“Vague and Artificial” The Historically Elusive Distinction between

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; [email protected]. 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.