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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
How may scientific research contribute effectively to industrial development? This question has been debated for many years. However, a recent development in this discussion has come from a number of eminent scientists and others who have become concerned with what has become known as the public understanding of science. According to them, a greater understanding of science by members of the public would result in a higher value being placed on scientific research, which, eventually, would result in both increased social status for scientists and growing funding from government and industry for their work. Thus, in part, concern about the public understanding of science is an indirect way of influencing the outcome of discussions about the science budget.
1 For a recent survey, see Durant, J. and Gregory, J. (eds.), Science and Culture in Europe, London, 1993Google Scholar. For another view, see Cooter, R. and Pumfrey, S., ‘Separate spheres and public places: reflections on the history of science popularization and science in popular culture’, History of Science (1994), 32, 237–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 In Britain during the First World War, for example, these concerns led to the formation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the first government department to have that sole remit. See Cardwell, D. S. L., The Organization of Science in England, London, 1972Google Scholar. Cardwell points to a similar interest in public understanding of science in the 1930s. See also Edgerton, David in National Military Establishments and the Advancement of Science (ed. Forman, Paul and Sanchez-Ron, J. M.), Dordrecht, 1994.Google Scholar
3 This sequence of events has intrigued several historians. See Musson, A. E. and Robinson, E., Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution, Manchester, 1969Google Scholar; Cardwell, D. S. L., Technology, Science and History, London, 1972Google Scholar; Jacob, M. C., The Cultural Meaning, of the Scientific Revolution, New York, 1988Google Scholar; Inkster, Ian, Science and Technology in History: An Approach to Industrial Development, London, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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9 One interesting demarcation involving machines was common to both natural philosophy and legislation. Steam-engines were openly discussed in natural philosophy lectures and their export was not prohibited by legislation ; whereas textile machinery was neither discussed in lectures nor covered by legislation prohibiting the export of machinery. Thus natural philosophy went against commercial secrecy, up to a point.
10 Golinski has discussed the development of lectures on chemistry as a form of public culture, shaped by the needs and aspirations of the audience. See Golinski, Jan, Science as Public Culture, Cambridge, 1992Google Scholar. The argument of this paper is that changes in the way science was portrayed to an audience also depended on industrial developments.
11 Harris, J. R., Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France, Aldershot, 1992, 18Google Scholar. Harris has drawn attention to the dearth of information about machinery in books of the period, including texts on natural philosophy, which he takes to be a sign of the unimportance of such sources, compared with the influence of craft-skills in his own discussion of the coal-based technologies. These practical craft-skills are transmitted ‘on the job’ and are precisely of the kind which are not or cannot be written down or published. I concede this point for information about technical processes. My argument makes narrower claims about natural philosophy being important only for some aspects of the improvement of machines and ways of talking about machines.
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38 Ironically, it became more difficult for Demainbray and his colleagues-cum-competitors to earn a living from lecturing. In fact, Demainbray gave up lecturing within a few years, in the early 1760s.
39 For this reason they objected to monopolies restricting trade in order to keep prices artificially high.
40 Coats, A. W., ‘Changing attitudes to labour in the mid-eighteenth century’, in Essays in Social History (ed. Flinn, M. W. and Smout, T. C.), Oxford, 1974, 87Google Scholar. See also Linebaugh, Peter, The London Hanged, Harmondsworth, 1993, 222Google Scholar, who says about the third quarter of the eighteenth century, ‘To say that the factory was introduced in this period would be misleading if by “factory” is meant machine production, but if the term is understood to mean a hierarchical organization of production under the eye of a single authority, then it calls attention to a major and decisive development.’
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