The Later Nineteenth Century

It is widely believed that before the middle of the nineteenth century, technological progress moved more or less independently of scientific progress, and that since then the interaction between science and technology has gradually become tighter. As we have seen, this view is only partially correct. The relation between scientific and technological progress after 1850 has confounded the best minds in the history of both fields (Mayr (1976)). Science and especially scientists were not totally irrelevant to technological change before 1850. Nor is it true that the imaginative, original, energetic, bold, but basically serendipitous, untrained, and unsystematic mind of the eighteenth century inventor disappeared after 1850. In fact, this kind of inventor is still quite important in the twentieth century. ⁵³ As a general rule, it seems likely that in the past hundred and fifty years the majority of important inventions, from steel converters to cancer chemotherapy, from food canning to aspartane, have been used long before people understood why they worked, and thus systematic research in these areas was limited to ordered trial-and-error operations. The proportion of such inventions is declining, but it is still large today.