1
“Vague and Artificial”
The Historically Elusive Distinction between Pure and Applied Science
By Graeme Gooday*
ABSTRACT
This essay argues for the historicity of applied science as a contested
category within laissez-faire Victorian British science. This distinctively
pre-twentieth-century notion of applied science as a self-sustaining,
autonomous enterprise was thrown into relief from the 1880s by a campaign
on the part of T. H. Huxley and his followers to promote instead the
primacy of “pure” science. Their attempt to relegate applied science to
secondary status involved radically reconfiguring it as the mere application
of pre-existing pure science. This new notion of extrinsically funded pure
science that would produce only contingently future social benefits as a
mere by-product came under pressure during World War I, when military
priorities focused attention once again on science for immediate utility. This
threatened the Cambridge-based promoters of self-referential pure science
who collectively published Science and the Nation in 1917. Yet most
contributors to this work discussed forms of “applied” science that had no
prior “pure” form. Even the U.K.’s leading government scientist, Lord
Moulton, dismissed the book’s provocative distinction between pure and
applied science as unhelpfully “vague and artificial.”
HISTORIANS OF TECHNOLOGY have long represented their subject as being most
definitely not the history of applied science. Understandably, they have challenged
any reductionism that subordinates their subject to the history of science.1 Yet, with
2
the exception of Ron Kline, their program of stigmatization has characteristically
focused only on one peculiarly twentieth-century notion of applied science. This is the
contentious notion that applied science somehow necessarily consists in some
application of a pre-existing pure science. 2 Robert Bud’s introduction to this Focus
section draws our attention, however, to the previously overlooked diverse and
contested meanings of “applied science” as a flexible category deployed in industrial
cultures over the last two centuries. This piece complements Bud’s work,
problematizing the conventional twentieth-century understanding by attending to an
older notion of applied science that predated the form so objectionable to historians of
technology.
In contrast to the conventional notion that pure science and applied science are
participants in a mutually defining dyadic relation, I show how applied science could
exist independently of pure science by historically preceding it. Indeed, applied
science was not originally seen by Victorians as necessarily an applied form of pure
science at all: for some interpreters, at least, it was instead an entirely autonomous
domain of practical knowledge. These claims may sound strange and even
counterintuitive to those familiar with the notorious “linear” thesis—that pure science
discovers and applied science utilizes the results. Yet we must remember that this
peculiarly modern division of labor had once upon a time to be both invented and
legitimized. If historians of science (if not of technology) have too often acquiesced in
the alleged historical and causal primacy of pure science, it is because they have been
raised in an interpretive tradition molded by late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury academic partisans of “pure” laboratory life. This essay investigates how
those partisans, led by T. H. Huxley and his followers, fought for the ideological and
functional supremacy of “pure” science against a well-entrenched notion of self-
3
sustaining “useful” (i.e., applied) science as the presumptive norm. In doing so, they
had to rewrite histories as if key developments in technology had only ever emerged
from the application of some prior form of pure science.
There are more than just historiographic and economic dimensions to this.
Proponents of applied science qua autonomous industrial enterprise expected that it
would pay for itself and thus needed no state support. The transatlantic “plea for pure
science campaign” that I discuss below (in parallel with Paul Lucier’s account)
therefore introduced a contentious new notion. This was that science’s practitioners
could draw on the funds of taxpayers and philanthropists to indulge in science with no
immediate benefit or accountability to others.3 This form of social contract for pure
science was not widely acceptable in late Victorian Britain. Although gaining
credibility by the early twentieth century, it came under particular pressure during the
Great War. During this time of national military emergency, the most immediately
useful state-funded research for wartime concerns was prioritized over the
serendipitous wait for utility to emerge from the project of “pure” science. In the vein
of Sabine Clarke’s discussion of “pure science with a practical aim,” I explore how
pure science was seen by others as a contentious (and self-indulgent) way of
postponing useful outcomes. Hence we will see how one senior figure in the British
scientific establishment characterized the alleged distinction as “vague and artificial.”4
APPLIED SCIENCE AS THE AUTONOMOUS STUDY OF USEFUL
KNOWLEDGE
Such terms as “applied science” and “pure science” were typically used in framing
future forms of knowledge making. This is apparent in Charles Babbage’s 1832 study
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, especially his programmatic
4
chapter “On the Future Prospects of Manufactures, as Connected with Science.” To
borrow a theme from Bud’s essay: Babbage did not see “applied science” or even
“applied sciences” as a secondary form of knowledge. He argued, rather, that
henceforth the improvement of manufactures should be premised on a symmetrical
nonhierarchical division of labor. On that basis, those working on “abstract science”
and those in the applied sciences would labor in parallel, in the domains
(“departments”) for which they were best fitted by aptitude and “acquired habits.”5
As a political economist, Babbage saw a completely separate fiscal basis for
these two forms of parallel science. Successful applied science would provide its own
ample “pecuniary” reward to its practitioners through the profits of commercial
utilization. For abstract science, however, he argued that there was a strong case for
future state patronage free of any obligation to pursue profit. The “discovery of the
great principles of nature” demanded a “mind almost exclusively devoted to such
investigations,” costly apparatus, and a time commitment “quite incompatible” with
the professional avocations of “cultivators of the higher departments of science.”
Hence it was a concern for all that the state should compensate them for the
“privations” to which, according to Babbage’s account, they so altruistically exposed
themselves. As is well known, Babbage was prodigiously skilled at absorbing large
quantities of state funding for his never-completed “cultivation” of the analytical
engine.6
This demand for state patronage was later adopted by Anglo-American
lobbyists for what became known more commonly as “pure science.”7 While
withdrawing from the political economy of applied science as a self-supporting
enterprise, they also wanted the financial security to follow noneconomic agendas.
One particular opportunity to promote their agenda came in 1870, when Britain’s
5
Liberal government launched its scheme of state-supported school education,
stimulating a demand for university-trained school teachers. Lobbyists for science
could now claim a place for their special expertise in the nation’s curricula. This was
the key theme that year when Professor of Chemistry Alexander Williamson delivered
his inaugural lecture at University College, London. His “Plea for Pure Science” was
at root a demand for financial recognition by the state of “pure science as an essential
element of national greatness and progress.”8 Significantly, Williamson presented the
proposed investment in pure science as a strategy for achieving greater longer-term
practical benefits from science by investing in its “pure” form at universities. It was
thus an alternative means of meeting the same goals as applied science, not an
enterprise of science pursued for its own sake. Indeed, the aim was to domesticate the
phenomenon of applied science as a second-order phenomenon, preferentially to be
accomplished by prior investment in pure science exclusively located in academic
institutions.
This emotionally charged “plea” for financial investment in the pure science
of the academic laboratory was echoed thirteen years later by Henry Rowland,
lecturing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.9 What was it
that prompted Rowland to adopt Williamson’s theme? As Paul Lucier’s account in
this Focus section notes, Rowland’s concern was that the technological endeavors of
Thomas Edison had come to be seen by the public as the canonical form of science—
from 1878 the benefits of an autonomous applied science were in the ascendant in the
electrical industry. Notwithstanding his own friendly dealings with Edison and the
Patent Office, Rowland was concerned to make his Johns Hopkins laboratory the
obligatory passage point for the world’s research, as exemplified in his production of
6
diffraction gratings. Edison’s West Orange suite threatened the authority of Rowland
as a self-styled “pure” American physicist.10
Much to the inconvenience of Rowland and his fellow puritans of knowledge,
the term “applied science” was long used to describe an area of industrial endeavor
and artifact production that did not draw much from institutionalized science. Indeed,
in that sense we might add “applied science” to the list of terms that Leo Marx has
documented as nineteenth-century candidates for what was later redesignated in the
twentieth century as “technology.”11 For example, when Victorian commentators
represented the telephone as a form of “applied science,” they were not asserting that
such putative inventors as Philipp Reis, Antonio Meucci, Elisha Gray, and Alexander
Graham Bell in any sense drew on the prior published work of André-Marie Ampère,
Michael Faraday, or Joseph Henry.12 Inevitably, the lobbyists for pure science, such
as Huxley, especially resented this usage of “applied science,” since it did not defer to
their growing specialist and elitist domain of experimental knowledge. The
autonomous enterprise of commercial invention in telephony was, after all,
inconveniently beyond the rule of their growing empire of academic science
laboratories.13
REFASHIONING APPLIED SCIENCE AS THE APPLICATION OF PURE
SCIENCE
Huxley’s aversion to science outside the control of the rising generation of laboratorybased practitioners featured in a much-quoted 1880 essay, “Science as Culture.” This
was based on the speech he gave on 1 October that year at the opening of Mason
College, Birmingham. In his address Huxley argued that such colleges should teach
science as a coherent institutionalized body of knowledge, uncompromised by a
7
concern with utility. He thus sought to discredit the autonomy of the old-style applied
science that still competed with his own vision for Britain’s new civic institutions of
laboratory-based learning in the 1880s. As Bud notes, however, one member of
Huxley’s audience—Mason’s lawyer—argued that the very existence of Mason
College owed much to a public sense of need for precisely the sort of applied science
that Huxley so deplored.14
Huxley presented such new institutions of higher education as part of a new
nonclerical and nonclassical culture that placed this form of notionally “pure”
physical science at the center of the curriculum. Denouncing enemies in the Church
and Oxbridge colleges, who had denied the viability of teaching science outside the
framework of either religion or the classics, his Birmingham lecture also attacked a
yet more entrenched foe: the industrial celebrants of “rule of thumb.” In the aftermath
of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition and at subsequent international exhibitions—
notably that held in Paris in 1867—such traditionalists had vocally defended the
integrity of British manufacturing against claims that academic training in science
was a major desideratum to improve it.15 In Huxley’s opinion, at least, such
uncooperative views had been discredited by the academic “laboratization” of
science: “the ‘practical’ man, scotched but not slain, may ask what all this talk about
culture has to do with an institution, the object of which is defined to be ‘to promote
the prosperity of the manufactures and the industry of the country.’ He may suggest
that what is wanted for this end is not culture, nor even a purely scientific discipline,
but simply a knowledge of applied science.” And here we see the crux of Huxley’s
lament that this is an intolerable interpretation of “applied science” unmanaged by
academic expertise:
8
I often wish that this phrase, “applied science,” had never been invented. For
it suggests that there is a sort of scientific knowledge of direct practical use,
which can be studied apart from another sort of scientific knowledge, which
is of no practical utility, and which is termed “Pure science.” But there is no
more complete fallacy than this. What people call applied science is nothing
but the application of pure science to particular classes of problems.16
This kind of claim is understandable in the context of Huxley’s obligation to promote
the new Birmingham college’s science departments to local youths and their parents
as a necessary passage point to success in industry.
For four decades, Huxley’s polemical denial of the autonomy of applied
science became a touchstone in the ensuing debate about what kinds of science ought
to exist and indeed be recognized as authoritative. As we shall see, one view of the
Department of Scientific and Industrial Research interpreted his claim as a denial that
there were two distinct kinds of science, since both were ultimately dedicated to
utility. The other view was that, for the sake of the nation’s long-term survival,
applied science ought to be subordinated to the imagined realm of academic pure
science and the public left to wait for benefits to trickle out. In the horrific crucible of
World War I these counterclaims about the appropriate division of labor in science
were tested again, bringing more challenges to the “pure science” lobby and their
attempts to secure major institutional funding for their endeavors.
SCIENCE AND THE NATION: THE WORLD WAR I CAMPAIGN FOR
“PURE” SCIENCE
At the outbreak of World War I, the assumption of many in Britain was that the extant
voluntaristic and laissez-faire culture of science and invention would somehow be
sufficient to produce the resources that would be decisive in warfare. Thus Oliver
9
Lodge found himself sitting on a Royal Society committee to which the nation’s
inventors brought their practical products to be inspected and either purchased for
government use or rejected. Things changed somewhat in spring 1915, when it
became clear that an impasse had been reached, largely owing to the extraordinary
efficacy of German forces in deploying gas warfare and communication interception
devices. Britain’s government responded to the old appeal to fund science centrally
only when it looked like Germany’s efficient war machine not only could not be
conquered by conventional means but might conceivably win the Great War through
sheer investment in military science and technology.17 This not only led to the
formation of the U.K.’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR),
whose role was to give a Germanic-style state direction to British innovations for
wartime, in 1916. It also reinvigorated a prewar campaign by scientists to highlight
the so-called “Neglect of Science”—the alleged neglect of scientific expertise by
British industry and politicians. Both lobbies were to appeal to Huxley in quite
distinct ways.
The DSIR was set up in response to an enormously successful high-level
patriotic and fear-mongering propaganda campaign by the “Neglect of Science”
committee in the early years of the war. It soon dedicated national funding to strategic
areas of “applied science,” specifically those urgently focused on chemical warfare,
telecommunications, and munitions; as Sabine Clarke has shown, however, this term
was eventually reconfigured in Government circles as “fundamental research.”18 The
first annual DSIR report declared in distinctly pragmatist terms that the DSIR Council
had decided to give “science in its applications to industry” precedence over “pure
science.” In so doing it was under “no misapprehension as to the relations between
pure and applied science.” Quoting Huxley’s dogma that applied science was nothing
10
but the application of pure science to particular classes of problems, the DSIR
admitted that, “properly” speaking, there were not in fact two kinds of science. But
going against Huxley’s agenda, the DSIR’s wartime premise was that all forms of
science must be subordinated to present and future industrial needs. For the
manufacturing firm that needed definite novel results within a year, science was to be
welcomed as a “handy servant, not a partner with ideas of her own.”19 This starting
position was anathema to those Huxleyites in academic science who refused to accept
such a social contract.
Such was the direct focus on useful applications during the Great War that
Huxley’s academic successors became alarmed that “applied science” might win a
permanent priority in the state funding of research over and above that of their much
vaunted “pure science.” At the height of the war, a cabal of Cambridge University
science professors took up the challenge by collectively writing Science and the
Nation. This volume looked to the postwar years and warned—in clearly populist
terms—of the dangers of neglecting the pure science that they claimed underlay all
instances of successful applied science.20 The book appeared in April 1917, its front
cover emblazoned with the congenial Cambridge University motto: “Hinc lucem et
pocula sacra” (“From here [we receive] light and sacred draughts”). It also bore as its
epigraph a telling line from Huxley’s 1880 speech in Birmingham: “What people call
applied science is nothing but the application of pure science to particular classes of
problems.”
The editor and impresario of Science and the Nation, Master of Downing
College and Cambridge Professor of Botany Albert Charles Seward, had earlier in his
career been trained by Huxley’s former assistant Sidney Vines. In a very Huxleyan
mode, Seward argued in his preface of 5 January 1917 that the history of science
11
furnished numerous illustrations of the “far reaching importance of pure science,” as
if this were the force that had somehow in the past led to British industrial prosperity
and the “betterment of the race.” Yet he complained that schemes of reform and
postwar reconstruction formulated under the present “abnormal conditions” were
likely to be “hastily conceived and ill-proportioned.”21 By this he clearly signaled the
fear that older universities such as Cambridge might soon be forced to break with
their unworldly traditions and focus uncomfortably on utilitarian applications of
science.
Notwithstanding these editorial devices intended to highlight unity, this was a
rather heterogeneous and ambiguous collection. Not all the volume’s contributors
upheld Seward’s scheme. Indeed, W. H. Bragg’s chapter on physics was one of the
very few that insisted on the uniform historical priority of pure science over mere
“invention.” Thus Bragg attempted to reduce the origins of wireless telegraphy to a
rather obvious application of prior early electromagnetic theory, thereby denying the
importance of work in practical engineering by Guglielmo Marconi for long-distance
signaling. Only the chapters on the physical sciences in Science and the Nation made
any claims for a pure/applied division of labor, let alone a history in which the “pure”
forms came first and only later contingently generated applications. Most other
contributors made no attempt whatsoever to refer back to any notion of a prior pure
science. Notable among this group were those working on plant breeding (Rowland
Biffen) and anthropology (William Pitt-Rivers), whose proposals for future research
were very clearly directed by practical goals: Biffen for agricultural improvements
and Pitt-Rivers for colonial administration.22 There was no “pure” precursor to such
tasks: these were the epitome of applied science operating on its own practical terms,
very far from the agenda of hegemonic pure science that Seward et alia appeared to
12
be promoting. Readers were thus a long way from the world imagined by Mason and
Huxley, in which the physical sciences reigned supreme as pure disciplines from
which other more applied sciences derived their substance and rigor.
The extraordinary diversity of accounts concerning pure and applied science in
Science and the Nation did not escape the attention of critical reviewers: H. G. Wells
alleged that the volume had barely been edited at all. More particularly, he objected to
the partisan promotion of the notion of “pure science” by just a handful of the
contributors instead of concrete plans to benefit education and industry: “There are
clear indications of a common intention to cry up ‘pure’ science and to insist upon the
importance of scientific studies and scientific research, but the cry never becomes
more than a vague cry, and the need for the present time is for definite proposals.”
The most obvious ammunition for Wells’s critique was the introduction by Lord
Moulton, which somewhat subverted the book’s overall theme that pragmatic concern
with technoscientific applications for the Great War might prejudice the future
independence of pure science. As a published electrical scientist, active for three
decades in locating original discoveries and inventions within the patent law, and now
as chief DSIR administrator for Government research and development of munitions,
Moulton was well placed to give an authoritative view. Certainly he conceded that
Seward’s collection of essays would “prove invaluable to those who seek to broaden
the interest of our Nation in Scientific Research.” Yet he explicitly rejected the
terminology of “pure science,” preferring to speak instead of “experimental research.”
Moreover, he also gently queried the scale of the threat perceived by the sensitive
Cambridge dons. He wrote, “I do not share the fear that so-called Pure Science is in
danger of being neglected” in the planned revival of industrial endeavor after the
war.23
13
More tellingly still, Moulton denied the very pure science/applied science
dichotomy that was under discussion, attributing it largely to the imaginations of the
anxious professors:
The distinction between Pure Science and Applied Science is vague and
artificial and, so far as my observation goes, it does not exist as a guiding
principle in the minds of those classes to whom we must look for the force
which will place Science in its right position in England. It is a distinction
which is more actively present to the minds of those who are engaged in
abstruse research than to the mind of the general public.
For Moulton, the distinction between pure science and applied science was untenable:
if all science was or could eventually be applied to useful purposes, there could be no
meaningful boundary between pure and applied forms. There was just a continuum of
interrelated endeavors, all leading ultimately to beneficial ends.24 Appealing to the
pure/applied distinction was clearly a rhetorical device used by those—such as
unworldly Cambridge dons—who wished to claim a role in the division of scientific
labor that was far from the messy industrial outputs of their research. This distinction
had little significance to the general public, who saw only manifestations of “applied
science”—however construed and originated: what could pure science mean to them
except a deferred form of applied science or a culpably self-indulgent diversion from
it?
Just how the notion of “pure science” became fully established in the midtwentieth-century British mythology of science, with histories rewritten to downplay
reference to the earlier mode of integrated “applied science,” is a story for another
occasion.
CONCLUSION
14
This essay has addressed what James McClellan has called the “applied science
problem”: what did this superficially simple yet multifaceted term actually mean?
McClellan is indeed correct that in answering this question we need to recognize the
historicity of a category such as “applied science” if we are to resolve the many
conundrums that attach to it.25 I have expanded on his work and that of Ron Kline to
argue three historicist points and a historiographical point. First, in relation to Kline’s
succinct identification of the older meaning of “applied science” as an autonomous
primary body of technical knowledge, I looked at the early Victorian origins and
conventional adoption of this deeply entrenched term—as distinct from applied forms
of the individual sciences, notably chemistry, and in relation to Robert Bud’s
persuasive claim that the terminology of “applied science” was promoted in the midnineteenth century by engineering scholars at King’s College, London, to domesticate
industrialization as a phenomenon susceptible to academic domination.26 Second, in
mapping the origins of the revised interpretation of applied science as the secondary
application of pure science, I reinterpreted T. H. Huxley’s much-discussed critique of
the persisting older meaning of “applied science” in 1880. Third, I showed that during
World War I a strong and continuing preference for “applied science” alarmed the
boundary-making campaigners for “pure science”—but that they found their claims
for the separateness of pure science from practicality dismissed as chimerical.
In my final point, let me return to the curiously parochial twentieth-century
notion of applied science as applied pure science that has so exasperated historians of
technology. Far from being a self-evident and unique formulation, this was originally
a very contentious contrivance. It took a great deal of effort for the Huxleyan
partisans to colonize “applied science” and reconfigure it as if it were not only a
subordinate branch of “pure science” but somehow—thanks to a considerable resort
15
to amnesia—always had been. This is a lesson that historians of science and
technology alike should not forget.
16
* Centre for History and Philosophy of Science, School of Philosophy,
Religion, and History of Science, Michael Sadler Building, University of Leeds,
Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom; G.J.N.Gooday@leeds.ac.uk.
This essay derives from an AHRC-funded project, “Owning and Disowning
Invention: Intellectual Property, Authority, and Identity in British Science and
Technology, 1880–1920,” 2007–2010. I am particularly grateful for comments from
project colleagues Stathis Arapostathis, Christine MacLeod, and Greg Radick and for
invaluable feedback from Robert Bud, Bernard Lightman, and Paul Lucier.
1
See Jennifer Karns Alexander, “Thinking Again about Science in
Technology,” in this Focus section; and John Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology’s
Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).
2
For a comparable study of the U.S. case see 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.
3
For studies of the late nineteenth-century campaign for “endowment of
research”—satirized by critics as “research for endowment”—see Roy MacLeod,
Public Science and Public Policy in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate
Variorum, 1996).
4
See Lord Fletcher Moulton, “Introduction,” in Science and the Nation:
Essays by Cambridge Graduates, ed. A. C. Seward (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1917), pp. viii–xx; and Sabine Clarke, “Pure Science with a Practical Aim: The
Meanings of Fundamental Research in Britain, circa 1916–1950,” Isis, 2010,
101:285–311.
5
Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
(London: Charles Knight, 1832), pp. 379–380.
17
6
Ibid. On Babbage’s analytical engine see the special issue of IEEE Annals of
the History of Computing, 2000, 22(4).
7
Peter Galison, “Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science,” Isis,
2008, 99:111–124, esp. pp. 113–114.
8
Alexander William Williamson, A Plea for Pure Science: Being the
Inaugural Lecture at the Opening of the Faculty of Science in University College,
London (London: Taylor & Francis, 1870), p. 26. A summary of this lecture appeared
in Nature, 1870, 3:135–136. The promotion of science schools was furthered by the
inquiries of the Devonshire Commission (Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction
and the Advancement of Science)—the secretary of which, Norman Lockyer, was an
ally of Huxley.
9
Henry Rowland, “A Plea for Pure Science,” Science, 1883, 2:242–250. See
Paul Lucier, “The Origins of Pure and Applied Science in Gilded Age America,” in
this Focus section, for detailed discussion of Rowland’s work.
10
George Sweetnam, The Command of Light: Rowland’s School of Physics
and the Spectrum (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000).
11
Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,”
Technology and Culture, 2010, 51:561–577; and Eric Schatzberg, “Technik Comes to
America: Changing Meanings of Technology before 1930,” ibid., 2006, 47:486–512.
The London Times and the Review of Reviews regularly used the editorial category
“applied science” for technological products not specifically connected with any prior
corpus of science.
12
Address by Mr. Justice Grove, reported in the London Times, 2 May 1881,
p. 13. For related controversies over whether the history of radio was distinctly
independent from or an application of the prior work of James Clerk Maxwell,
18
Heinrich Hertz, and Oliver Lodge see Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday,
Patently Contestable: Historical Trials of Electricity, Identity, and Inventorship
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming), Ch. 6.
13
Huxley’s stance was indirectly a response to the practice of North British
professors like William Thomson, who saw no difficulty in integrating industrial
imperatives at the heart of their researches.
14
See Robert Bud, “‘Applied Science’: A Phrase in Search of a Meaning,” in
this Focus section. Mason College is now the U.K.’s University of Birmingham.
15
For related debates see Graeme Gooday, “Lies, Damned Lies, and
Declinism: Lyon Playfair, the Paris 1867 Exhibition, and the Contested Rhetorics of
Scientific Education and Industrial Performance,” in The Golden Age: Essays in
British Social and Economic History, 1850–70, ed. Ian Inkster et al. (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2000), pp. 105–120.
16
“Sir Josiah Mason’s Science College,” Birmingham Daily Post, 2 Oct. 1880,
p. 4. This lecture was reproduced and amplified as Thomas Henry Huxley, “Science
and Culture,” in Science and Culture, and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1881),
pp. 1–23; the quotations are from pp. 19–21. Compare the discussions of the quotation
regarding Huxley’s wish that the phrase “applied science” had never been invented in
Kline, “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Science’” (cit. n. 2); and 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 (the quotation appears on p. 401).
17
Anna-K. Mayer, “Reluctant Technocrats: Science Promotion in the Neglect-
of-Science Debate of 1916–1918,” History of Science, 2005, 43:139–159; and Zuoyue
Wang, “The First World War, Academic Science, and the ‘Two Cultures’:
Educational Reforms at the University of Cambridge,” Minerva, 1995, 33:107–127.
19
18
Clarke, “Pure Science with a Practical Aim” (cit. n. 4); Ian Varcoe,
Organizing for Science in Britain: A Case Study (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974);
and Andrew Hull, “War of Words: The Public Science of the British Scientific
Community and the Origins of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research,
1914–16,” British Journal for the History of Science, 1999, 32:461–481.
19
Report of the Committee of the Privy Council (London: HMSO, 1917), pp.
4–5. The report offers references to Huxley, “Science and Culture” (cit. n. 16), p. 20.
20
For an alternative view that this book was produced directly as part of the
“Neglect of Science” movement see Paolo Palladino, “Between Craft and Science:
Plant Breeding, Mendelian Genetics, and British Universities, 1900–1920,” Technol.
& Cult., 1993, 34:300–323.
21
Albert C. Seward, “Preface,” in Science and the Nation, ed. Seward (cit. n.
4), pp. v–vii. On Seward see H. H. Thomas, “Albert Charles Seward, 1863–1941,”
Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1941, 3:867–868.
22
William H. Bragg, “Physical Research and the Way of Its Application,” in
Science and the Nation, ed. Seward, pp. 24–48; Roland Biffen, “Systematized PlantBreeding,” ibid., pp. 146–175; and W. G. Pitt-Rivers, “The Government of Subject
People,” ibid., pp. 302–328.
23
H. G. Wells, “Science and the Nation,” Nature, 1917, 99:141–142; and
Moulton, “Introduction” (cit. n. 4), pp. ix, xvii. On Moulton see Hugh Fletcher
Moulton, The Life of Lord Moulton (London: Nisbeth, 1922).
24
Moulton, “Introduction,” p. ix. Invocation of this pure/applied distinction
was thus an instance of “boundary work”; see Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary-Work
and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in
20
Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review, 1983, 48:781–
795.
25
James E. McClellan III, “What’s Problematic about Applied Science?” in
The Applied Science Problem, ed. McClellan (Jersey City, N.J.: Jensen/Daniels,
2008), pp. 1–36, esp. p. 28. On the problems of the linear model of technology as the
application of science see Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and Sven Widmalm, eds., The
Science–Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications (Sagamore Beach, Mass.:
Science History Publications, 2004).
26
For the duality of meanings of “applied chemistry” see Robert Bud and
Gerrylynn Roberts, Science versus Practice: Chemistry in Victorian Britain
(Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984); and James F. Donnelly,
“Representations of Applied Science: Academics and Chemical Industry in Late
Nineteenth-Century England,” Social Studies of Science, 1986, 16:195–234. For
Bud’s claim about the promotion of the terminology of “applied science” see Bud,
“‘Applied Science’” (cit. n. 14); and Bud, “Making Sense of Change: ‘Applied
Science’ and the Promise of Meaning amidst Industrial Revolution,” paper presented
at the “Owning and Disowning Invention” workshop, Univ. Leeds, Mar. 2009.