The contrast between science as a generalized social property incidental to production and science as capitalist property at the very center of production is the contrast between the Industrial Revolution, which occupied the last half of the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth centuries, and the scientific-technical revolution, which began in the last decades of the nineteenth century and is still going on. The role of science in the Industrial Revolution was unquestionably great. Before the rise of capitalism—that is, until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe—the body of fundamental scientific knowledge in the West was essentially that of classical antiquity, that of the ancient Greeks as preserved by Arab scholarship and in medieval monasteries. The era of scientific advance during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries supplied some of the conditions for the Industrial Revolution, but the connection was indirect, general, and diffuse—not only because science itself was as yet unstructured by capitalism and not directly dominated by capitalist institutions, but also because of the important historical fact that technique developed in advance of, and as a prerequisite for, science. Thus, in contrast with modern practice, science did not systematically lead the way for industry, but often lagged behind and grew out of the industrial arts. Instead of formulating significantly fresh insights into natural conditions in a way that makes possible new techniques, science in its beginnings under capitalism more often formulated its generalizations side by side with, or as a result of, technological development.\* If we choose as a prime example the steam engine—because of the significant scientific principles it exemplified and because it was the central working mechanism of the Industrial Revolution we can see this clearly. One historian of science has written of the process by which the steam engine came into being:
How much of this development was owing to the science of heat? All the available evidence indicates that it was very little. This point of view was expressed emphatically by a writer on the history of the invention of the steam engine, Robert Stuart Meikleham. In the preface to his book Descriptive History of the Steam Engine, of 1824, he wrote, "We know not who gave currency to the phrase of the invention being one of the noblest gifts that science ever made to mankind. The fact is that science, or scientific men, never had anything to do in the matter. Indeed there is no machine or mechanism in which the little that theorists have done is more useless. It arose, was improved and perfected by working mechanicsand by them only."3
This view is buttressed by the fact that in the early days of the development of steam power the prevailing scientific theory of heat was the caloric theory, from which, as Lindsay points out, “few really significant deductions about the properties of steam could be drawn." Landes concludes that the development of steam technology probably contributed much more to the physical sciences than the other way around:
It is often stated that the Newcomen machine and its forerunners would have been unthinkable without the theoretical ideas of Boyle, Torricelli, and others; and that Watt derived much of his technical competence and imagination from his work with scientists and scientific instruments at Glasgow. There is no doubt some truth in this, though how much is impossible to say. One thing is clear, however: once the principle of the separate condenser was established, subsequent advances owed little or nothing to theory. On the contrary, an entire branch of physics, thermodynamics, developed in part as a result of empirical observations of engineering methods and performance.
To contrast this with the manner in which science has been employed as the cutting edge of industrial change during the past three-quarters of a century is to contrast science in two very different modes of existence. The organized scientific professions as we know them today hardly existed before the second half of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, the universities were still oriented toward classical learning, scientific societies were in their infancy, and scientific patronage was principally a private affair. Scientists were “typically ‘amateurs,' or men for whom science was often an avocation however passionate their interest in it. . . . Not until the late nineteenth century . . . is there a firmly established social basis for large numbers of scientists in the universities, industries, and governments of Western society."6 Even as late as 1880, Thomas Huxley could speak of those “ranged around the banners of physical science" as “somewhat of a guerrilla force, composed largely of irregulars."
The old epoch of industry gave way to the new during the last decades of the nineteenth century primarily as a result of advances in four fields: electricity, steel, coal-petroleum, and the internal combustion engine. Scientific research along theoretical lines played enough of a role in these areas to demonstrate to the capitalist class, and especially to the giant corporate entities then coming into being as a result of the concentration and centralization of capital, its importance as a means of furthering the accumulation of capital
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\* Of the technical skill that existed in Britain in the eighteenth century, Landes writes: “This should not be confused with scientific knowledge; in spite of some efforts to tie the Industrial Revolution to the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the link would seem to have been an extremely diffuse one: both reflected a heightened interest in natural and material phenomena and a more systematic application of empirical searching. Indeed, if anything, the growth of scientific knowledge owed much to the concerns and achievements of technology; there was far less flow of ideas or methods the other way; and this was to continue to be the case well into the nineteenth century."2