conclusion. Robert Fox and Anna Guanine, in a comparative study of education and industry in six European countries and the United States for the pre-World War I decades, demonstrate that although nations had contrasting rates of industrial growth, their educational policies and practices nevertheless frequently converged.

The existence of a direct and linear connection between research and industry is also viewed as doubtful today. For example, during the decades immediately preceding and following World War I, very few French firms possessed any research capacity, and with scant exception, neither was applied research present inside the educational system. Still, France’s industry advanced at a steady albeit slow pace, thanks largely to alternative innovation-acquisition practices, such as patent procurement, licensing, and concentration on low-technology sectors.

The historical relations between the physical sciences and the life sciences have often been framed in terms of overarching conceptions about the nature of vital processes. Thus, in antiquity, the mechanistic viewpoint of the atomists, represented in physiological thought by the Alexandrian anatomist Erasistratus, is contrasted with the teleological foundations of Aristotle’s biology, defended in late antiquity by Galen. For the early modern period, the Aristotelian framework within which William Harvey (1578–1657) discovered the circulation of the blood is contrasted with the “mechanical conception of life,” introduced in the new “mechanical philosophy” of René Descartes (1596–1650), and a chemical conception of life, associated with the iconoclastic Renaissance physician Paracelsus (1493–1541).

For the nineteenth century, the cleavage between the “vitalist” views of physiologists early in the century and the “reductionist” views of physiologists coming of age in the 1840s, who aimed to reduce physiology to physics and chemistry, has been treated as the most significant turning point in the relation between the physical and biological sciences. The views of these, mainly German, physiologists are often compared with those of the most prominent French physiologist, Claude Bernard (1813–1878), who also opposed vitalism but believed, nevertheless, that life is something more than the physical-chemical manifestations through which it must be investigated.

In 1799 the Royal Institution was founded in London, in the wake of various provincial literary and philosophical societies; in 1851, under Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg’s aegis, the Great Exhibition attracted vast crowds to London, yielding profits to buy land in South Kensington for colleges and museums; and in 1900 the Paris Exposition heralded a new century of scientific and technical progress. There were prominent critics, but the wonders of science proved throughout the nineteenth century to be attractive to audiences of the aristocracy and gentry, of working men, and of everybody in between – which was fortunate, because in this world of competing beliefs and interests, of markets and industrial capitalism, those engaged in science needed to arouse the enthusiasm of people who would support them. Popularization started in Europe but was taken up in the United States, in Canada and Australasia, in India and other colonies, and in Japan.

We shall focus upon Britain because of its place as the first industrial nation, where cheap books and publications emerged early, and scientific lectures were a feature of intellectual life. Specialization came relatively late to British education, so that until the end of the nineteenth century, university graduates shared to a great extent a common culture. Great Britain contained two nations, the English and the Scots, whose educational histories were very different; and Ireland was another story. Scotland had been, ever since its Calvinist Reformation, a country where education was valued and could be had cheaply in parochial schools and at the universities: It was throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an exporter of talent, to England, the Continent, and North America.