CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Technological Revolution
Notes on the Relationship
of Technology, Science, and Culture
THE STANDARD ANSWER TO THE QUESTION, “What brought about the explosive change in the human condition these last two hundred years?” is “The Progress of Science.” This paper enters a demurrer. It argues that the right answer is more likely: “A fundamental change in the concept of technology.” Central to this was the re-ordering of old technologies into systematic public disciplines with their own conceptual equipment, e.g. the “differential diagnosis” of nineteenth-century medicine. In the century between 1750 and 1850 the three main technologies of Man—Agriculture, the Mechanical Arts (today’s Engineering), and Medicine—went in rapid succession through this process, which resulted almost immediately in an agricultural, an industrial, and a medical “revolution” respectively.
This process owed little or nothing to the new knowledge of contemporary science. In fact, in every technology the practice with its rules of thumb was far ahead of science. Technology, therefore, became the spur to science; it took, for instance, seventy-five years until Clausius and Kelvin could give a scientific formulation to the thermodynamic behaviour of Watt’s steam engine. Science could, indeed, have had no impact on the Technological Revolution until the transformation from craft to technological discipline had first been completed.
But technology had an immediate impact on science, which was transformed by the emergence of systematic technology. The change was the most fundamental one—a change in science’s own definition and image of itself. From being “natural philosophy,” science became a social institution. The words in which science defined itself remained unchanged: “the systematic search for rational knowledge.” But “knowledge” changed its meaning from being “understanding,” i.e. focused on man’s mind, to being “control,” i.e. focused on application in and through technology. Instead of raising, as science had always done, fundamental problems of metaphysics, it came to raise, as it rarely had before, fundamental social and political problems.
It would be claiming too much to say that technology established itself as the paramount power over science. But it was technology that built the future home, took out the marriage licence, and hurried a rather reluctant science through the ceremony. And it is technology that gives the union of the two its character; it is a coupling of science to technology, rather than a coupling of science and technology.
The evidence indicates that the key to this change lies in new basic concepts regarding technology, that is, in a genuine Technological Revolution with its own causes and its own dynamics.
Of all major technologies medicine alone has been taught systematically for any length of time. An unbroken line leads back for one thousand years, from the medical school of today to the medical schools of the Arab caliphates. The trail, though partly overgrown, goes back, another fourteen hundred years, through the School of Alexandria to Hippocrates. From the beginning, medical schools taught both theoretical knowledge and clinical practice, engaged simultaneously, therefore, in science and technology. Unlike any other technologist in the West, the medical practitioner has continuously enjoyed social esteem and position.
Yet, until very late—1850 or thereabouts—there was no organized or predictable relationship between scientific knowledge and medical practice. The one major contribution to health care which the West made in the Middle Ages was the invention of spectacles. The generally accepted date is 1286; by 1290 the use of eyeglasses is fully documented.* This invention was, almost certainly, based directly upon brand-new scientific knowledge, most probably on Roger Bacon’s optical experiments. Yet Bacon was still alive when spectacles came in—he died in 1294. Until the nineteenth century there is no other example of such all but instantaneous translation of new scientific knowledge into technology—least of all in medicine. Yet Galen’s theory of vision, which ruled out any mechanical correction, was taught in the medical schools until 1700.†
Four hundred years later, in the age of Galileo, medicine took another big step—Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, the first major new knowledge since the ancients. Another hundred years, and Jenner’s smallpox vaccination brought both the first specific treatment and the first prevention of a major disease.
Harvey’sfindings disproved every single one of the theoretical assumptions that underlay the old clinical practice of bleeding. By 1700 Harvey’s findings were taught in every medical school and repeated in every medical text. Yet bleeding remained the core of medical practice and a universal panacea for another hundred years, and was still applied liberally around 1850.* What killed it finally was not scientific knowledge—available and accepted for two hundred years—but clinical observation.
In contrast to Harvey, Jenner’s achievement was essentially technological and without any basis in theory. It is perhaps the greatest feat of clinical observation. Smallpox vaccination had hard sledding—it was, after all, a foolhardy thing deliberately to give oneself the dreaded pox. But what no one seemed to pay any attention to was the complete incompatibility of Jenner’s treatment with any biological or medical theory of the time, or of any time thereafter until Pasteur, one hundred years later. That no one, apparently, saw fit to try explaining vaccination or to study the phenomenon of immunity appears to us strange enough. But how can one explain that the same doctors who practised vaccination, for a century continued to teach theories which vaccination had rendered absurd?
The only explanation is that science and technology were not seen as having anything to do with one another. To us it is commonplace that scientific knowledge is being translated into technology, and vice versa. This assumption explains the violence of the arguments regarding the historical relationship between science and the “useful arts.” But the assumptions of the debate are invalid: the presence of a tie proves as little as its absence—it is our age, not the past, which presumes consistency between theory and practice.
The basic difference was not in the content but in the focus of the two areas. Science was a branch of philosophy, concerned with understanding. Its object was to elevate the human mind. It was misuse and degradation of science to use it—Plato’s famous argument. Technology, on the other hand, was focused on use. Its object was increase of the human capacity to do. Science dealt with most general, technologies with the most concrete. Any resemblances between the two were “purely coincidental.”*
There are no hard and fast dates for a major change in an attitude, a world view. And the Technological Revolution was nothing less. We do know, however, that it occurred within the half century 1720 to 1770—the half century that separates Newton from Benjamin Franklin.
Few people today realize that Swift’s famous encomium on the man who makes two blades grow where one grew before, was not in praise of the scientist. On the contrary, it was the final, crushing argument in a biting attack on them, and especially against the august Royal Society. It was meant to extol the sanity and benefits of nonscientific technology against the arrogant sterility of an idle inquiry into nature concerned with understanding; this is against Newtonian Science, for Swift was, as always, on the unpopular side. But his basic assumption—that science and application were radically different and worlds apart—was clearly the prevailing one in the opening decades of the eighteenth century. No one scientist spoke out against the weirdest technological “projects” of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, even though their theoretical infeasibility must have been obvious to them. Many, Sir Isaac Newton taking the lead, invested heavily in them.* And while Newton, as Master of the Royal Mint, reformed its business practices, he did not much bother with its technology.
The dissenters did not, of course, see material technology as the end of knowledge; rational knowledge was a means towards the knowledge of God or at least His glorification. But knowledge, once its purpose was application, immediately focused on material technology and purely wordly ends—as St. Bernard pointed out in his famous attack on Suger’s “technocracy” as early as 1127.
The dissent never died down completely. But after the Aristotelian triumph of the thirteenth century, it did not again become respectable, let alone dominant until the advent of Romantic Natural Philosophy in the early nineteenth century, well after the Technological Revolution and actually its first (and so far only) literary offspring. It is well known that there was the closest connection between the Romantics—with Novalis their greatest poet, and with Schelling their official philosopher—and the first major discipline which, from its inception, was always both science and technology: organic chemistry. Less well known is the fact that the Romantic movement, its philosophers, writers, and statesmen came largely out of the first Technical University, The Mining Academy in Freiberg (Saxony) that had been founded in 1776.
Fifty years later, around 1770, Dr. Franklin is the “philosopher” par excellence and the West’s scientific lion. Franklin, though a first-rate scientist, owed his fame to his achievements as a technologist—”artisan” in eighteenth-century parlance. He was a brilliant gadgeteer, as witness the Franklin stove and bifocals. Of his major scientific exploits, one—the investigation of atmospheric electricity—was immediately turned into useful application: the lightning rod. Another, his pioneering work in oceanography with its discovery of the Gulf Stream, was undertaken for the express purpose of application, viz. to speed up the transatlantic mail service. Yet the scientists hailed Franklin as enthusiastically as did the general public.
In the fifty years between 1720 and 1770—not a particularly distinguished period in the history of science, by the way—a fundamental change in the attitude towards technology, both of laity and of scientists, must have taken place. One indication is the change in English attitude towards patents. During the South Sea Bubble they were still unpopular and attacked as “monopolies.” They were still given to political favourites rather than to an inventor. By 1775 when Watt obtained his patent, they had become the accepted means of encouraging and rewarding technological progress.
We know in detail what happened to technology in the period which includes both the Agricultural Revolution and the opening of the Industrial Revolution. Technology as we know it today, that is, systematic, organized work on the material tools of man, was born then. It was produced by collecting and organizing existing knowledge, by applying it systematically, and by publishing it. Of these steps the last one was both the most novel—craft skill was not for nothing called a “mystery”—and the most important.
The immediate effect of the emergence of technology was not only rapid technological progress: it was the establishment of technologies as systematic disciplines to be taught and learned and, finally, the reorientation of science towards feeding these new disciplines of technological application.
Agriculture* and the mechanical arts† changed at the same time, though independently.
Beginning with such men as Jethro Tull and his systematic work on horse-drawn cultivating machines in the early years of the seventeenth century and culminating towards its end in Coke of Holkham’s work on balanced large-scale farming and selective livestock breeding, agriculture changed from a “way of life” into an industry. Yet this work would have had little impact but for the systematic publication of the new approach, especially by Arthur Young. This assured both rapid adoption and continuing further work. As a result, yields doubled while manpower needs were cut in half—which alone made possible that large-scale shift of labour from the land into the city and from producing food to consuming food on which the Industrial Revolution depended.
Around 1780, Albrecht Thaer in Germany, an enthusiastic follower of the English, founded the first agricultural college—a college not of “farming” but of “agriculture.” This in turn, still in Thaer’s lifetime, produced the first, specifically application-focused new knowledge, namely, Liebig’s work on the nutrition of plants, and the first science-based industry, fertilizer.
The conversion of the mechanical arts into a technology followed the same sequence and a similar time table. The hundred years between the 1714 offer of the famous £20,000 prize for a reliable chronometer and Eli Whitney’s standardization of parts was, of course, the great age of mechanical invention—of the machine tools, of the prime movers, and of industrial organization. Technical training, though not yet in systematic form, began with the founding of the École des Pontes et Chaussées in 1747. Codification and publication in organized form goes back to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the first volume of which appeared in 1750. In 1776—that miracle year that brought the Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations, Blackstone’s Commentaries, and Watt’s first practical steam engine—the first modern technical university opened: the Bergakademie (Mining Academy) in Freiberg, Saxony. Significantly enough, one of the reasons for its establishment was the need for technically trained managers created by the increasing use of the New-comen steam engine, especially in deep-level coal mining.
In 1794, with the establishment of the École Polytechnique in Paris, the profession of engineer was established. And again, within a generation, we see a reorientation of the physical sciences—organic chemistry and electricity begin their scientific career, being simultaneously sciences and technologies. Liebig, Woehler, Faraday, Henry, Maxwell were great scientists whose work was quickly applied by great inventors, designers, and industrial developers.
Only medicine, of the major technologies, did not make the transition in the eighteenth century. The attempt was made—by the Dutchman Gerhard van Swieten,* not only a great physician but politically powerful as adviser to the Habsburg Court. Van Swieten attempted to marry the clinical practice which his teacher Boerhaave had started at Leyden around 1700 with the new scientific methods of such men as the Paduan Morgagni whose Pathological Anatomy† (1761) first treated diseases as afflictions of an organ rather than as “humours.” But—a lesson one should not forget—the very fact that medicine (or rather, something by that name) was already respectable and organized as an academic faculty defeated the attempt. Vienna relapsed into medical scholasticism as soon as van Swieten and his backer, the Emperor Joseph II, died.
It was only after the French Revolution had abolished all medical schools and medical societies that a real change could be effected. Then another court physician, Corvisart, Napoleon’s doctor, accomplished, in Paris around 1820, what van Swieten had failed in. Even then, opposition to the scientific approach remained powerful enough to drive Semmelweis out of Vienna and into exile when he found, around 1840, that traditional medical practices were responsible for lying-in fever with its ghastly death toll. Not until 1850, with the emergence of the modern medical school in Paris, Vienna, and Wuerzburg, did medicine become a genuine technology and an organized discipline.
This, too, happened, however, without benefit of science. What was codified and organized was primarily old knowledge, acquired in practice. Immediately after the reorientation of the practice of medicine, the great medical scientists appeared—Claude Bernard, Pasteur, Lister, Koch. And they were all application-focused, all driven by a desire to do, rather than by a desire to know.
We know the results of the Technological Revolution, and its impacts. We know that, contrary to Malthus, food supply in the last two hundred years has risen a good deal more than an exploding human population. We know that the average life-span of man a hundred and fifty years ago was still close to the “natural life-span”: the twenty-five years or so needed for the physical reproduction of the species. In the most highly developed and prosperous areas, it has almost tripled. And we know the transformation of our lives through the mechanical technologies, their potential, and their dangers.
Most of us also know that the Technological Revolution has resulted in something even more unprecedented: a common world civilization. It is corroding and dissolving history, tradition, culture, and values throughout the world, no matter how old, how highly developed, how deeply cherished and loved.
And underlying this is a change in the meaning and nature of knowledge and of our attitude to it. Perhaps one way of saying this is that the non-Western world does not want Western science primarily because it wants better understanding. It wants Western science because it wants technology and its fruits. It wants control, not understanding. The story of Japan’s Westernization between 1867 and her emergence as a modern nation in the Chinese War of 1894 is the classical, as it is the earliest, example.*
But this means that the Technological Revolution endowed technology with a power which none of the “useful arts”—whether agricultural, mechanical, or medical—had ever had before: impact on man’s mind. Previously, the useful arts had to do only with how man lives and dies, how he works, plays, eats, and fights. How and what he thinks, how he sees the world and himself in it, his beliefs and values, lay elsewhere—in religion, in philosophy, in the arts, in science. To use technological means to affect these areas was traditionally “magic”—considered at least evil, if not asinine to boot.
With the Technological Revolution, however, application and cognition, matter and the mind, tool and purpose, knowledge and control have come together for better or worse.
There is only one thing we do not know about the Technological Revolution—but it is essential: what happened to bring about the basic change in attitudes, beliefs, and values which released it? Scientific progress, I have tried to show, had little to do with it. But how responsible was the great change in world outlook which, a century earlier, had brought about the great Scientific Revolution? What part did the rising capitalism play? And what was the part of the new, centralized national state with its mercantilistic policies on trade and industry and its bureaucratic obsession with written, systematic, rational procedures everywhere? (After all, the eighteenth century codified the laws as it codified the useful or applied arts.) Or do we have to do here with a process, the dynamics of which lie in technology? Is it the “progress of technology” which piled up to the point when it suddenly turned things upside down, so that the “control” which nature had always exercised over man now became, at least potentially, control which man exercises over nature?
This should be, I submit, a central question both for the general historian and for the historian of technology.
For the first, the Technological Revolution marks one of the great turning points—whether intellectually, politically, culturally, or economically. In all four areas the traditional—and always unsuccessful—drives of systems, powers, and religions for world domination are replaced by a new and highly successful world-imperialism, that of technology. Within a hundred years, it penetrates everywhere and puts, by 1900, the symbol of its sovereignty, the steam engine, even into the Dalai Lama’s palace in Lhasa.
For the historian of technology, the Technological Revolution is not only the cataclysmic event within his chosen field; it is the point at which such a field as technology emerges. Up to that point there is, of course, a long and exciting history of crafts and tools, artifacts and mechanical ingenuity, slow, painful advances and sudden, rapid diffusion. But only the historian, endowed with hindsight, sees this as technology, and as belonging together. To contemporaries, these were separate things, each belonging to its own sphere, application, and way of life.
Neither the general historian nor the historian of technology has yet, however, concerned himself much with the Technological Revolution. The first—if he sees it at all—dismisses technology as the bastard child of science. The only general historian of the first rank (excepting only that keen connoisseur of techniques and tools, Herodotus) who devotes time and attention to technology, its role and impact is, to my knowledge, Franz Schnabel.* That Schnabel taught history at a technical university (Karlsruhe) may explain his interest. The historians of technology, for their part, tend to be historians of materials, tools, and techniques rather than historians of technology. The rare exceptions tend to be nontechnologists such as Lewis Mumford or Roger Burlingame who, understandably, are concerned more with the impact of technology on society and culture than with the development and dynamics of technology itself.
Yet technology is important today precisely because it unites both the universe of doing and that of knowing, connects both the intellectual and the natural histories of man. How it came thus to be in the centre—when it always before had been scattered around the periphery—has yet to be probed, thought through, and reported.
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First published in Technology and Culture, Fall 1961.