I argue and demonstrate in this essay that interconnected systems of science and technology, or technoscience, existed long before the late nineteenth century, and that eighteenth-century chemistry was such an early form of technoscience. Based on recent historical research on the early development of carbon chemistry from the late 1820s until the 1840s—which revealed that early carbon chemistry was an experimental expert culture that was largely detached from the mundane industrial world—I further examine the question of the internal preconditions within (...) the expert culture of carbon chemistry that contributed to its convergence with the synthetic-dye industry in the late 1850s. I argue that the introduction of new types and techniques of organic-chemical reactions and organic substances in this experimental expert culture, along with the application of chemical formulae as paper tools for modeling reactions as well as the chemical constitution and structure of substances, enabled academic chemists to make specific, novel contributions to chemical technology and industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Are science and technology independent of one another? Is technology dependent upon science, and if so, how is it dependent? Is science dependent upon technology, and if so how is it dependent? Or, are science and technology becoming so interdependent that the line dividing them has become totally erased? This book charts the history of technoscience from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century and shows how the military-industrial-academic complex and big science combined to create new (...) examples of technoscience in such areas as the nuclear arms race, the space race, the digital age, and the new worlds of nanotechnology and biotechnology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The term “applied science,” as it came to be popularly used in the 1870s, was a hybrid of three earlier concepts. The phrase “applied science” itself had been coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, translating the German Kantian term “angewandte Wissenschaft.” It was popularized through the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, which was structured on principles inherited from Coleridge and edited by men with sympathetic views. Their concept of empirical as opposed to a priori science was hybridized with an earlier English (...) concept of “practical science” and with “science applied to the arts,” adopted from the French. Charles Dupin had favored the latter concept and promoted it in the reconstruction of the Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers. The process of hybridization took place from the 1850s, in the wake of the Great Exhibition, as a new technocratic government favored scientific education. “Applied science” subsequently was used as the epistemic basis for technical education and the formation of new colleges in the 1870s. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The term “applied science,” as it came to be popularly used in the 1870s, was a hybrid of three earlier concepts. The phrase “applied science” itself had been coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, translating the German Kantian term “angewandte Wissenschaft.” It was popularized through the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, which was structured on principles inherited from Coleridge and edited by men with sympathetic views. Their concept of empirical as opposed to a priori science was hybridized with an earlier English (...) concept of “practical science” and with “science applied to the arts,” adopted from the French. Charles Dupin had favored the latter concept and promoted it in the reconstruction of the Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers. The process of hybridization took place from the 1850s, in the wake of the Great Exhibition, as a new technocratic government favored scientific education. “Applied science” subsequently was used as the epistemic basis for technical education and the formation of new colleges in the 1870s. (shrink)

How to characterize the relationship between science and technology has been a sensitive issue for historians of technology. This essay uses a recent and controversial piece by Paul Forman as a springboard for reexamining the concept of applied science and asks whether “applied science” remains a useful term. Scholars have often taken “applied science” to mean the subordination of technological knowledge to scientific knowledge—and thus the subordination of history of technology to history of science. This essay argues that the historical (...) moment for sensitivity on the subject of applied science has passed, that even in instances where technology can accurately be described as subordinate to science it need not follow that its history is subordinate, and that the concept can be useful in addressing issues in the history and contemporary practice of engineering education. (shrink)

Since the eighteenth century chemistry has been deemed to be useful, yet how it might find widespread application, particularly in the case of its most advanced developments, was generally unclear. The discovery of synthetic dyestuffs has often been considered as the turning point towards much closer linkage between chemistry and the manufacture of useful products. How this occurred can best be seen in the case of August Wilhelm Hofmann, who for two decades after 1845 was director of the Royal College (...) of Chemistry in London. As the teacher of many pioneers of the dye industry, Hofmann can be considered its first scientific leader. Indeed, the compounds he studied from 1860 were products made in the factories of his former students and assistants. They in turn were the first to recognize Hofmann's role in stimulating the practical application of science. Henry Armstrong, the chemist and educator, went so far as to imply that this was germane to Hofmann's pedagogic and research strategies: ‘it is clear that the influence he exercised in introducing scientific method into industry was in no sense accidental, but the considered expression of innate convictions’. These convictions were also encouraged by the need to attract funds from industrial sponsors for the Royal College of Chemistry, and they charged the rhetoric that served to enhance Hofmann's ambition and the discipline of chemistry before international audiences. (shrink)

Louis Pasteur plays a role in the creation myth of biotechnology which resembles the heroic position of his great antagonist Liebig in the story of agricultural chemistry. His intellectual development, expressed in a great book, supposedly underlay a revolution in practice. Similarly, biotechnology is conventionally traced back to Pasteur, through whose influence, it has been assumed, ancient crafts were transformed into an applicable science of microbiology. The emphasis on Pasteur's work in the history of biotechnology has served to bolster the (...) image of progress in the technology following from periodic scientific breakthroughs. Elsewhere I have argued that biotechnology can be better seen as a boundary object, to use Star and Griesemer's terminology, between biology and engineering. As such it has been significant throughout this century, and the word has been used since 1917. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Before “applied science” and “technology” became keywords, the concept of art was central to discourse about material culture and its connections to natural knowledge. By the late nineteenth century, a new discourse of applied science had replaced the older discourse of art. This older discourse of art, especially as presented in Enlightenment encyclopedias, addressed the relationship between art and science in depth. But during the nineteenth century the concept of fine art gradually displaced the broader meanings of “art,” thus (...) undermining the utility of the term for discourse on the relationship between knowledge and practice. This narrowed meaning of “art” obscured key aspects of the industrial world. In effect, middle-class agents of industrialism, including “men of science,” used the rhetoric of “applied science” and, later, “technology” to cement the exclusion of artisanal knowledge from the discourse of industrial modernity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Before “applied science” and “technology” became keywords, the concept of art was central to discourse about material culture and its connections to natural knowledge. By the late nineteenth century, a new discourse of applied science had replaced the older discourse of art. This older discourse of art, especially as presented in Enlightenment encyclopedias, addressed the relationship between art and science in depth. But during the nineteenth century the concept of fine art gradually displaced the broader meanings of “art,” thus (...) undermining the utility of the term for discourse on the relationship between knowledge and practice. This narrowed meaning of “art” obscured key aspects of the industrial world. In effect, middle-class agents of industrialism, including “men of science,” used the rhetoric of “applied science” and, later, “technology” to cement the exclusion of artisanal knowledge from the discourse of industrial modernity. (shrink)

This article attempts a contextual study of the origin and early development of August Kekulé's theory of aromatic compounds. The terminus a quo is essentially August Hofmann's coining of the modern chemical denotation of ‘aromatic’ in 1855; the terminus ad quem is the first full codification of Kekulé's theory in the sixth fascicle of his Lehrbuch der organischen Chemie, published in the summer of 1866. Kekulé's theory is viewed in context with the earlier and concurrent experimental work of such chemists (...) as Hermann Kolbe, Friedrich Beilstein, Rudolph Fittig, and Hugo Müller. The reception of the theory is briefly examined. Attention is paid to the role of Kekulé's molecular models and of his celebrated dream anecdote of the snake that seizes its own tail. The episode is used as a case study for the continuity of scientific progress, and to illustrate the close reciprocal interactions of hypothesis and experiment in the evolution of a scientific theory. (shrink)

: This essay addresses the difficulties that sociology as a discipline continues to experience in grasping the relations between technology, science and the social. I argue that these difficulties stem from a resolute centering of sociology on the social, which follows a generically Durkheimian blueprint. I elaborate a response to these difficulties which derives from recent lines of work in science and technology studies, and which entails a decentering of the social relative to the material and the conceptual, in terms (...) of both objects of analysis and explanatory formats. In order to display the direct sociological relevance of this approach, I move to the macro level, developing the conceptual apparatus of a decentered social theory via the discussion of a historical example of major sociological significance—the systematic gearing together of scientific research, technological innovation and industrial production that originated in the synthetic dye industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides the interest of the topic itself, the aim is thus to exemplify in some detail what a decentered sociology might look like, both empirically and conceptually. (shrink)