Government policies, stories, and institutions lie at the heart of the argument. Widely embodying the term ‘applied science’, they made it visible and real. They have also been sites of interplay between organisational and professional promotion and public discourse about Britain’s prospects. Summarising the book, this chapter reflects on the continuity between the nineteenth-century emphasis on pedagogy and the twentieth-century focus on research. It suggests that because the meaning of applied science is rooted in national debate and experience, it differed from terms growing out of other national experiences, such as the German Technik. Its trajectory in other English-speaking countries should also be studied individually. The imperial experience meant the term may have been transformed as it travelled. In sum, its meaning was not the work of just a few intellectuals. Instead, the character of applied science developed through the complexities of history and widespread public debate.

Remarkably, the classification of science is only now being studied historically. The introduction specifies this book’s question: What made applied science seem such a potent economic, cultural, and political elixir in the United Kingdom for many decades and then saw it superseded? The book explores the meaning of the term that gave it such potency using five tools: institutions, narratives, sociotechnical imaginaries, concepts, and ideologies. The term has epistemic connotations; it has been promoted and blamed for its science policy implications, and cultural reality once weighed heavily. The book explores the relationship between ‘applied science’ and ‘technology’ with their different emphases to describe the space between pure science and the market. The argument has three parts: the nineteenth-century concern with pedagogy, the early twentieth century as attention shifted to research, and the period after World War Two in which the visibility of applied science first rose and then collapsed.

In the era of the colleges’ foundation around 1880, ‘applied science’ dominated the space between science and practice in British education. However, ‘technology’ was an increasingly popular competitor. These two categories of knowledge were associated with different institutions and classes of students, and between the 1870s and World War Two, educators treated the two as complementary. So, this chapter asks how ‘technology’ was used in this period and how it related to ‘applied science’. ‘Technology’ was popularised by the technical education examined first by the Society of Arts and then by the City and Guilds. While carefully differentiated from workplace apprenticeship, it was much more practical than applied science. Government concern not to interfere with the free market and industrial anxieties about proprietary knowledge defended the divide. In the early twentieth century, emulating American and German models, ‘higher technological education’ taught at its own elite centres, particularly at Imperial College, in Manchester, and in Glasgow, came to be differentiated from technical education.

This chapter asks what processes erased applied science from public view from the late 1960s. It explores the public talk of a second industrial revolution in the 1950s, and the increasing popularity of ‘technology’, gaining the support of the Labour Party, which founded the Ministry of Technology in 1964. Meanwhile, funds for scientific research became tighter, and the public popularity of science waned. Increasingly, as economists became interested in ‘innovation’, analysts questioned the efficacy of the applied science route to wealth. By the end of the 1960s, science-push was giving way to demand-pull as a government-favoured model of innovation. Scientific research was seen as just one of several important inputs into successful development. As a result, the use of the term ‘applied science’ fell precipitously. However, in the twenty-first century, the new concept of ‘translational research’ emerged in the ever-more prominent biosciences to fill the gap between bench and bedside.

After World War One, new institutions and gadgets gave reality to a changing landscape of public culture. Therefore, in this chapter, we explore applied science in the inter-war public realm. Society’s usage interacted with officials’ language as public and bureaucratic discussions of applied science intertwined. Talk about applied science connected intimately with an intense discussion of ‘modern civilisation’ to make sense of science too. Amidst anxiety, the separation of pure and applied became important to science’s standing. To some, the process by which scientific research led to a multitude of new gadgets was frighteningly dangerous. To others, science was exploited too slowly due to the historical inadequacy of British industry. Both branch of government and a cathedral of applied science, the Science Museum displayed linkages between science and technical wonders. Debates were conducted over the new radio service and in newspapers, and were contested by bishops as well as politicians.

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.