"Vague and artificial": The historically elusive distinction between pure and applied science

ISIS

Volumn 103, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 546-554

  Gooday, Graeme ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HISTORY; NOMENCLATURE; NOTE; SCIENCE; TECHNOLOGY; UNITED KINGDOM; WAR;

GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; SCIENCE; TECHNOLOGY; TERMINOLOGY AS TOPIC; WORLD WAR I;

EID: 84869436417     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/667978     Document Type: Note

References (54)

1. 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. 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"
4. Roy MacLeod, Public Science and Public Policy in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1996).
5. Lord Fletcher Moulton, "Introduction," in Science and the Nation: Essays by Cambridge Graduates, ed. A. C. Seward (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1917), pp. 8-20.
6. Sabine Clarke, "Pure Science with a Practical Aim: The Meanings of Fundamental Research in Britain, circa 1916-1950," Isis, 2010, 101:285-311.
7. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1832), pp. 379-380.
8. Charles Babbage. On Babbage's analytical engine see the special issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2000, 22(4).
9. Peter Galison, "Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science," Isis, 2008, 99:111-124, esp. pp. 113-114.
10. 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.
11. A summary of this lecture appeared in Nature, 1870, 3:135-136.
12. 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.
13. Henry Rowland, "A Plea for Pure Science," Science, 1883, 2:242-250.
14. Paul Lucier, "The Origins of Pure and Applied Science in Gilded Age America," in this Focus section, for detailed discussion of Rowland's work.
15. George Sweetnam, The Command of Light: Rowland's School of Physics and the Spectrum (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000).
16. Leo Marx, "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept," Technology and Culture, 2010, 51:561-577
17. Eric Schatzberg, "Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology before 1930," Technology and Culture., 2006, 47:486-512.
18. 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.
19. Mr. Justice Grove, Reported in the London Times, 2 May 1881, p. 13.
20. For related controversies over whether the history of radio was distinctly independent from or an application of the prior work of James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz, and Oliver Lodge
21. Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday, Patently Contestable: Historical Trials of Electricity, Identity, and Inventorship (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming), Ch. 6.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. 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, 1850-1870, ed. Ian Inkster et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 105-120.
25. "Sir Josiah Mason's Science College," Birmingham Daily Post, 2 Oct. 1880, p. 4.
26. Thomas Henry Huxley, "Science and Culture," in Science and Culture, and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1881), pp. 1-23.
27. 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).
28. 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).
29. Anna-K. Mayer, "Reluctant Technocrats: Science Promotion in the Neglect-of-Science Debate of 1916-1918," History of Science, 2005, 43:139-159.
30. Zuoyue Wang, "The First World War, Academic Science, and the 'Two Cultures': Educational Reforms at the University of Cambridge," Minerva, 1995, 33:107-127.
31. Clarke, "Pure Science with a Practical Aim" (cit. n. 4).
32. Ian Varcoe, Organizing for Science in Britain: A Case Study (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974).
33. 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.
34. Report of the Committee of the Privy Council (London: HMSO, 1917), pp. 4-5.
35. The report offers references to Huxley, "Science and Culture" (cit. n. 16), p. 20.
36. Paolo Palladino, "Between Craft and Science: Plant Breeding, Mendelian Genetics, and British Universities, 1900-1920," Technol. & Cult., 1993, 34:300-323.
37. Albert C. Seward, "Preface," in Science and the Nation, ed. Seward (cit. n. 4), pp. 5-7.
38. H. H. Thomas, "Albert Charles Seward, 1863-1941," Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1941, 3:867-868.
39. William H. Bragg, "Physical Research and the Way of Its Application," in Science and the Nation, ed. Seward, pp. 24-48.
40. Roland Biffen, "Systematized Plant-Breeding," ibid., pp. 146-175.
41. W. G. Pitt-Rivers, "The Government of Subject People," ibid., pp. 302-328.
42. H. G. Wells, "Science and the Nation," Nature, 1917, 99:141-142.
43. Moulton, "Introduction" (cit. n. 4), pp. 9, 17.
44. Hugh Fletcher Moulton, The Life of Lord Moulton (London: Nisbeth, 1922).
45. Moulton, "Introduction," p. ix. Invocation of this pure/applied distinction was thus an instance of "boundary work".
46. Thomas F. Gieryn, "Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists," American Sociological Review, 1983, 48:781-795.
47. 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.
48. On the problems of the linear model of technology as the application of science.
49. Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and Sven Widmalm, eds., The Science-Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2004).
50. Robert Bud and Gerrylynn Roberts, Science versus Practice: Chemistry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984)
51. James F. Donnelly, "Representations of Applied Science: Academics and Chemical Industry in Late Nineteenth-Century England," Social Studies of Science, 1986, 16:195-234.
52. For Bud's claim about the promotion of the terminology of"applied science".
53. Bud, "'Applied Science'" (cit. n. 14)
54. 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.