The Scientific Enterprise: Institutions and the Diffusion of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

AT a meeting of the Glasgow branch of the British Society of Chemical Industry in November 1885, its chairman, J. Neilson Cuthbertson, offered yet one more comment by British industry upon recent European and American innovation in the organisation of science. Cuthbertson noted the splendid provision for science and engineering at the newly erected University of Strasburg, its 92 professors and large laboratory facilities. His measure of scientific improvement was manifold and included its contribution to industry, its institutional formalisation, its support by and of the State:

I might refer to the great success that has attended Continental science in different ways; in organic chemistry, in the introduction of the ammonia process in the alkali trade, in the ventilation of deep mines, in the application of water power, in the invention of the dynamo machine, in the construction of roofs and bridges, in the printed cottons of Mulhouse, in the woolen yarns of Verviers and in the ribbon trade of Basle … all the principal machinery that is now at work on the Continent has been derived from England, or, at all events, is the direct offspring of suggestions made in Great Britain … the beginnings of the modern industrial systems are due in the main to Great Britain.… This was no doubt the occasion of the great efforts put forth by Continental nations to cope with this country, and they began by instituting Polytechnic Schools.

the sole aim of our thoughts and our exertions must be the kind of organisation most favourable to industry … including every kind of useful activity, theoretical as well as practical, intellectual as well as manual

Saint Simon, 1817

Man has mounted science and is now run away with

Henry Adams, 1862