From Art to Applied Science
By Eric Schatzberg*
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.
BEFORE THERE WAS APPLIED SCIENCE, before there was technology, there was art. For
centuries before “applied science” and “technology” emerged as keywords, “art” served as a
fundamental category for understanding material culture and its relationship to natural
knowledge. But the concept of art lost this role in the nineteenth century, when a discourse of
pure and applied science gradually displaced an older discourse on the relationship between art
and science. Key to this displacement was a profound change in the dominant meaning of “art.”
By the twentieth century, technological practices that had long been classified as arts came to be
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seen as the antithesis of art. Similarly, the concepts of science and art became so estranged that
they occupied different cultural worlds, even though in the nineteenth century the terms had been
so close that they were often used interchangeably. When “technology” arose as a keyword in the
1930s, it appropriated the older meanings of “art” while also becoming a synonym for “applied
science,” producing a conceptual confusion that continues to plague debates about the
science/technology relationship today.
What accounts for the profound shift in the meaning of these fundamental concepts? In
part, this shift reflects changes associated with nineteenth-century industrialization. But the
narrowing of the concept of art in fact began well before the triumph of industrialization, starting
with the new concept of fine art in the mid-eighteenth century. As the concept of fine art
gradually displaced the broader meanings of “art” in the nineteenth century, the term lost its
utility in the theoretical discourse on the relationship between knowledge and practice. At the
same time, the shift from “art” to “applied science” and then “technology” helped legitimate the
new social order of industrial society. The narrowing of the meaning of “art” obscured key
aspects of this industrial world, in part by effacing much of the human agency behind the new
order—namely, the skilled work of artisans. In effect, middle-class agents of industrialism,
including “men of science,” used the rhetoric of “applied science” to appropriate, or at least
subordinate, artisanal knowledge.
This short essay can only sketch this argument. I first show how the new concept of fine
art began to reshape Enlightenment ideas about art and its relationship to science. I then examine
the continuing discourse of art and science into the nineteenth century, showing how artisans
were excluded from the discourse of industrialism. I conclude with a brief discussion of the rise
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of technology as a concept that cemented the exclusion of craft knowledge from industrial
modernity.
FROM TECHNE TO FINE ART
A continuous discourse about the arts reaches from late antiquity into the nineteenth century,
beginning with the Greek concept of techne. This concept and its Latin equivalent, ars,
encompassed a broad range of activities—rhetoric as well as carpentry, medicine as well as
sculpture. Larry Shiner insists that the ancient and medieval worlds lacked a category for the fine
arts and made no distinction between artist and artisan, creative imagination and craft. The
ancients did distinguish between base and noble arts, but Serafina Cuomo shows that this
distinction did not reflect clear occupational divisions.1
During the medieval and early modern periods, the most significant change in the concept
of art was a division between liberal and mechanical arts (artes mechanicae), with the first the
province of the scholar and the second that of the artisan. From the twelfth century on, many
scholars gave mechanical arts a prominent place in systems of classification. Such scholars often
conferred moral value on the mechanical arts as part of a Christian search for human perfection.
Still, a huge gulf remained between the liberal and mechanical arts. This divide narrowed
somewhat in the fifteenth century, as writings about the mechanical arts proliferated, including
works by artisan practitioners like Leonardo da Vinci.2
In a number of fields, such as astrology, late medieval practitioners did draw on abstract,
formal knowledge in their technical practice. Sometimes this relationship was framed in terms of
theory and practice (theorica and practica), where theory was conceived not in Aristotelian
terms as pure contemplation but, rather, as instrumental knowledge. But this relationship
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between theory and practice existed within art, not between art and natural philosophy. Thus, as
Peter Dear argues, instrumental and contemplative knowledge of nature remained categorically
distinct into the early modern era. Contemplative knowledge was not irrelevant to expertise, as
Tom Broman notes, but functioned primarily to provide social status for the expert rather than as
a guide to practice.3 This tension between the instrumental and status-related functions of
theoretical knowledge remains a central issue into the present.
Francis Bacon challenged this separation of contemplative from instrumental knowledge.
Bacon sought to make natural philosophy useful to the arts, in effect combining contemplative
and instrumental knowledge, without, however, undermining the social status of natural
philosophy by subordinating it to instrumental purposes. Despite the popularity of Bacon’s
writings, the divisions between mind and hand remained deeply embedded in early modern
society, where “the steeply graded hierarchy of head and hand was vital to defining persons and
their social places.”4 Nevertheless, as a generation of historians of science have shown, the
knowledge-making practices of the scientific revolution drew heavily on the skills of practical
artisans, despite the aristocratic norms that often rendered this relationship invisible.5
As the Enlightenment emerged from the scientific revolution, this Baconian argument for
the utility of natural knowledge became formalized in a discourse on the relationship between art
and science. This discourse is central to two of the best-known encyclopedias of the
Enlightenment, the Cyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers and the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot
and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. Both these works prominently featured the concept of art and
elaborated its relationship to science.
Chambers’s 1728 Cyclopaedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences was the
most successful English-language encyclopedia of its era. In his preface, Chambers presented art
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and science as the two main branches in his classification of knowledge. “Science” he defined as
the deductive use of reason, while “art,” in contrast, required the addition of sense perception to
reason. Science was therefore universal, art particular to the artist (a term that applied to
practitioners of any art). But the difference between art and science had a more fundamental
basis—namely, the distinction between the works of God and of man. In science, the mind was
passive, and the contents of science flowed from God, unshaped by human agency. Art, in
contrast, started with the stuff of science, which was then “directed and applied by us, to
particular Purposes and Occasions of our own.” In other words, art was knowledge shaped by
human purposes.6
This analysis was drawn from Aristotle’s distinction between episteme and techne in the
Nicomachean Ethics. But when Chambers discussed the relationship between art and science, he
abandoned Aristotle for Bacon. There was, according to Chambers, no sharp boundary between
art and science. They existed on a continuum defined by the purity of reason, with substantial
overlap between the two extremes. Art, in particular, had its principles, which constituted a
“doctrinal Part [which] is of the nature of Science.” Such principles arose in part from reflection
about art, reflection that then took the form of science. Such science, when applied to particular
purposes, reassumed the character of art, so that development of an art always involved a
reciprocal movement between artistic and scientific aspects.7
Even though Chambers showed little interest in artisans, human agency was central to his
concept of art, while secondary to his concept of science. There was no art without an artist.
Chambers insisted that creative inspiration was the essence of all the arts. He posited poetry as
the archetypical art, but he did not separate creative arts from the arts in general. Chambers did,
however, embrace hierarchy within the arts, viewing manual arts like “sculpture, architecture,
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[and] agriculture” as inferior poetry. Yet this hierarchy was not about the degree of science in an
art. Instead, for Chambers both art and science partook in aspects of the divine, and therefore
neither could be subordinated to the other.8
The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert reveals the conceptual changes that were
reshaping the Enlightenment understanding of art and science in the mid-eighteenth century. The
Encyclopédie’s most detailed discussions of art are found in two of its best-known documents,
both published in 1751: the Preliminary Discourse, written mainly by d’Alembert, and the article
on “Art,” written by Diderot.9 These publications have many similarities with Chambers’s
Cyclopaedia—which is not surprising, since the Encyclopédie began as a French translation of
the Cyclopaedia. In the Encyclopédie, art and science are divisions within knowledge in general,
distinguished by the nature of their object: art is directed toward action, science toward
contemplation. Like Chambers, Diderot ascribed a speculative and a practical side to every art.
“The speculative side consists of nothing more than knowing the rules of an art without using
them, while the practical side is but the habitual and unreflective employment of these same
rules.” Echoing a Baconian theme, he also argued that one cannot advance the practical side of
an art without speculation, nor fully grasp the speculative side without practice. Diderot and
d’Alembert argued explicitly against the low status of the mechanical arts. Both men stressed
that knowledge of the arts was embodied in artisans (artistes). As Diderot confidently
proclaimed, “Let us finally restore to artists the justice that is their due.”10
Yet even while Diderot and d’Alembert sought to elevate the status of the mechanical
arts, they were cutting out their creative essence by embracing the new category of fine arts. The
first clear articulation of this new category was Charles Batteux’s 1746 book Les beaux arts
réduit à un meme principe. As Shiner argues, the category of fine art split aesthetic creativity
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from “mere” craft skill, so that “all the ‘poetic’ attributes—such as inspiration, imagination,
freedom, and genius—were ascribed to the artist and all the ‘mechanical’ attributes—such as
skill, rules, imitation, and service—went to the artisan.” Shiner ascribes the emergence of this
category to social and institutional changes connected to the growing cultural consumption of the
middle classes. Although advocates of the fine arts disagreed as to its boundaries, its core
embraced poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Such a grouping was far from selfevident. Chambers, for example, had no category to unite such disparate arts as music and
sculpture. Instead, he classified music under phonics and sculpture with trades and
manufactures.11
Although Diderot’s entry on art did not mention the fine arts, d’Alembert’s Preliminary
Discourse embraced them. D’Alembert placed the fine arts among the liberal arts, noting that
they were commonly distinguished from other liberal arts by having “pleasure for their principal
object.” But, he wrote, the fine arts differed from traditional liberal arts in another respect. “The
practice of the Fine Arts consists principally in an invention which takes its laws almost
exclusively from genius.” Following this logic, Diderot and d’Alembert classified the arts very
differently than Chambers, placing the fine arts within the general category of poetry, which
included music, painting, sculpture, and engraving.12
By embracing the category of fine arts, Diderot and d’Alembert undermined their project
to elevate the mechanical arts. Separating the fine arts from the mechanical arts removed the
creative element from the mechanical arts, in effect reducing them to mere technique. Despite
their proclamations about the value of the mechanical arts, Diderot and d’Alembert remained
decidedly paternalistic toward artisans. D’Alembert in particular complained about the
inarticulate artisans who “work only by instinct” and could not explain their methods.13 In the
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end, Diderot and d’Alembert did less to build bridges between scholars and artisans than to
appropriate artisanal knowledge for scholarly purposes—or at least attempt to do so.
A discourse about art and science continued into the early twentieth century, despite the
emergence of a parallel discourse of pure and applied science.14 Nevertheless, the elevation of
fine arts involved a parallel deprecation of what remained. The new category established
problematic dichotomies, such as the sharp division between fine art and craft. The mechanical
arts were shorn of their creativity, becoming mere craft, bound by rule. The terms “artist” and
“artisan,” used interchangeably in English through most of the eighteenth century, gradually
grew distinct. The artist could make claims to middle-class status, but not the artisan.15 The new
divisions in effect gutted art as a concept for understanding industrial technology and its
relationship to new forms of natural knowledge.
THE GENIUS OF INVENTION AND DEVALUATION OF THE MECHANICAL ARTS
With the creative element segregated in the fine arts, the concept of mechanical art lost much of
its ability to explain the dramatic changes in material culture that were about to emerge in the
Industrial Revolution. Or, to put it a bit more precisely, the only model available to explain
advances in the mechanical arts was that of creativity in the fine arts, the lone inventive genius
(invariably male) giving unconstrained expression to his creativity.16 At the same time, industrial
capitalism, while providing a great spur to technical creativity, did little to encourage the dignity
and moral status of the mechanical arts. Nevertheless, as recent historians of industrialization
have shown, the rise of modern industry was not premised on the destruction of craft skills. The
accumulation and transmission of artisanal knowledge was undoubtedly a key factor in European
industrialization.17
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In nineteenth-century Britain, however, middle-class theorists of industrialization rarely
acknowledged the role of artisanal knowledge and instead praised the division of labor and skilldestroying mechanization. For these theorists, progress in the useful arts did not depend on the
artisan. Rather, artisans were presented as obstacles to progress whose limitations could be
remedied by science. Science, from this perspective, was a form of middle-class knowledge that
could be applied to manufacturing. This reconceptualization of the relationship of science to art
as one of application represented a significant shift from the Enlightenment representation of
science and art as interacting along a continuum.
Perhaps the most striking example of this reconceptualization is Andrew Ure’s
Philosophy of Manufactures of 1835. Ure’s Philosophy was both a technical survey and an
apologia for the new mechanized factories of the Industrial Revolution, especially textile mills.
Ure stridently defended existing practices in the textile mills, especially the use of child labor,
while also articulating a theory of the ideal automatic factory. Like other writers of the era, Ure
did not have access to a twentieth-century concept of technology to explain the rise of the
factory. Instead, he invoked the phrase “arts and manufactures,” in effect reducing the arts to
manufacturing. This reduction is explicit in his 1844 Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and
Mines, where he defined “an art or manufacture” as “that species of industry which effects a
certain change in a substance, to suit it for the general market, by combining its parts in a new
order and form, through mechanical or chemical means.”18 Human agency had no role in Ure’s
definition of art.
In The Philosophy of Manufactures, Ure made it clear that skilled artisans deserved no
place in this system of arts and manufactures. “The more skilful [sic] the workman, the more
self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a
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mechanical system.” Therefore, “it is … the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in
machinery to supersede human labour altogether, or to diminish its cost, by substituting the
industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary labourers, for trained
artisans.” Although Ure’s concept of skill may have been “more than a little paranoid” for his
time, his general approach was endorsed in more sober terms by other middle-class theorists of
industry, such as Charles Babbage.19
Ure was quite explicit that, in the modern factory, craft skills were to be replaced by
science. “The principle of the factory system then is, to substitute mechanical science for hand
skill.” Through the “union of capital and science,” work would be reduced to the “exercise of
vigilance and dexterity.” He also praised the ability of self-acting machinery to suppress strikes.
Richard Roberts’s self-acting mule, for example, demonstrated “that when capital enlists science
in her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility.” Karl Marx famously
quoted this passage in the machinery chapter of Capital, where he argued that, under capitalism,
inventions could be used as “weapons against working-class revolt.”20
Ure framed his broader project in terms of the application of science. He was inspired to
survey British factories after spending years teaching “practical men … the application of
mechanical and chemical science to the arts.” Yet these sciences were not the natural philosophy
of the universities. Ure praised the “science of the factory” as understood by “enlightened
manufacturers” over the “theoretical formulae” of the “recluse academician.” Ure’s “science”
was eminently practical. He referred, for example, to “mill architecture” as a “science of recent
origin.” He also described the “modern cotton mill” as an exemplar of “exact mechanical
science.” Ure was clearly using “science” to describe the same type of autonomous practical
knowledge that Babbage, writing just three years earlier, defined as “applied science.” Unlike
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Babbage, Ure felt no need to differentiate this practical knowledge from science generally. This
is not surprising, because Ure’s work as an industrial consultant placed him far from Babbage’s
elite world of university science. (As Robert Bud notes, Ure’s approach to applied science was
picked up by the French founders of the Conservatoire Nationale des Ars et Métiers.)21
Ure’s usage shows that James Turner’s argument about the meaning of “science” in
nineteenth-century America is also applicable to Britain. Turner insists that, before 1900,
“science” did not refer to “laboratory methods or the quest for general laws” but, rather, to
something “more general, a kind of ‘systematic knowledge’ or ‘rigorous thought,’” which could
include most social sciences and sometimes even theology. By the later nineteenth century,
argues Turner, the increasing professionalization of academic disciplines and the growing
prestige of technology encouraged natural scientists to claim a monopoly on science. When
historians view the nineteenth century in terms of this monopoly, accepting the primacy of
natural science over other forms of knowledge, “we are ourselves victims of a linguistic coup
d’etat carried out by specialists in the natural sciences at the end of the nineteenth century.”22
In Ure’s thinking, this broad nineteenth-century concept of science displaced artisanal
knowledge, transferring agency from artisans to factory owners, inventors, and engineers. Ure
also drew on the concept of fine art to grant these middle-class agents of industrialism a degree
of creativity denied to artisans. He likened the cotton mill to “individual master-pieces” that are
studied in the “philosophy of the fine arts.” Ure mentioned a number of heroic inventors, in
particular Richard Arkwright, whom he praised more for his willingness “to subdue the
refractory tempers of work-people” than for the brilliance of his technical contributions.
Similarly, Babbage was also willing to describe mechanical invention in terms borrowed from
the fine arts. Babbage saw the invention of machinery as rooted less in craft skills than in the
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creative process. Although new machines were common, he opined, “the more beautiful
combinations are exceeding rare.” Such machines “are found only amongst the happiest
productions of genius.” As Christine MacLeod shows in her award-winning study of invention in
Britain, this view of mechanical invention as an act of genius became widespread in the early
nineteenth century.23
CONCLUSION: FROM ART TO TECHNOLOGY
A discourse about science and art continued throughout the nineteenth century in a way that
increasingly shifted agency from art to science. The discourse of pure and applied science
dispensed with the need to address the mechanical arts at all, although the term “industrial arts”
remained common until World War I. In their essays in this Focus section, Robert Bud and
Graeme Gooday note the dual meanings of “applied science,” which could refer either to an
autonomous body of practical knowledge or to the act of applying the principles of science to
practical problems. This flexibility allowed the phrase to do boundary work for both engineers
and scientists as these professions solidified in the second half of the nineteenth century.
American engineers, in particular, based their claim to social status on the concept of applied
science as an autonomous body of knowledge, while scientists could use the definition of applied
science as the application of pure science to claim credit for modern wonders of the industrial
age.24 In neither case was science an attribute of workers, as demonstrated by the movement for
mechanics institutes on both sides of the Atlantic, which sought to ameliorate the condition of
the laboring classes by giving them a scientific education.25
In all this discourse, however, there was remarkably little attention to the human agency
behind developments in applied science and industrial arts, aside from the individual creative
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geniuses supposedly responsible for specific inventions or discoveries. It is precisely this lack of
human agency that later became a key attribute of the discourse of technology. Before the first
decade of the twentieth century, “technology” was an obscure term almost universally defined as
the “science of the arts,” with “science” here understood primarily as a system of classification.
Nevertheless, the connection to applied science was there from the beginning. Technology was a
science that concerned the useful arts. As Paul Lucier has noted, American geologists in the midnineteenth century invoked “technological science,” which was largely a synonym for “applied
science” as an autonomous body of technical expertise. It was in this sense that “technology”
became synonymous with “applied science” in the early twentieth century, as expressed in the
phrase “science and technology,” which generally meant “pure and applied science” rather than
“science and its applications.”26
But there remained what Leo Marx has termed a “semantic void,” the lack of an adequate
term to capture the dramatic changes in the material culture of the second industrial revolution.
This void emerged not just from changes in material culture, however. It was also a product of
the decline of the broader concept of art. Although the term “art” continued to be used well into
the twentieth century for what would today be called “technology,” by 1910 this usage already
had an antiquated air. As the literary scholar Sidney Colvin noted in his entry on “Art” in the
eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “the word Art, becoming appropriated to the
fine arts,” was no longer used for the “large number of industries and their products to which the
generic term Art … properly applies.” But with “art” no longer available, a term was still needed
for the material processes of industrial civilization. “Technology” assumed this role as well. In
the early twentieth century, English-language social scientists, beginning with Thorstein Veblen,
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appropriated the meanings of the German term “Technik,” which referred to the arts of material
production as a whole, transferring these meanings to “technology.”27
“Technology” rose to the status of a keyword only in the 1930s.28 By then it expressed
the idea of both applied science and industrial arts. It also inherited the effacement of human
agency that occurred in the nineteenth century, when middle-class theorists denied the creative
role of skilled artisans in modern industry. In addition to obscuring agency, “technology” also
embodied a class relationship, with working-class skills subordinate to middle-class knowledge.
This nineteenth-century legacy in part explains why the rhetoric of technological determinism is
so stubbornly persistent—and why Leo Marx has labeled technology a “hazardous concept.”29
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* Department of the History of Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison,
Wisconsin 53706-1528; eschatzb@wisc.edu.
Research for this essay was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant no.
0646788.
1
Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,
2001); and Serafina Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007).
2
Elspeth Whitney, “Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the
Thirteenth Century,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1990, 80:1–169; and
Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge
from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001).
3
Peter Dear, “What Is the History of Science the History Of? Early Modern Roots of the
Ideology of Modern Science,” Isis, 2005, 96:390–406, esp. pp. 393–394; William Newman,
“Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages,” ibid., 1989, 80:423–445; and
Thomas Broman, “The Semblance of Transparency: Expertise as a Social Good and an Ideology
in Enlightened Societies,” Osiris, 2012, forthcoming.
4
Dear, “What Is the History of Science the History Of?” pp. 395–396; and Lissa Roberts
and Simon Schaffer, “Preface,” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late
Renaissance to Early Industrialisation, ed. Roberts, Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007), pp. xiii–xxvii, on p. xiii.
5
Steven Shapin, “The Invisible Technician,” American Scientist, 1989, 77:554–563; and
Pamela H. Smith, “Art, Science, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe,” Isis, 2006, 97:83–
100.
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6
Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2
vols., Vol. 1 (London: Printed for J. and J. Knapton, 1728), p. viii; and Richard Yeo,
Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 147–152 (on the success of the Cyclopaedia see Ch. 5).
7
Chambers, Cyclopaedia, p. viii.
8
Ibid., pp. viii, ix.
9
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot
(1751), trans. Richard N. Schwab (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1995); Denis Diderot, “Art,”
in Encyclopédie; ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Diderot
and d’Alembert (1751), Univ. Chicago ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, Spring 2011, ed. Robert
Morrissey, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/, Vol. 1, pp. 713–717; and Robert Darnton,
“Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie,”
in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage,
1984), pp. 191–213. See also “Art,” in The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert
Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer (Ann Arbor:
MPublishing, Univ. Michigan Library, 2003), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.139.
10
Diderot, “Art,” Vol. 1, pp. 714, 717 (here and throughout this essay, translations into
English are mine unless otherwise indicated); d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, pp. 37–39;
Lissa Roberts, “Introduction [to Section III],” in Mindful Hand, ed. Roberts et al. (cit. n. 4), pp.
189–195, esp. pp. 189–190; and Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions (cit. n. 6), pp. 152–154.
11
Shiner, Invention of Art (cit. n. 1), pp. 80–83, 111 (quotation).
12
D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse (cit. n. 9), pp. 144–145; and Shiner, Invention of
Art, pp. 83–85.
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13
D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 123.
14
Sidney Colvin, “Art,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences,
Literature, and General Information, 11th ed., ed. Hugh Chisholm (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1910), Vol. 1, pp. 657–660.
15
Shiner, Invention of Art (cit. n. 1), pp. 99–120.
16
See Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British
Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007).
17
See Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., World of Possibilities: Flexibility and
Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997);
Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 154, 250; and Berg, “The Genesis of ‘Useful Knowledge,’”
History of Science, 2007, 45:123–133, esp. pp. 127–130.
18
Andrew Ure, “Preface,” in A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines; Containing
a Clear Exposition of Their Principles and Practice, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1853),
Vol. 1, pp. iii–xiv, on p. iii. See also Steve Edwards, “Factory and Fantasy in Andrew Ure,”
Journal of Design History, 2001, 14:17–33; and W. V. Farrar, “Andrew Ure, F.R.S., and the
Philosophy of Manufactures,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 1973, 27:299–
324.
19
Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures; or, an Exposition of the Scientific,
Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (London: Charles
Knight, 1835; rpt., New York: Kelley, 1967), pp. 20, 23; Berg, Machinery Question and the
Making of Political Economy (cit. n. 17), pp. 184, 99 (“more than a little paranoid”); and Charles
Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1835).
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20
Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, pp. 20, 21, 368; and Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique
of Political Economy, 3 vols., Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 563–564.
21
Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, pp. viii, 23–24, 32, 25; Graeme Gooday, “‘Vague
and Artificial’: The Historically Elusive Distinction between Pure and Applied Science,” in this
Focus section (on the likeness of Ure’s “science” to Babbage’s “applied science”); and Robert
Bud, “‘Applied Science’: A Phrase in Search of a Meaning,” in this Focus section.
22
James Turner, “Le concept de science dans l’Amérique du XIXe siècle,” Annales:
Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2002, 57:753–772, on pp. 771–772.
23
Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures (cit. n. 19), pp. 2, 16, 32–33, 37–38; Babbage, On the
Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (cit. n. 19), pp. 260, 65; and MacLeod, Heroes of
Invention (cit. n. 16).
24
Ronald Kline, “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Science’: The Public Rhetoric of
Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1880–1945,” Isis, 1995, 86:194–221; and Thomas
F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 37–64.
25
Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, “Science, Nature, and Control: Interpreting
Mechanics’ Institutes,” Social Studies of Science, 1977, 7:31–74; and Stephen P. Rice, Minding
the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America (Berkeley: Univ. California Press,
2004), pp. 42–68.
26
Eric Schatzberg, “Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology
before 1930,” Technology and Culture, 2006, 47:486–512, esp. pp. 487–493; Jacob Bigelow,
Elements of Technology (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little & Wilkins, 1831); Paul Lucier, Scientists
and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
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Schatzberg, “From Art to Applied Science”
Univ. Press, 2008), p. 143; and “The National Research Council,” Science, 1919, 49:458–462, on
p. 459.
27
Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Technol. & Cult.,
2010, 51:561–577; Colvin, “Art” (cit. n. 14), p. 660; and Schatzberg, “Technik Comes to
America.”
28
E.g., “America’s Future Studied in Light of Progressive Application of Technology,”
New York Times, 20 July 1937, p. 20.
29
Marx, “Technology” (cit. n. 27).
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