The Institutionalization and Professionalization of Scientific Research

Abstract

The modern ideal of science, and the mathematical and experimental method of investigation which contained the seeds of the subordination of technology to the demands of precision, did not lead immediately to a direct linkage between science and the economy. In any event, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century took place practically without the participation of science. It was brought about by inventors, people of a practical bent who were not always and not necessarily acquainted with the theoretical basis of their inventions. These inventors worked usually by the method of trial and error. They proceeded empirically in the bad as well as the good sense of the word, and often despised theoreticians, regarding them as divorced from real life. Theoreticians paid them back in kind, claiming that they were not disinterested and acted not with the aim of advancing knowledge, but for personal and material gain, which is improper for men of science. This period can be virtually symbolized by the names of James Watt and Thomas Edison. The steam engine, which literally and metaphorically served as the engine of the industrial revolution, was constructed well before Fourier, Carnot, Clausius, Maxwell and Boltzmann established the foundations of thermodynamics. Their theories later served to introduce various improvements in the invention, but the innovation itself not only appeared but also found widespread use without their help. Lewis Mumford claims that “The detailed history of the steam engine, the railroad, the textile mill, the iron ship, could be written without more than a passing reference to the scientific work of the period.”¹ This judgment certainly does not apply to the history of technological development during the last hundred years. Edisonés greatest invention, as Norbert Wiener notes ironically, was “the industrial research laboratory, turning out inventions as a business”;² but priority in this field probably rests with the chemical industry of Germany and England.