Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century

J.D. Bernal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135653996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Published in 2005, Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century is a valuable contribution to the field of Economic History.

Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter I

Introduction

WE who live in an age where science is recognized as a means of life or death, cannot fail to see all around us the consequences and even the instruments of science. That very fact, however, makes it extremely difficult to disentangle science from the social and economic factors with which it is entwined. Scientists themselves are at a loss to know how far their responsibility extends into the consequences for good or evil of discoveries and applications often made more collectively than individually. There is no recognized means of assessing the amount of a community’s resources that should go to science, how it should be apportioned or indeed whether the whole matter should not be left to chance, as it has been so largely in the past.

These are not academic questions—we need the solutions to deal with our day-to-day problems and for planning the most immediate future. Yet they can be solved only by a study which takes account of how the present grew out of the past, for science and technology are preeminently traditional social institutions, depending for their very existence on an accumulated stock of facts and methods to a far larger degree and far more consciously than do the arts. That is why it may be of some value to examine the relations of science and technology, or, more widely, of science and industry, in an era like the nineteenth century when those relations were simpler than they are now, but yet one not so distant that we cannot appreciate from our own experiences the significance of its main movements.

Short as has been the gap in years we are now getting far enough away from the nineteenth century to be able to see its achievements in science and technology in the wide perspective of history. Nevertheless, the task of finding the relations between them is by no means an easy one. Science is still a somewhat unfamiliar part of social life and those outside its disciplines find it hard to realize the changes that have taken place in them. Consequently, many intelligent non-scientific people still think of science as it appeared to be in the nineteenth century, as the product of individual efforts of men of genius, instead of, as it now is, a highly organized new profession closely linked with industry and government. On the other hand many scientists of today, outside the older centres of learning where the ways of the past still linger, find it difficult to grasp the uncoordinated and amateur character of nineteenth-century science with little formal teaching and without research laboratories or research funds. It is almost as difficult in an age of vast engineering and chemical factories, each furnished with its own research department, to recall the intimate traditional and practical character of the old workshops and forges from which the modern giants are descended.

In fact the nineteenth century was as different from the twentieth as it was from the eighteenth. It was above all a period of expansion—expansion of population, of manufacture, of trade and of knowledge. In their time these increases seemed unlimited, they were taken to herald the achievement of a universal Progress that was reflected in the world of nature itself by the great generalization of Evolution. All this also seemed to be a most natural, as well as desirable, state of affairs. With the advent of free-trade capitalism in the mid-century, economics was deemed to have found its true laws which the ignorance and superstition of earlier ages had hidden from sight. By abandoning all restrictions a laisser-faire Liberalism would achieve the best distribution of wealth by the automatic operation of the laws of the market.

What actually happened, as we know, was very different. Far from producing peaceful progress, the nineteenth century ushered in the transitional period of upheaval and violence of the twentieth century. We can see it now as a period of material and social preparation for a far more radical revolution of production, distribution and government. This revolution was an implicit consequence of the great new productive forces released by the scientific and technical advances achieved in principle in the eighteenth century but first realized on a large scale in practice only in the nineteenth.

Then, for the first time, it becomes possible to deal with the relations of science and technology in such a relatively short space as a hundred years. The pace of application of scientific discovery was speeding up sufficiently for the effect of discoveries made early in the century to be appreciable by its end. The use of the electric current, discovered just before the beginning of the century, was appreciable in the telegraph in the fifties though it was only beginning to be used as electric light and power in the nineties. In general the industry of the nineteenth century depended on the twin scientific and technical achievements of the late eighteenth century: the development of the steam engine and the establishment of a rational, quantitative chemistry. The greatest achievements of the physical sciences of the nineteenth century—the doctrine of the conservation of energy and the interchangeability of its various forms; the sciences of thermodynamics and electrodynamics—drew their inspiration from the study of practical sources of power and arose from the needs of transport and communication. Their full utilization as the basis of a rational chemical and electrical industry had to wait till the twentieth century.

For the historian a century is necessarily a most arbitrary and often inconvenient division of time; it is doubly so when the histories of two different human activities have to be considered together. A longer or shorter period, say from 1760 to 1914 or 1820 to 1870, would have advantages in considering the history of technology, the former bridging the whole of the Industrial Revolution before the period of mass production, the latter concentrating on the characteristic nineteenth-century achievements of the railway, steamship and telegraph. In the history of science, the limits are more difficult to define at the beginning and easier at the ened. The era might start with Hales and Black and the beginning of the pneumatic revolution in the mid-eighteenth century or, alternatively, considering that revolution as already complete, with 1831, the year of the foundation of the British Association and the discovery of electromagnetic induction by Faraday. The end of the era is definite enough, at least for physical science, because it is marked by a break-through to a new and unsuspected realm of experience. This was the discovery of X-rays by Rontgen in 1895, followed almost immediately by that of the electron and radioactivity and leading to the theory of atomic structure, the central feature of twentieth-century science. The choice taken here is to limit the century in the beginning by a social fact, the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, and to end it by 1895, a date fixed for scientific reasons which roughly coincides with a turning-point in the development of capitalism when the division of the world into empires was completed and preparation for a new era of wars was consciously beginning. These limitations of time will not preclude a certain casting backward for origins or looking forward for consequences.

The aim of this essay is to bring out by the study of actual examples the close and necessary connections between technical developments and the advance of scientific knowledge. These connections are not limited to any period of history but have a critical importance in the nineteenth century.¹ Before the Industrial Revolution, science had been an affair of courts, gentlemen and scholars, and except for the arts of navigation and war it hardly affected ordinary life. The idea that it could do so was a vision enthusiastically acclaimed but as often derided.² By the twentieth century, on the other hand, the interrelations of science and technique were consciously recognized. Whether constructive or destructive ends were in view there could be no doubt that the means employed for the advancement of techniques must be scientific. The transition between the dream and the reality was effected in the nineteenth century and it is therefore specially important to inquire how and why it occurred.

Before attempting to analyse in some detail the connections between the scientific and technical developments of the nineteenth century it is useful to give a general summary of the main trends which revealed themselves in science and technology separately.

Each field, the technical as much as the scientific, has its own inner coherence, not only in the logical unfolding of new discoveries on the basis of older researches and in the making of new inventions drawing on older technical advances, but also in their being in the hands of two largely distinct sets of men, the scientists and the engineers. At the beginning of the century the personal interaction was greatest, the engineers and scientists were the same men or were close friends, but the state of the sciences themselves provided only certain limited bridges between theory and practice. On the other hand towards its end the scientists and engineers, incorporated in their distinct societies and institutions, had drawn further apart, but by then the advance of science had made its intervention into techniques possible and indeed necessary over a large part of the field, while conversely the problems, the equipment and, not least, the funds of science were provided by industry.

The Main Lines of Scientific Advance

In science, the nineteenth century was the great period of specialization, as witness the formation of the separate scientific societies to supplement the older general academies such as the Royal Society. Each discipline followed its own line of development, they were not yet ready for the general unification of the sciences which is the major task of the twentieth century. Such unification as occurred lay inside each science; in physics with the great generalization of the electromagnetic theory of light; in chemistry with the union of organic and inorganic through the theory of valency. Both were achieved only towards the end of the century and both seemed to indicate a finality that was soon to prove illusory.

New Trends in Physics

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the specific field opened by the great Galilean-Newtonian union of mechanics and astronomy had been effectively worked out, though it still dominated academic science through its immense prestige. There was no longer either practical use or new scientific knowledge to be gained by following out the theory of gravitation to its ultimate conclusions. Leverrier and Adams’ discovery of Neptune by this means was the greatest triumph, but at the same time the last effort, of classical astronomy.³ When gravitation theory reappeared in the twentieth century with Einstein, it was in a very different physical context. But though Newtonian mechanics might have little more to add in its own field, it was to give birth to Newtonian physics. Where the classical dynamics found its use was in the evolution of a mathematical language, in the hands of Lagrange, Fourier, Hamilton and Gauss, to describe the physical phenomena of a more generalized character, such as those of electricity and magnetism or, on a molecular scale, of the kinetic theory of gases and the foundations of thermodynamics.

Electricity

In physics the new era effectively began with the discovery by Galvani and Volta of the electric current. This was originally derived from the study of nerve physiology but for most of the century it was to be developed on a physical basis. The study of electricity provided an inexhaustible fund of new and exciting phenomena providing a lasting stimulus towards further experimentation of a qualitative kind, calling for an explanation by mathematical theory in quantitative terms, and, as we shall see in more detail later, opening up a sequence of inviting opportunities to commercial exploitation. All three threads are to be found in the culminating generalization of the century—Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of light—for this was based on the experiments of Faraday, on the theories of Fresnel and Gauss and on the relation of systems of electrical and magnetic units of Weber. It was in turn to lead through Hertz to the practical control of radiation of the twentieth century. The development and mastery of the electric current and of its magnetic and chemical manifestations was one great task of nineteenth-century physics.

Thermodynamics

The other main branch of physics grew more directly out of the operation of the great eighteenth-century achievement—the steam engine—or the philosophical engine as it was so rightly called. The economic production and use of mechanical power was the inspiration of Carnot, Joule, Rankine and Thomson. It led, characteristically, first to the concept of maximum utilizable energy—the second law of thermodynamics—and then to the conception of the indestructibility and interchange-ability of all forms of energy—the first law of thermodynamics. This was to bring its return to industry in the development of the internal combustion engine and the practice of refrigeration. Extended to chemistry by Clausius and Gibbs it was to be the basis of the rational chemical industry of the twentieth century. The electrical and thermal streams of nineteenth-century science, inspired by the new phenomena of atomic physics, were to come together in the generalizations of Planck and Einstein in the quantum theory of the twentieth century.

Chemistry

In chemistry it would be more logical to begin the story right back in the eighteenth century with the pneumatic revolution—the study of gases—which ushered in the oxygen theory of combustion through the logical analysis by Lavoisier of the experiments of Priestley, Scheele and Cavendish. But this story really belongs to the concentrated and combined intellectual and technical effort of the early Industrial Revolution. We can start the new century with the assumption that the period of purely traditional chemistry is over and that rational methods, based on a clear conception of chemical elements and the law of constancy of mass, can now be used. The additional keys of electrochemical decomposition and of the atomic theory were provided at the very opening of the century by Davy and Dalton. Nevertheless, so great was the variety of mineral, and even more of organic, substances that it took the best part of a hundred years to use these keys effectively to understand the structure of chemical compounds and reactions between them. And mere complexity was not the only obstacle. Another was the difficulty of shaking off the influence of the half-magical, half-metaphysical, chemical theories of the past, exemplified by the opposition to the atomic theory which was still maintained right to the end of the century.

At all stages, as we shall see, these advances are connected with the solutions of problems presented by a growing chemical industry and, in turn, give rise to new branches of that industry, such as those of coal-tar dyes or alkali manufacture. These were, however, but a small foretaste of the possible uses of chemistry. Throughout the nineteenth century, chemistry was essentially feeling its way, concentrating on the purification of natural substances and on their analysis. It ventured on the synthesis of only very simple molecules and attempted only small modifications of accessible substances. Despite the pioneer work of Berthelot, industrial chemical synthesis of complex molecules, starting from the elements themselves, was not to come till well into the twentieth century.

Closely linked with physics as it was in the beginning of the century, chemistry grew so fast that it became virtually autonomous and developed its own laws as the century progressed. And this autonomy persisted even though important instruments such as the polariscope and the spectroscope were borrowed from physics, as were also major guiding principles, such as those of thermodynamics and the kinetic theory of gases and solutions. No full union of chemistry and physics was, however, possible without some physical picture of the structure of the atom, which could come only in the twentieth century.

Biology

Although this essay is intended to deal primarily with physical science, it is impossi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century
• Molecular Asymmetry
• Index
• Chart