“Applied Science”
A Phrase in Search of a Meaning
By Robert Bud*
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 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.
BY THE 1870S, the phrase “applied science” had been popularized in the public sphere in Britain.
Not just the expression of a literal meaning, the term also had connotations, implications, and a
contested cultural place. When T. H. Huxley deplored the very use of the expression in his speech
opening Mason College, Birmingham, in 1880 he was answered during the subsequent lunch. G. J.
Johnson, lawyer and best friend to the elderly founder, Josiah Mason, retorted, “It was probably to
that phrase that they owed the existence of the Mason College.”1
The purpose of this short essay is to identify the differing rhetorical traditions out of which
the phrase’s uses grew and the institutions that gave bureaucratic reality to individual enthusiasms.
1
By the 1870s, the relationship of elite science to managing and promoting industrial change had
been a matter of debate for more than half a century.2 The meanings of the phrase “applied science”
can be seen to be a hybrid of “angewandte Wissenschaft,” “practical science,” and “science
appliquée aux arts.” It is the contention of this essay that these terms, each of which originated in a
different country and in its own narrow context, were hybridized in mid-nineteenth-century Britain
to create a widely used term that acquired global influence and that would itself, in its turn, change
and hybridize.
COINING “APPLIED SCIENCE”
The term “applied science” itself was coined by the writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge and first
appeared in his 1817 Treatise on Method. It does not appear in the press earlier, and for the next
decade it is found only in reference to the work of Coleridge. He had, however, drawn on an
existing German term. “Angewandte Wissenschaft,” as Google N-gram shows, had emerged
suddenly in the late 1780s, though the terms “angewandte Mathematik” and “angewandte Chemie”
already existed.3 According to Google, there were two publications in 1788 that used the term and a
further one in 1792. Based generally in a triangle of southern Germany outlined by Halle to the east,
Jena to the west, and Leipzig to the south, early adopters included Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob,
Johann Christoph Hoffbauer, and Johann Heinrich Gottlieb Heusinger.4
These authors were not just geographically close but were also joined by their distinguished
promotion of Kantianism.5 Their works on agriculture, philosophy, religion, and education, albeit
diverse in subject, shared a philosophical base—one that they laid out quite formally. Jakob, for
instance, defined “applied science” in his Grundriß der allgemeinen Logik in terms of a posteriori
knowledge resulting from experiment, in contrast to theoretical, a priori knowledge.6 This
definition, like those to be found in other volumes, is a variation of the well-known distinction
made two years earlier by Kant himself in his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft
(Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science) (1786). In the introduction to this book Kant had
2
distinguished between reine Wissenschaft (pure science), which was based on a priori principles,
and angewandte Vernunfterkenntnis (applied rational cognition).7 Here it is important to note that
Kant did not mean “applied” in the sense of “utilitarian” but, rather, as “learned empirically.”
Such is the significance of Kantianism to the mapping of knowledge in Germany that in
1894 Meyers Konversationslexicon looked back over the previous century to reflect on the history
of this approach. It identified the key figures as the Braunschweig literary historian Johann Joachim
Eschenburg, who produced a textbook on the scientific crafts (Wissenschaftskunde) in 1792, and the
Jena professor Carl Erhard Schmid, author of the General Encyclopedia and Methodology of the
Sciences in 1810.8
Eschenburg was careful to begin by distinguishing between a science (Wissenschaft) and an
art (Kunst). The German word “Kunst” can cover both the modern English category of art and the
older category of art as craft. In fact, Eschenburg’s principal concern was with aesthetics and
writing; he does argue, however, that an applied science such as applied chemistry draws on the
ideal knowledge, derived a priori, and then applies it to making sense of the observations acquired
a posteriori.9 A similar point was made by Schmid at the University of Jena, then at the height of its
fame. These were the golden years of Jena, when Schiller, Schelling, and Fichte lent a new luster
and built up idealist scholarship in the university. The lesser-known Schmid, a doctor who had been
there since 1785, structured his interpretation of sciences in terms of the pure, the mixed, and the
applied.10
More influential was a third acolyte of Kantianism to create an encyclopedia, the poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As is well known, Coleridge traveled in Germany, studying at the
University of Göttingen under Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1798. Here he was just a little over
twenty miles from Jena. Coleridge returned from his studies in Germany thoroughly imbued with
the teachings of the Jena school. He had taken to Kantianism with enthusiasm and great diligence,
and although he never visited Königsberg or even Jena he carefully read and annotated his copy of
Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft. And in 1817 he would launch his own
3
Kantian encyclopedia, based on a distinction between pure and applied science. From the
perspective of southern Germany, this was neither radical nor innovative. But Coleridge would
translate the Kantian encyclopedia from the universities of southern Germany into the Englishspeaking market. Although he was ultimately not himself the editor, his vision led to the publication
of thirty volumes by 1845, and more than twenty-two thousand pages appeared in a second edition
from 1849 to 1858.
As Coleridge explained in the Treatise on Method that served as a prospectus, this was to be
an encyclopedia of all knowledge, organized—like that of Schmid—according to the structure of
knowledge rather than according to the naively empirical alphabetic arrangement of the Scottish
school, evidenced in the Britannica.11 Like Eschenburg’s project, Coleridge’s magnum opus would
include the whole range of knowledge and practice, the fine arts as well as the most fundamental
knowledge and the practical skills.
Coleridge mapped knowledge in an environment separated from Kant’s Königsberg by an
industrial revolution, a world war, and a thousand miles. Nonetheless, he was determined to use the
German’s philosophy to make sense of his chaotic world, as part of a wider campaign. In the same
year that he published his Treatise on Method, his Lay Sermon … on the Existing Distresses and
Discontents warned that while machines could be instantly restarted after being put aside in a
recession, people could not be treated in the same way.12
Coleridge followed his German contemporaries in distinguishing between pure science and
applied science, though between the two he added the level of mixed sciences. He explained, along
the lines of Jakob, that “there are, as we have before noticed, two sorts of relation, on the due
observation of which all Method depends. The first is that which the Ideas or Laws of the Mind bear
to each other; the second, that which they bear to the external world; on the former are built the
Pure Sciences; on the latter those which we call Mixed and Applied.”13 It is not suggested here that
Coleridge copied any particular German writer; rather, he was expressing what by now had become
folk knowledge among German Kantians.
4
PROMOTING “APPLIED SCIENCE” THROUGH THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA
METROPOLITANA
Coleridge’s prospectus saw the first use of the phrase “applied science” in English. This piece was
not just reprinted in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana but also underpinned the structure of this
very widely read encyclopedia. Editing was taken over by two Anglican clergymen of conservative
bent, neither of whom was attracted to the new industrial and steam-driven world. The first, Edward
Smedley, was a poet but also a vicar appalled by the popularity of evangelicism who denounced the
readiness with which religion could be proclaimed on the basis of revelation rather than study.14
Smedley’s poems, letters, and memoir show a man of the eighteenth century struggling to make
sense of a new world.
The contributors chosen by Smedley were outstanding. In science, he recruited from the
community that Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray would call (after Coleridge) the scientific
clerisy.15 Authors included William Herschel, William Whewell, and Charles Babbage. To write on
the topic of manufacturies Smedley chose not one of the new Unitarian industrialists but the learned
Cambridge mathematician and polymath Babbage.
Babbage used his article as the first part of a book, On the Economy of Machinery and
Manufactures, published in 1832. Here he gives a definition: “The applied sciences derive their
facts from experiment; but the reasonings, on which their chief utility depends, are the province of
what is called abstract science.”16 In this expression, which the Oxford English Dictionary
mistakenly identifies as the first use of the phrase in English, we see the Coleridgian and Kantian
meanings. The use of empirical facts is what characterizes applied science.
When Smedley died in 1838, he was succeeded in the editorial seat of the Encyclopaedia
Metropolitana by the clergyman H. J. Rose, a friend of Whewell and the principal of the new King’s
College, London, an Anglican and conservative response to the new godless University College.
Like Whewell, Rose saw it as his role to incorporate engineering within rational society. It was
5
therefore at King’s College that applied science achieved its first formal institutional realization. At
a time when the need for engineers who could support the boom in railway building offered a great
opportunity to a new college, Rose obliged. To theology and medicine was added a department
variously called—within a few years—“Department of Civil Engineering and Mining,”
“Department of Civil Engineering and Science as Applied to Arts and Manufactures,” “Department
of Civil Engineering and Architecture and of Science as Applied to Arts and Manufactures,”
“Department of Engineering, Architecture, Arts, and Manufactures,” and finally, in 1844,
“Department of General Instruction in the Applied Sciences.” Students were taught both general
scientific principles and how to apply these to practical situations. As in the Encyclopaedia
Metropolitana, applied science constituted the instantiation of enduring truths in the mundane
world.17 The term clearly represented an attempt both to support the application of science but also
to manage it within the framework of an orderly Tory society ruled by timeless principles.
“PRACTICAL SCIENCE” AND “SCIENCE APPLIED TO THE ARTS”
By 1850, “applied science” was also appearing as an alternative to another phrase of similar
vintage: “practical science.” Although that alternative term could be found in the press as early as
the 1730s, it occurred only rarely until early in the nineteenth century. Its use in the public sphere
was therefore roughly contemporary with that of the German-derived term, but its meaning had
none of the philosophical depth of “applied science.” Instead, it was simply used to describe the
practice that complemented theoretical knowledge. Thus a report of objectors to the fixed term of
seven years for apprenticeship referred to “persons distinguished for their theoretical knowledge
and practical science.” The phrase was popularized by great shows and promoted by inventors in
venues such as Jacob Perkins’s Adelaide Gallery of Applied Science (1832) and George Cayley’s
Polytechnic Institute (1838). These establishments were predominantly concerned with inventions,
although the Polytechnic Institution was also seriously interested in education.18
Quite different from this English term, with its connotation of an alternative way of
6
knowing, was a French import that in subsequent years would be hybridized with now-native
traditions. The English phrase “science applied to the arts” was imported through translation from
the French “science appliquée aux arts,” the ideological origin of which was quite different from
that of the apparently similar “applied science.” Whereas the latter grew out of academic and Tory
anxiety about the chaos of uncontrolled manufacturing, the former reflected a desire in the early
nineteenth century to promote industry through scientific education.
Several historians have identified the ironically contradictory processes in revolutionary
France through which, on the one hand, the emergence of professional science separated the
practice of science from practices such as pharmacy while, on the other hand, there arose an urgent
need to bring science to bear on practical military and industrial issues.19 The Terror that had led to
Lavoisier’s death in May 1794 ended shortly afterward with the execution of Robespierre. That fall,
at a time of war on many fronts, the French educational system was put in order. The new École
Polytechnique was given a place among the great engineering schools of Paris by defining it as a
central general school and the others as “écoles d’application.” In the view of some, such as
industry minister Jean-Antoine Chaptal, a chemical manufacturer, the student learning how to
“apply” science was in position similar to that of a tradesman enriching his craft through science.20
Others, however, had a rather different view. In the immediate aftermath of war, encounters
with an industrializing Britain, from which Frenchmen had been cut off for almost a generation,
created a sense of awe and a determination to bring about change at home. Visiting Britain, Charles
Dupin, a graduate of the early École Polytechnique who had become a professional engineer, was
inspired to link his own educational experience to what he called “science applied to the industrial
arts” by the teaching of Andrew Ure at the Andersonian Institution in Glasgow.21
At the École Polytechnique, Gaspard Monge, who had made the institution’s reputation with
a course based around descriptive geometry leading to engineering, had been replaced by the much
more mathematical Pierre Simon Laplace. But Monge’s approach would be resurrected by his
students in a series of new schools. Thus, on his return from Britain, Dupin was inspired to propose
7
the reconstitution of the failed revolutionary trade school, the Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et
Métiers (CNAM). A report was drawn up by Dupin, the leading chemist Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac,
and the physicist François Arago, three stalwarts of the Napoleonic era who shared a fascination
with British developments. (Arago would write the first book-length biography of James Watt,
which would emphasize his scientific credentials.) The new CNAM was accordingly redefined as
an “haute école des connaissances des science appliquée aux arts industrielles.” There would be
three professors: Dupin taught mechanics applied to industry, the chemist Nicolas ClémentDesormes taught chemistry applied to industry, and, the economist and “ideologue” Jean-Baptiste
Say taught industrial economy. Each offering would be distinguished, and the course given by
Clément-Desormes—in addition to being practical—laid out the basis for the new
thermodynamics.22 A decade later, the formation of the École Centrale for the education of
engineers would also be explained as an attempt to return to the original vision of the École
Polytechnique.23
The distinctive and radically new emphasis of the CNAM has been pointed out by Robert
Fox. The former minister Chaptal would write in his memoirs that he had taken an industrycentered view of the future of the CNAM. He envisaged three departments, dealing variously with
products made of wood and of metal and precision instruments.24 The last director of the old school,
Gerard-Joseph Christian, had a similar, industry-focused vision of it as a center of a science he
called “technonomie,” which would analyze generic processes across industry.25
HYBRIDIZING MEANINGS AND WORDS
French thought may be very different from British thought, but French was an international
language, required of the educated English middle class. So by the early 1850s, various
combinations of a Tory-inspired, philosophically based concept of “applied science,” an English
pragmatic concept of “practical science,” and a French radical concept of “science applied to the
arts” could all be found in English. The distinctions in meaning were not always clear, as was
8
illustrated in King’s College, London.26 Even George Wilson, the new professor of “technology” at
Edinburgh, found himself forced to use “applied science” in private correspondence.27
It was in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition of 1851 that these terms had become
interchangeable; their meanings routinely hybridized, and “applied science” came to be the
dominant form. A specific political context provided the occasion for the transformation of an
immaterial Zeitgeist into specific institutional change. The transformation of the party system
occasioned by the end of the Corn Law debates gave a platform to Lyon Playfair, former pupil of
Justus Liebig and protégé of former prime minister Robert Peel, a mill owner and technocrat. A new
political and media context was critical not just in getting him a position but also in getting his
voice heard. In 1848 the Morning Chronicle, a leading (if loss-making) competitor to the Times
itself, had been taken over by a group of Peelite lords and used to promote their views in general
and the speeches and position of Playfair in particular. The Great Exhibition had also brought to
London both foreign products and processes worthy of admiration—and people too. Charles Dupin,
now head of the French delegation, was a permanent feature of the London scene in the autumn of
1851. The diaries published by the Times and other newspapers show that he attended parties and
meetings with Playfair at least a dozen times in the four months from May to August. Playfair in
turn had the ear of Prince Albert, an enthusiastic promoter of new educational schemes. His position
became all the more powerful when in June 1852 an indecisive election brought the Earl of Derby
to lead a weak minority Tory administration that appealed to an uncontroversial middle ground.
The old battles between free traders (and their municipal and industrial backers) and the
agricultural interests were superseded. In November 1852 the Queen, speaking for the weak
minority government, laid out plans for future spending. Seeking uncontroversial common ground,
the new Prime Minister wrote a speech for the Queen that for the first time promised spending on
science. Although the minority government was unable to save itself, falling within months, it was
succeeded by the technocratic so-called “Aberdeen coalition,” which brought together Peelite (anti–
Corn Law) Tories and the Whigs, often representing cities. This established a new Department of
9
Science and Art, with Playfair as Secretary for Science (and Henry Cole representing art). Over the
next eight years this and the subsequent government turned away from funding free compulsory
elementary education and instead plowed money into the Department of Science and Art.28 This
support gave Playfair an unparalleled voice in the promotion of science in the public sphere.
Playfair’s basic interest was to emulate industrial instruction on the Continent—and
specifically the model to be seen in Paris at the École Centrale and the CNAM. To that end he
deployed the phrase and category “applied science,” many speeches, innumerable contacts, and a
complex institutional position. As Secretary for Science of the Department of Science and Art he
was overall responsible for its main operating body, the Government School of Mines in London;
but as deputy director he was the subordinate of its director, the geologist Henry de la Beche, and of
his successor, Roderick Murchison. Playfair also attempted to transform the School of Mines. The
name was changed to “School of Mines and of Science Applied to the Arts,” and with its wide
acclaim came use of its sobriquet. Although the further attempt to make the school formally a center
of “applied science” was repulsed, the terms were now frequently interchanged.29
In 1858 Playfair took a professorship at Edinburgh University. There he endeavored to
reorganize science into faculties of pure and applied science. The principal was the old competitor
of William Whewell, David Brewster, who had been promoting the importance of practical science
for a generation.30 He was convinced by Playfair, and so even was the Senate, but the political
chemist could not stick to academic politics. He returned to London in 1869 as a member of
Parliament and continuing activist for technical education and applied science, having achieved an
agreement to create Edinburgh’s first Division of “Applied Science.”
The renewed technical education movement of the 1870s was more successful than its
predecessor a decade earlier.31 A Parliamentary select committee explored “instruction in theoretical
and applied science to the industrial classes,” giving a public forum to such promoters as Lyon
Playfair and Henry Roscoe. Within a period of less than a decade, new colleges were established not
just in Birmingham but also in Aberystwyth (1872), Bristol (1876), Leeds (1874), Liverpool (1882),
10
and Manchester (1883). In each, the phrase “applied science” would be a potent rallying cry. In
France, as the work of Bruno Belhoste and Konstantinos Chatzis has made clear, training in
“science appliquée aux arts” had already distinguished the “ingenieur.”32 In Britain, too, applied
science increasingly provided the epistemological basis of engineering, as Sir William Siemens’s
campaign clearly showed.
Even as it was becoming widely used, “applied science” was also criticized. From the
practical side, it seemed to be unduly favoring science. As Christian’s call for the teaching at the
CNAM to be characterized as “technonomie,” or Wilson’s plea for “technology,” showed, the
enduring importance of know-how could make an alternative term seem more attractive. On the
scientists’ side, “applied science” was subject to the charges of a Huxley or a Pasteur that applied
science had no claims to an epistemological standing distinctively different from that of any other
science.
However familiar these criticisms might seem, it should be emphasized that during the first
three quarters of the nineteenth century the term “applied science” was not a research category, the
familiar bogey of the twentieth century. It was instead a category of existing positive knowledge
that was to be disseminated through teaching or mapped through encyclopedias. This hybrid
category had long since incorporated qualities from its ancestry. The epistemological hierarchy
introduced by Kant, which declared the lesser certainty and truth value of a posteriori knowledge,
would translate into the lower status of practicing “applied” rather than “pure” science. The
traditions of both practical science and of science appliqué aux arts would also characterize the
evolving claims of the profession of engineering as applied science.
11
* Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD, United Kingdom;
Robert.bud@sciencemuseum.org.uk.
In all my work on applied science I am indebted to past collaborative conversations with
Gerrylynn K. Roberts. Recent research has been conducted with support from the Science Museum,
London, and from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant no. AH/I027177/1. I am
grateful for comments of audiences at meetings of the History of Science Society and the British
Society for the History of Science and those of participants in seminars organized by the project
“Owning and Disowning Invention: Intellectual Property, Authority, and Identity in British Science
and Technology, 1880–1920,” 2007–2010.
1
“Sir Josiah Mason’s Science College,” Birmingham Daily Post, 2 Oct. 1880.
2
See Robert Bud and Gerrylynn K. Roberts, Science versus Practice: Chemistry in
Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984); and Bud and Roberts, “Thinking
about Science and Practice in British Education: The Victorian Roots of a Modern Dichotomy,” in
Industry and Higher Education, ed. P. W. G. Wright (Milton Keynes: Open Univ. Press, 1990), pp.
18–30. A slightly different interpretation is provided by J. F. Donnelly, “Representations of Applied
Science: Academics and Chemical Industry in Late Nineteenth-Century England,” Social Studies of
Science, 1986, 16:195–234.
3
Christoph Meinel, “Reine und Angewandte: Die Entstehung einer neuen
Wissenschaftskonzeption in der Chemie der Auflkaerung,” Berichte der Wissenschaftsgeschichte,
1985, 4:25–45.
4
Of the ten identified authors who used the phrase between 1784 and 1800, according to
Google N-grams in December 2011, one was associated with Leipzig (Karl Heinrich Heydenreich),
two with Halle (Johann Christoph Hoffbauer and Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob), and two with Jena
(Johann Heinrich Gottlieb Heusinger and Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach).
5
See Marie-Elisabeth Vopelius, “Jakob, Ludwig Heinrich von,” in Neue Deutsche
Biographie, Vol. 10 (1974), pp. 216–217; Carl von Prantl, “Heusinger, Joh. Heinrich Gottlieb,” in
12
Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Vol. 12 (1880), pp. 335–336; Friedrich Merzbacher, “Feuerbach,
Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, Vol. 5 (1961), pp. 110–111; D.
Wood, “Novalis: Kant Studies (1797),” Philosophical Forum, 2001, 32:323–338; Manfred Frank,
The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004); and
http://www.manchester.edu/kant/bio/BioUniFrames.html.
6
Ludwig Heinrich Jakob, Grundriß der allgemeinen Logik (Halle: Franke & Bespint, 1788),
7
“A rational doctrine of nature deserves the name of natural science only when the natural
p. 4.
laws at its foundation are cognised a priori, and are not mere laws of experience. A natural cognition
of the first kind is called pure, that of the second applied, rational cognition.” Quoted from the
translation in Ernest Belfort Bax, Kant’s Prolegomena and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science (London: Bell, 1891), p. 138.
8
Meyers Konversationslexikon (1894), Vol. 5, pp. 754–758. On Eschenburg see Fritz
Meyen, Johann Joachim Eschenburg 1743–1820 (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus, 1957); for Schmid
see Randall Collins, “A Micro-Macro Theory of Intellectual Creativity: The Case of German
Idealist Philosophy,” Sociological Theory, 1987, 5:47–69. I should emphasize my indebtedness to
the suggestive “Introduction” by Alice Snyder to her edition of S. T. Coleridge’s Treatise on
Method, as Published in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (London: Constable, 1934).
9
Johann Joachim Eschenburg, Lehrbuch der Wissenschaftskunde: Ein Grundriss
Encyclopaedischer Vorlesungen (Berlin: F. Nicolai, 1792).
10
Lothar Ehrlich and Georg Schmidt, eds., Ereignis Weimar-Jena: Gesellschaft und Kultur
um 1800 im internationalen Kontext (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008); and Olaf Breidbach, “The Culture of
Science and Experiments in Jena around 1800,” in Hans Christian Ørsted and the Romantic Legacy
in Science, ed. R. M. Brain, R. S. Cohen, and O. Knudsen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 177–
216. For Schmid’s encyclopedia see C. C. E. Schmid, Allgemeine Encyklopädie und Methodologie
der Wissenschaften (Jena, 1811).
13
11
See Snyder, ed., S. T. Coleridge’s Treatise on Method (cit. n. 8); and Alice D. Snyder,
“Coleridge and the Encyclopedists,” Modern Philology, 1940, 38:173–191.
12
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermon Addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes on the
Existing Distresses and Discontents (London: Gale & Fenner, J. M. Richardson, and J. Hatchard,
1817), p. 30. See A. S. Link, “Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Economic and Political Crisis in
Great Britain, 1816–1820,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1948, 9:323–338.
13
Snyder, ed., S. T. Coleridge’s Treatise on Method (cit. n. 8), p. 55.
14
E. Smedley, Religio Clerici: A Churchman’s First Epistle (London: Murray, 1819), p. 31;
on the editorship of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana after Coleridge see R. Collison, “Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and the ‘Encyclopaedia Metropolitana,’” Journal of World History, 1966, 9:751–
768.
15
Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981).
16
Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles
Knight, 1832), pp. 379–380.
17
“Department of General Instruction in the Applied Sciences,” in “Report from the Council
to the Annual General Court … Held on Monday 28th April 1845,” bound in King’s College
Calendar 1844–45, King’s College Archive Service, London.
18
The earliest examples of the phrase “practical science” in the Gale collection of digitized
newspapers are “To the Author,” Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 21 Apr. 1747;
and “House of Commons,” Morning Post, 21 Dec. 1813 (quotation). For the Adelaide Gallery and
the Royal Polytechnic Institution see Richard Daniel Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 376–387.
19
See, e.g., Jonathan Simon, Chemistry, Pharmacy, and Revolution in France, 1777–1809
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); and Janis Langins, La République avait besoin de Savants: Les Débuts
14
de l’Ecole Polytechnique, l’Ecole Centrale des Travaux publics et les Cours Révolutionnaires de
l’An III (Paris: Belin, 1987).
20
“Assemblée Générale du 23 Messidor an XII,” Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement
pour l’ Industrie Nationale, 1804, 3:4.
21
For Dupin’s description of the Andersonian see Charles Dupin, Mémoires sur la Marine et
les Ponts et Chaussées de France et d’Angleterre (Paris: Geury, 1818), pp. 67–69. On the French
response to the sight of Britain after the war see Liliane Pérez, “Technique, Économie et Politique
entre la France et l’Angleterre (XVIIe–XIXe siècles),” Documents pour l’Histoire des Techniques,
2010, 19:9–29; and Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Genesis of ‘Industrial Revolution’: Jean-Baptiste
Say and the French Debate on Industrie,” in Les Idées Passent-elles La Manche? Savoirs,
Représentations, Pratiques, ed. Jean-Philippe Genet and François-Joseph Ruggiu (FranceAngleterre, Xe–Xxe Siècles) (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne, 2007), pp. 211–233.
22
Philip Lervig, “Sadi Carnot and the Steam Engine: Nicolas Clément’s Lectures on
Industrial Chemistry, 1823–28,” British Journal for the History of Science, 1985, 18:147–196. See
also Nicolas Clément-Desormes, Cours de Chimie Appliquée aux Arts; ou, Analyse de Cours de
Chimie Industrielle Professé au Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, ed. by “un Auditeur,” 2 vols.
(Paris: Bachelier, 1829).
23
Théodore Olivier, Mémoires de Géométrie descriptive, théorique et appliqué (Paris,
1851), pp. iii–v; Olivier, “Monge et l’École Polytechnique,” Revue Scientifique et Industrielle,
1850, 7:64–68; and John Hubbel Weiss, The Making of Technological Man: The Social Origins of
French Engineering Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).
24
Chaptal laid out his views in Jean-Antoine Claude Chaptal, “Mes souvenirs sur Napoléon
1er,” ed. A. Chaptal (Paris: Plon, Nourris, 1893), pp. 90–92. See also René Tresse, “J. A. Chaptal et
l’enseignement technique de 1800 à 1819,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences et de Leurs Applications,
1957, 10:167–174; J. Payen, “The Role of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in the Development
of Technical Education up to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century,” History and Technology,
15
1988, 5:315–321; and Robert Fox, “Education for a New Age: The Conservatoire des Arts et
Métiers, 1815–30,” in Artisan to Graduate: Essays to Commemorate the Foundation in 1824 of the
Manchester Mechanics’ Institution, Now in 1974 the University of Manchester Institute of Science
and Technology, ed. D. S. L. Cardwell (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 23–38. For
the views of Chaptal in general see Jacob Horn and Margaret Jacob, “Jean-Antoine Chaptal and the
Cultural Roots of French Industrialization,” Technology and Culture, 1998, 39:671–698.
25
Jan Sebestik, “De la Technologie à la Technonomie: Gerard-Joseph Christian,” Cahiers
S.T.S., 1984, 2:256–269.
26
Among the first to affect such hybrids was the chemist J. F. W. Johnston, who began an
1843 article in Blackwood’s Magazine with a pithy, much-to-be quoted sentence: “Skilful practice is
applied science.” See J. F. W. Johnston, “The Practice of Agriculture,” Blackwood’s Magazine, Apr.
1843, 53:415–432, on p. 415.
27
George Wilson to Dr. Andrews, 3 June 1856, MS 350/2/306, Science Museum Library,
Swindon. Wilson nonetheless expressed his derogatory feelings toward the competing phrase in his
inaugural lecture: George Wilson, What Is Technology? An Inaugural Lecture (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh Univ., 1855).
28
Wilbur Devereux Jones and Arvel B. Erickson, The Peelites, 1846–1857 (Columbus: Ohio
State Univ. Press, 1972).
29
Bud and Roberts, Science versus Practice (cit. n. 2), p. 90.
30
See, e.g., David Brewster, “Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences,” Edinburgh
Review, 1837, 66:110–151.
31
Robin Betts, “Persistent but Misguided? The Technical Educationists, 1867–89,” History
of Education, 1998, 27:267–277.
32
Bruno Belhoste and Konstantinos Chatzis, “From Technical Corps to Technocratic Power:
French State Engineers and Their Professional and Cultural Universe in the First Half of the
Nineteenth Century,” Hist. & Technol., 2007, 23:209–225; and Chatzis, “Theory and Practice in the
16
Education of French Engineers from the Middle of the Eighteenth Century to the Present,” Archives
Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, 2010, 60:43–78.
17