ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the next subsequent chapter. It focuses on the scientific and institutional environs within which particular technologies were adopted, refined and diffused, and of the dependence of an industrial and commercial system upon key infrastructural developments. The part emphasizes the continuum of scientific and technical practices during the nineteenth century, particularly as embodied in such individuals as the Sandemanian scientist Michael Faraday, men whose very careers and incomes depended on such an eclecticism. In a very lengthy commentary on the supposed significance of the Great Exhibition to industrial workers, Sir Lyon Playfair astutely noted the claims of scientists such as Babbage and Herschel concerning a decline of British science, and went on to persuade his readers. The part uses the abundant patent statistics to describe the geographic and social distances between the ordinary inventiveness of a successful industrial economy and the culture of its scientific and intellectual elites.
