The Industrial Orientation of Science in the Lunar Society of Birmingham

Abstract

THE historical relationship of science with technology is a complicated one and conclusions as to the extent of that relationship vary depending on the country and the perspective in which the problem is studied.' Dr. C. C. Gillispie has presented us with his conclusions based on a study of France in the revolutionary period and the early years of the empire.2 He suggests that the relationship for this period in France is, at best, an indirect one. The same type of argument can be -and indeed has been -made for Great Britain for approximately the same period. It is suggested, however, that were the same conclusion drawn for this period in Great Britain a mistake would be made. The social patterns of scientists in late eighteenth-century England were quite different from those of France. Dr. Gillispie refers to the mutual stimulation of science, commercial enterprise, and Puritan influence . . . [characteristic] of British social, intellectual, and scientific history from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. 8 He also points out the very evident connection between the consequent utilitarianism and the relative poverty of British achievements in abstract science during the years of greatest dominance of this stimulation. Few would deny this latter observation, but that is not really the point here. For if one studies the activities of the scientists responding to this stimulation, one must conclude that science and industry were, by that very fact, more closely and more deliberately related in Great Britain than in France. One cannot approach the problem of science and technology in late eighteenth-century England or Scotland by referring to the technological activities of the Royal Society, for the Royal Society was in its doldrums during this period. Nor can even the activities of the Society Instituted at London for the Promotion of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (i.e., the Society of Arts, later the Royal Society of Arts) be used as a standard. However influential the Society of Arts may have been in encouraging (and spreading information about) technological improvements, it cannot seriously be maintained that there was much of a scientific nature in its work. For many an eighteenth-