Has science created technology?

Abstract

presented to the general public as the prime source of inventions which would utterly transform human life for the better. No one individual can be held responsible for launching the idea that science will lay a succession of golden eggs, and that society should pay to understand how nature works in order to exploit the potentialities of nature. But the team of scholars of Salomon's House was to include a group who "bend themselves, looking into the experiments of their fellows, and cast about how to draw out of them things of use and practice for man's life and knowledge . . . These we call dowry-men or Benefactors".1 This expectation that such dowry-men will find plenty to employ them has continued in force, and still flourishes. Bacon apparently reasoned: from the carcasses of an obscure kind of maggot, we can extract a cloth finer, smoother, more glistening than any other; from a mush of old rags, we produce a smooth white sheet, the best surface for showing clear marks of writing or drawing; from the scraping of cowsheds, from sulphur, and charred wood a powder with powers of violence greater than any mechanical blow. All these inventions had been made since the end of the Roman