Science, Technology and Education: England in 1870

Abstract

My lecture is about the diffusion of science and technology, through education, into the culture and economy of a society. As the journal Nature wrote early in I870, Education and science so naturally associate themselves in the mind that it is hardly possible to discuss the latter as independent of the former [I]. Here historians of science find common territory with economic and social historians, political historians, historians of education [2] and with some eminent scientists; Lord Ashby has been a notable pioneer in the subject [3]. Why I870? Because it is one of the dates which form natural breaks in history books. Momentous upheavals were occurring in the power structure of the world. The FrancoPrussian War in I870, so short, yet so far-reaching in its consequences, was followed by the unification of Germany. Italy too was unified in I870. Japan had thrown off feudalism. The United States had just emerged from the Civil War, its unity symbolised by the opening of the first railway line linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Simultaneously a new stage of industrialisation was beginning, dependent upon mass production and science-based technology [4]. Innovations in steel, electricity and chemicals, based on the scientific advances of the previous o00 years, heralded vast economic potentialities. Through these key industries science began to affect the whole economy. From about 1870 science, previously peripheral to technology and industry, became central to them. What of Britain in I870? Still the leading industrial nation, she produced nearly a third of the world's manufactures while the United States produced less than a quarter and Germany I3%. Moreover, 1870 seemed a creative period of reform with votes for the industrial working classes; legalisation of trade unions; open competition for the Civil Service and the first Act for publicly provided elementary schools. Yet at this moment British self-confidence wavered. The immediate occasion was the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, which aroused British fears of vanishing supremacy rather as the first Sputnik aroused United States fears ninety years later. Out of ninety classes at the Exhibition Britain was prominent in scarcely a dozen. Two reasons were advanced: inadequate scientific and technical education and that old favourite, the trade unions. The Paris Exhibition was the alarm bell which first awoke the British Government's interest in Science, with a capital S, but it was not the first warning. Babbage had led a 'decline of science' movement in the I83os [5] and while the London Great Exhibition of I85I had confirmed British industrial supremacy, it also showed the growing dependence of industry on scientific and technical competence.