1.1. Introduction

What the two historical approaches to innovation and technology have in common are that they both reveal a difference in their emergence and evolution, both factually and conceptually. To invent is a constant in human history. “The innovator is a leader who does not have to act (prattein), he governs (archein) those who are capable of executing”, wrote Plato in Le Politique [ARE 94]. On the other hand, objectifying innovation and building a dedicated culture around it is more difficult than the act of innovating. It is the same for technical fact. Technical fact, tangible and/or intangible, has been a part of the history of human societies since the dawn of time. Nevertheless, human societies do not necessarily objectify the technical fact, even nowadays. Human societies often appropriate the technical fact without developing a technical culture. Actually, the history of the regimes of technical fact appropriation shows the late emergence of a distancing from the techniques [GAR 15].

Let us take Europe as an example. Its material and cultural history experienced profound ruptures between the 16th and 18th Centuries: the first world expansion in the 16th Century, the advent of modern science in the 17th Century and the compelling development of industrial capitalism in the 18th Century. We would expect that such changes would have been made in an innovative mind and that they would have been accompanied by a culture that glorified innovation. This is what happened, but only partially. The Theaters of Machines, written by engineers and published between the 16th and 18th Centuries, praised the novelty and put it forward [VER 03]. The many technical treatises published in the 17th Century insist on their innovative character. In the 18th Century, encyclopedists pleaded for the expansion of knowledge maps. Yet innovation was unanimously condemned. Even worse it was feared, until the 18th Century. From the 16th Century onwards, there was a growing awareness of technical thinking; technicality became objectified as a singular way of mastering action and its languages. The result is a technical culture, but no innovation culture.

1.2. Technological development practices in the 16th Century

In the 16th Century, Europe initiated a new culture of technical writing. Its function was to set the rules and to define the specificities. The key word: in artem redigere, which I will translate as “confer a written language” on practices and action in general, with what this implies in terms of norms and methods [DUB 08]. This movement of thought was part of the grammaticalization movement, which then seized intellectual Europe [AUR 94]. The general idea of this intellectual revolution, in which we remain today, and perhaps more than ever, is that understanding the world depends on understanding the languages that grasp it. This requires objectifying them by elaborating a language science (i.e. according to them, in their minds, a written knowledge). Practice, a term which did not designate the craftsmen’s know-how at the time, but the action necessary for life in society [CIF 01], was thought of as a language, a rhetoric, which was necessary to “reduce to art”, as Cicero recommended. The scholars set themselves the task of detecting the grammars of practical languages, to define their words, expressions, explain them and compare them. A natural extension of this need was to define a specific method for writing these technical writings as well as possible.

The advent of this new type of technical culture is linked to the development of printing. More precisely, it is linked to the hope that this new technique promoted among intellectuals. Leo Marx explains the disappearance of the technological optimism that permeated American culture from the 19th Century to the 1970s, through the succession of technological disasters, such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island [MAR 94]. A strictly opposite movement occurred in 16th-Century Europe. A deep sense of loss had permeated Western culture since the late 14th Century, after the devastation caused by the Black Death, which translated into a sense of loss of knowledge in intellectual circles. The printing press seemed like a way to prevent this loss in the future. Unlike manuscripts, printing had the unprecedented characteristic of ensuring an identical transmission of writings, and a transmission which, at the time, seemed to be able to be inscribed in the very long term, simply because everything written seemed infinitely reproducible, as long as the initial supports, wooden plates, or a little later, copper, were maintained.

Reducing to art became the major concern of the experts employed, because of their profession, as teachers and/or trainers of princes and elites: lawyers, administrators, architects, engineers, and also fencing masters, dancing masters, with, in all cases, the concern to create, each in his or her field, a technè in the sense understood by Plato. A technical culture that could be shared between practitioners and their clients, materialized at the same time via the quality of the writing of the works, their clarity, their logic, their concern to be complete, and from the results, government treaties, historical methods, social norms, private and public buildings, garden planning understandable and appreciable by all [BRI 02, COU 96, GAR 03, MAN 02, PAU 12]. Famous for the aesthetics of their engravings, and far more technically relevant than was long believed, The Theaters of Machines also contributed to the development of a technical culture shared between technicians and users [THE 16]. Written by engineers and architects, its purpose was to show drawings of various technical achievements including military, garden, household, industrial and energy equipment, in place or as prototypes, and to propose them as a model to sponsors, or simply to amateurs and potential customers, or even engineers of future generations.

1.3. A new system of technology, but no innovation culture

Francis Bacon theorized the need for any society immersed in economic competition to have a technical and scientific culture, overflowing with the knowledge of trades. The House of Solomon, an institution described in Bacon’s book New Atlantis, was to be the place of life and research for the scholars stipulated by the power [RUE 16]. This proved to be a source of inspiration, not to mention a model of action. For example, the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, officially recognized in London in 1662 by Charles II [BRI 96], and the Royal Academy of Sciences, officially founded by Colbert in 1666 [MAZ 02, DEL 17] were strongly inspired by it. Yet no innovation culture can be found in Bacon, nor among the scientists and leaders who were inspired by his ideas [GOD 15]. The culture they all advocate is a culture of invention and experimentation.

Francis Bacon expressed his feelings on the fact, a sign in passing that the question had arisen. Common sense today considers innovation as a successful invention, the invention being a novelty in itself, while innovation is that same novelty socialized, (i.e. economically integrated). In the 16th Century, Bacon, like all the scholars of his time, perfectly mastered Latin, the language of sharing and exchanging of ideas among European scholars. For him, invention, from Latin inventio, is literally, what we find, and inventus, what we discover, that exists without having been detected, or understood, or located. Innovation, from Latin innovare, presupposes introducing something new or making a change. With invention, we are in the realm of improvement, perfecting and progress:

If the usefulness of a single particular invention has so struck men that they have judged superior to humanity those who have been able by a blessing to attach themselves to the whole human race, how much more noble it will seem to invent that by which all other things can be easily invented! [BAC 86]

He becomes excited with the notion of innovation in the Novum Organum. With innovation, we are in the realm of radical change, of societal risk. The philosopher pleaded for invention, which works ad meliorem, for the best, which he recommends himself:

If in this I sometimes departed from what is commonly received, it was with the intention of proceeding in melius (for the better) and not in aliud (for what is other), in a spirit that tends to improvement and development not change and transformation… [BAC 91].

He reiterates this in his essay on innovation: “It were good, therefore, that men in their innovations would follow the example of time itself; which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, by degrees scarce to be perceived” [BAC 11]. He perceives innovation rather positively when it comes to method, but otherwise negatively because of its brutal character, especially when it concerns politics.

The case until the end of the 18th Century was that, while the idea was spreading among the social elites that it was necessary to seize professional and trade cultures and transform them into open, shareable and perfectible technical cultures, nowhere was there the idea that innovation should be developed. For Diderot, invention was indispensable because it broadened the map of knowledge; it opened up new paths for action. He also condemned the “disastrous secrets” of the trades and their “routine”. This was the outcome of the habit of keeping complete ownership of know-how, hiding it and delivering its knowledge only to a limited number of apprentices along with it the knowledge of possible new developments.

The philosopher profusely pleaded for the expansion of knowledge, the making available of as much knowledge as possible to the public. This idea, which is the basis of the encyclopedia, was also the main idea of patent legislation during the revolutionary period. There was skillful management of what might a priori be opposed, namely intellectual property and the making available of knowledge. The inventor had his reputation guaranteed and the rights to his invention protected, at least for a certain time, provided he published it and thus made it available. Innovation, as Bacon wrote in the 17th Century, remained something to be feared, because it inevitably led to the rearrangement of structures. As well when one evoked it, one placed it in the nowhere, in an imaginary place certainly describable but without a hold on reality. From this perspective, invention gives way to technical culture, while innovation gives way to utopia [GAR 05].

1.4. But how did entrepreneurs achieve success before Schumpeter?

We cannot reduce the economic structure before the iron/coal/steam system to proto-industrialization. This type of business model, dominated by commercial capital which subcontracted craftsmen and peasant craftsmen, making them bear the investment in fixed capital and the acquisition of raw materials – a business model that the economy is rediscovering today with “uberization” – mainly characterized the textile sector. The European metallurgical industry was based on other models; either land valuation by the owners, incorporation of shareholder companies, private-public blocks, small shareholder companies or state foundries.

In the 18th Century, France saw powerful mining and metallurgical companies in Alsace, Lorraine, the Cévennes, Lyon, the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Armorican Massif. These companies were large, industrial entities in a world that was not. Managed by engineers, financed by shareholders; their initial investment included a major share of fixed capital. There was, in fact, no difference in their way of innovating and investing in modern equipment, in the name of searching for greater efficiency and profit by adapting metallurgical processes to the needs of the field, adopting new processes early, such as steam engines, coke into cast iron, and English copper and lead lamination in the 1780s in Normandy [BEL 91, BEL 92, BEN 97]. Some even innovated their management methods, with the invention of technical accounting in the foundries of Poullaouen, which was intended to be a model for mining engineering students until the 1860s. These are indeed innovations, that is, the implementation of completely new processes (coke cast iron production, technical accounting, English copper and lead lamination), or new interpretation of old processes (metal reduction in the reverberatory furnace), but this was done without developing an innovation culture. Entrepreneurs innovated, without feeling the need to objectify their innovative practices.

However, entrepreneurs soon realized that they lacked the proper operating cultures. These industrial entrepreneurs and engineers worked tirelessly to adopt and even develop technical cultures congruent with the technical innovations for which they chose [GAR 02]. Many had a bitter experience. Whether they brought in experts, including reputable ones, from Germany or England, or whether they borrowed processes from these countries, the result was the same: short-term failure. The perennial reason: in these times of practical knowledge linked to a local and/or regional technical complex, with its language, its cultures, its technical habits, its geological context, there was a gap between these local practical cultures and the technical culture of the experts. It was impossible for the established expert from Alsace to operate a cupellation furnace in the Cévennes, for lack of adequate knowledge of the available raw materials. It was impossible for the Poullaouen managing engineer in Brittany to maintain the use of copper cylinders for drainage pumps, for lack of technical skills in drilling. It was also impossible on the same site to keep the Newcomen atmospheric steam engine running because the mechanic and the engineer did not have enough reciprocal knowledge about the machine’s operation and the specific organization of this particular mining environment imposed by the silver-bearing lead deposits. The installation of a state-of-the-art steelworks in Le Creusot failed [GAR 96, BEL 11]. The entrepreneurs, as innovative as they were, and because they were innovative, anxious to adopt the processes supposed to be the most efficient, discovered at their expense that they had to develop, around new ideas, a supporting knowledge, and adequate operating cultures. In terms of innovation, the mobility of experts does not in itself generate cooperation. In addition, it is necessary to have technical environments open to hybridization between the old and the new, or, failing that, to encourage them.

To conclude this point, it must be noted that the history of pre-industrial enterprises confirms two aspects of the concept-knowledge theory (C-K theory) [LEM 14]:

1. 1) designing an object, a process, or a material, is not the same thing as understanding it;
2. 2) the innovative process involves the design and development of knowledge that allows the process to be used over time.

In the pre-industrial European world, the phase of building up the knowledge field had not gone through the search for an innovation culture, but through the search for operating cultures involving, first and foremost and perhaps above all, the regime of practice, informal knowledge about the subject, which is why, moreover, specialists were spontaneously brought in. Their short-term failure raised the question of cooperation, and thus the development of a technical or technical-scientific culture common to all stakeholders, contractors, engineers, administrators and master-workers. This was the reason in Germany for the multiplication of technology courses from the 1750s and their importation into France at the end of the 18th Century. It was still the founding reason for l’Ecole des Mineurs de Saint-Étienne [the Saint-Etienne School for Miners] in the mid-1810s and that of its success with French entrepreneurship [LAB 12, GAR 04, GAR 12].

1.5. A “dashboard knowledge” culture to complement the operating cultures

The great ambition of the École des Mineurs de Saint-Étienne was to train practical engineers capable of contributing to the modernization of industrial facilities throughout the country. Fortunately, we have the courses that were professed at the beginning of the 1830s, a time when professing industry was itself an innovation. We discover how these engineering students were trained in modernity, and therefore in innovation.

The first observation is that novelty is widely present, in both its theoretical and practical forms. All the innovations of the 1820s are present: the railway, hydraulic lime, suspension bridges, gas lighting, the analytical theory of heat, coke cast iron, debates on the nature of steel, Elie de Beaumont’s geological theory on the mountain system, and geologists’ debates between Plutonism and Neptunism. All innovations, both material and intellectual, were presented, analyzed scientifically, broken down, made available, proposed for study and technical imagination. What is striking, when reading these courses, is that nothing is considered revolutionary or innovative. On the contrary, everything is taken for granted, including the newest and most radical techniques; everything is leveled out and standardized by the technical-scientific reading that it is made of.

Cast iron production using coke, for example, presented in the metallurgy course: how many blast furnaces operated in this way at that time in France (or appear to have operated, because the crisis of 1827–1829 had been cruel to this young steel industry)? Barely, a dozen. However, everything about their functioning is stated as self-evident. The introduction of coke during metallurgy is almost insignificant, which does not mean that it is non-existent or inefficient. On the contrary, it permeates the whole exposition with its presence, but on the register of normality. No specific chapter is devoted to it, unlike, for example, steel. The new fuel is fully integrated into the metallurgical process statement, as is the case in the preliminary definition. It is present at each of the phases, but in all discretion. Pragmatism prevails as a method of technical liberalism, which left to the industrialist the choice to opt for the best fuel according to the time they have available, the place and the conditions in which they find themselves, and also according to the product they want to produce. The dominant idea is to present, to propose and not to impose, including in the name of progress. The disruptive nature of coke smelting, in economic terms, was indeed known. It required a commercial and institutional link with the mining companies, where coke smelting was limited to a link with land (woodland ownership). In other words, the wood-based steel industry was the work of landowners, placing their furnaces under the control of master landowners, the coke-based steel industry involved industrial capitalism. Notably, part of the metallurgy course was devoted to economics. Like coke, innovation disappears in every way, even though it is everywhere. There is no difference in treatment between traditional and new processes in the statements. Everything contributes to the standardization of the innovative product, from which the worrying strangeness is erased and trivialized as much as possible. Innovation has value only if it disappears into the technical landscape, is integrated into it and does not disturb it, including the related teaching of its methodologies.

The second observation is that the professional statement mobilizes other modes of acceptance: the narrative, this discourse, almost a staging, which is reinforced at certain times by the use of aesthetic, even heroic, language. A geology course, from 1828, gives an example. Fénéon, the mining engineer who wrote and taught it, incorporates the best thinkers at the time: Fourrier, Cordier, Elie de Beaumont and Brongniart. He educated himself, visiting the Alps with the two great scientists Elie de Beaumont and Léopold de Buch. Werner is quoted here and something of the spirit of adventure undoubtedly breathes when he described the Alps and regales his audience with the latest discoveries of geological science. Here, he described natural heterogeneity:

Fossils in large alluvium: large alluvium contains two Crocodiles, a Tryonis, the bones of a Dolphin near our Killer Whale, a Whale similar to the Whales and a new genus very close to the Sperm Whales, and which consists of three species. With them gigantic Pachyderms, Elephants, Rhinos, Hippos, Tapirs, a Boar, a large number of very small horses and some ruminants.

The flavor of the course reaches for the sublime. It discusses “prodigious abundances”, “transported”, “torn” materials; “violent concussion”, “tearing”, “remains”, “numerous and sudden revolutions”, “tumbled, contorted layers” and “torn masses, violently torn” [LAB 12].

Some will see the hallmark of Georges Cuvier’s catastrophism, although the great French anatomist and paleontologist is not mentioned. As for me, I remember that this strongly metaphorical discourse gave meaning to history, that of rocks, and also of humanity. In effect, the course theorized crisis and disruption by including them in evolution. Again, it weakened the impact of disappearance and renewal by introducing historical hindsight. Basically, what was the lesson given? Within the framework of a science that posed “the order of phenomena to arrive if possible at their real cause” of a science that had these tangible facts that were fossils, the student learned that the earth had gone through a series of violent changes before reaching its state of tranquility; that the “globe has experienced numerous and sudden massive changes”, the last of which “had totally annihilated the race of the mastodons”.

In this shared learning of novelty and how to introduce it, the scientific register gave meaning. It was a precious ally because, perfectly mastered by the engineering professor, it generated evidence. In other words, in addition to the essential technical culture, the school distilled a “dashboard knowledge” culture, to use Owen Barfield’s expression [BAR 88]. The students were trained in each of the technical cultures specific to each of the specialties they were required to practice or interact with in their professional lives. A general culture was distilled, in addition to these strictly operational approaches, where, in the same pragmatic, aesthetic and narrative approach, a philosophy of scientific rationality, a factor of progress and the popularization of scientific methods and practices were combined. This “dashboard knowledge” culture, which was lacking in pre-industrial companies, was a habit shared by all the students leaving school, regardless of their profession – factory manager, practical engineer, miner or mine guard, depending on their origins and/or achievements.

1.6. When the “dashboard knowledge” culture becomes an innovation culture

Let us examine the work of other industrial engineers, mainly Gadzarts and Centraliens, who published extensively in the journal La Nature in the 1890s. An innovation culture undeniably appears in these publications, but at the different level of scientific and technical popularization. Innovation is finally named and considered for its capacity to destroy. It is to face this capacity for destruction that the journal proposes intellectual procedures and safeguards. There are two levels of discourse. First, the journal presents and popularizes the technical culture specific to each field of génie industriel by giving substance to the amateur expert in passing. Secondly, at a general level, what is produced in La Nature is a global and coherent topic of thought around new concepts, both tangible and intangible, a common sense of innovation. Notably, this topic of thought incorporates, in the same regime of appropriation, the immediate stakeholders of the technique, the users, and even spectators and the public, which was not the case before.

I studied this new topic, the true lingua franca of innovation, by focusing on the objects of displacement such as the automobile, cars, tricycles, trucks, moving pavements, escalators, all present and described in the 1890s, and adopted the following profiles:

1) Innovation clearly has its origin in two dreams, that of the engineer and that of the consumer. There is something of the “you dreamed it, we did it”, which we regularly encounter in advertising slogans. The journal evokes the user’s dream. On the subject of motor vehicles: “Without realizing the dream of the tourist or the trader, the gasoline-powered car has already entered into practice” [HOS 94]; or again, on another level:

The doctors, the businessmen (...) will applaud the efforts of the manufacturers who work for them and prepare for them cars with which it will not be possible to drive more than twenty kilometers per hour, but which will make it possible to climb all the hills and to be economically transported [HOS 98].

Building from a dream has a function: it fixes the portrait of the ideal machine, gives the goal to reach, and in the same breath, gives its limits to its materialization. The dream serves as a horizon of thought.

2) There are two types of innovations. The first, absolute innovation, does not resemble anything known. This category arouses mistrust and skepticism. Thus, like the diesel engine in the late 1890s, the first stage is that of reticence, even mockery:

Let us hasten to point out this invention while the periodicals from across the Rhine place it on the Capitol. A few weeks late would perhaps expose us to finding it at the bottom of the Tarpeian Rock [JB 97].

The second stage is that of acceptance, subject, however, to the introduction of testimonials. For the diesel engine, this comes quickly. Within a week, the tone is rectified because a demonstration of this machine was made in front of a community of engineers. Therefore, the technical community took it seriously:

The test engine was built in Augsburg and presented on 27 April; on 16 June 1897, it was described to the Society of Engineers in Cassel. The attached figure 1 gives an external view of the engine…. In summary, the diesel engine seems to have made great progress on current engines, and it is still in its infancy and is therefore likely to undergo major improvements [LAF 97].

The second type of innovation is that which starts from an existing object and redevelops it: the redesign. Acceptance in this case goes without saying. There are many examples among which we can choose that of the “motorized tricycle”, which is:

…a small three-wheeled car, grazing the ground, (which can be seen) quickly crossing streets and boulevards, moving with ease in the midst of car congestion and disappearing into the crowds of passers-by with no other noise than that of the exhaust of burnt gases [BAU 96].

For the journal, this is a “good innovation”, that is, an innovation that fully corresponds to what the engineer knows, can and must do, improve what exists and does not create:

The motorized tricycle in question does not contain any innovations in any of its parts but brings together with skill all the progress that the motor car industry has made today […] Mr. Bollée had a very clear design, followed by a very skillful execution of the motor car built according to the principles of cycling, and for which such an enormous clientele is indeed ready [BAU 96].

We will note the reversal of meaning that has taken place between “invention” and “innovation”. The absolute novelty that was “innovation” in modern times has become “invention”, but beyond the change of meaning, there is a permanence – absolute innovation is frightening. The reaction in two stages after the announcement of the development of the diesel engine shows that at the beginning of the 20th Century, as in the 16th Century, what is feared is the sudden change in standards.

3) Finally, and this is notable, La Nature’s engineer-editors perfectly understood that innovation increased the entropy of the system. In any case, this is the analysis they make of it. And what they theorize here is nothing less than destructive creation. For them, innovation creates a fracture; it forces us to constantly reorganize the system and to constantly deploy new techniques. There is a clear awareness in La Nature that society is changing, that its technical environment is also changing, and that this puts society at risk! Innovation increases the social responsibility of the engineer to follow these changes to lower entropy. The daily improvement of the devices by the engineers, with the aim of simplifying them, is one of the recurring themes of the journal. Incompleteness, in some ways, protects from disintegration.

The dream, the risk of fracture, the containment by the ability of industrial engineering to perfect new concepts and objects: these are the outlines of a topic socialized thought that de facto socializes the industrial novelty, at a time, let us not forget, when the industrial world is in the social chronicle. The economic crisis is in full swing, the workers’ movement is powerful; Marxism has the wind in its sails. In contrast, industrial genius, also affected by unemployment, works to “produce its reality, gradually and collectively, through a constant work of rewriting itself”, and to paraphrase Antoine Hennion’s definition of innovation in business [HEN 03]. We were in the presence of the cultural broth of industrial society at the end of the 19th Century, on the basis of which the thinking of economists and sociologists of innovation, Joseph Schumpeter and William F. Ogburn in the first place, was constituted [GOD 10].

1.7. Conclusion: what does the objectification of an innovation culture at the turn of the 19th–20th Century mean?

Innovation, which includes the human capacity to use new material forms, technical lines and symbolic forms, belongs to all epochs, societies and human groups. It is based on technicality, the ability of a large number of adaptable human beings to transform their surroundings and acquire technical capital by developing standardized, transmissible and transferable know-how.

The uniqueness of the human species is evidenced by its having managed its aptitude for technicality by individualizing it and having made it an objective practice. Technicality, as Gilbert Simondon writes, “is the degree of concretization of the object”, that is, the degree of concretization of the topic of thought form/matter/functioning. The technical imagination unfolds thanks to “a particular sensitivity to the technicality of the elements; it is this sensitivity to the technicality which allows the discovery of possible assemblies”, and thus ultimately leads to innovation. This was done by means of a specific regime of appropriation of the technical fact, structured by oral language and all that relates to it, use of sounds, with an intensive use of symbolic, metaphorical interpretation of the world [SIM 12]. Humans did not first invent the written word; they first intertwined their two capacities of technicality and imagination to standardize and transmit this know-how in full consciousness by developing multiple technical symbolisms. Professional cultures are structured around oral communication and the human capacity to standardize and transmit through symbolization. We will call these trade cultures and these practical cultures “original technical cultures”. Like any technical culture, they include a vocabulary and/or a trade language, jargon and a technical terminology; a set of gestures and rites whose practice authorizes and/or determines their effectiveness, within the framework of a given culture. They continue to exist, even in the most sophisticated workplaces, although they remain misunderstood and underestimated. They support the human capacity to innovate, without however objectifying it, without objectifying the technical fact in itself. What they objectify is the technicality, the human capacity to imagine the form/matter/functioning relationship by materialization of the object or the tool, and by featuring the symbol to ensure its propagation.

The development of the “technical regime” in 16th-Century Europe, reflects a radical change in the understanding of the technical fact. This change was made in connection with the organization of complex sites and/or workshops, in all likelihood, because they required an expanded and rigorous management of materials and the orchestration of multiple know-hows. Thus, the enormous construction sites of the 3rd and 4th millennia BCE, the large-scale mining operations of the Roman era, and the construction of the gigantic hydraulic system of Dujiangyan, in Sichuan in the 3rd Century (CE), the Great Wall, and the Grand Canal, three centuries later. The invention of the written word has made possible its full and complete expression by encouraging the objectification of standards, the distance learning of know-how and the organization of new transmission methods. This evolution in the modes of appropriation of the technical fact emerged locally, regionally, to then attenuate, even disappear over centuries. Certainly, it accompanied the establishment of the Chinese government, while printing was invented in the first centuries of our era. It became an integral and lasting part of European history in the 16th Century, also in connection with printing. The analysis of this historical moment in Western history allows us to make three observations:

• – this objectification is supported by a socio-professional category, which develops then with force: the engineer, whose field of action is sometimes military (fortifications and military machines), and sometimes civil (hydraulic mechanism, industrial tools);
• – the new technical regime adapts to the contours of the general culture of the scholarly elites, in this case writing and the grammaticalization of practices, which serves as support and as a topic of thought. Technical textbooks and manuals become indispensable tools for the development, dissemination, and transmission of technical knowledge and/or know-how management tools. The objective is to achieve universality of technical expression. The technical statement abandons symbolism that is also linked to local cultures, in favor of “neutral” vocabularies conveying precise terms. Schools become a major place for the transmission of technical knowledge. The technical culture of the socio-professional categories concerned, language and habits, moves away from the regime of practice, repressed in the mysteries of intuition, and becomes embedded in the mode of scientific thought, all the more aided as the technical regime contributed to its elaboration in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Technical efficiency was then expressed mathematically;
• – this new way of conceiving technical fact was in itself an innovation, but this innovative character has not been objectified as such. What has been objectified is the social role of technology and this objectification has given meaning to the notion of progress. On at least two occasions, philosophers and scholars have relied on technical progress to demonstrate the human capacity to move forward, to do better than the ancients, for example, at the beginning of the 16th Century, with Francis Bacon and at the end of the 17th Century, during the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes [Ancient and Modern Quarrels]. However, this paradigmatic shift in the history of European thought has not given rise to an innovation culture, but its development has forced the various technical players to rethink the question of cooperation. From the 18th Century onwards, this led to the development of a new technical-scientific culture, which could be shared between engineers, entrepreneurs, administrators and master-workers, a “dashboard knowledge” culture, a true topic of engineering thought until the end of the 19th Century which was established around three central themes: technique (that of the regime of technique, not that of the regime of practice), progress and science. The technical culture of an engineer is also growing, which now understands: the old culture of practice, informal, used to “intuit”, and to accomplish the low works of technical reality; the technical culture sensu stricto, the culture of professional efficiency, sometimes school culture, always bookish and scientific, around which is organized the regulated conception [LEM 14]. Finally, the “dashboard knowledge” culture, Saint-Simonianism in France, for example, is in support of the industrialist ideology, shared by the majority of the sector’s stakeholders, entrepreneurs, engineers, foremen and very often even the workers.

It was this “dashboard knowledge” culture that would support the innovation culture that emerged in industrial countries between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries, with electricity, oil and aluminum, the telephone, the automobile, the plane, all these materials and technical objects that industrial engineering mobilized, invented and/or deployed at the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries, in a phase of strong economic disruption. Then, the innovative potential of the technique was objectified, and treated as such. The disruptive nature of the new technical environment was clearly perceived. In 1910, the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting exalted the merits of the creative destruction of the new industrial civilization. At the same time, the industrial engineer and designer of the technical objects exalted by the Futurists, worked to make conceptual creations whose destructive potential they measured socially acceptable. The new need to introduce innovation socially, and thus to invent an adequate culture, echoes a business model change in the industrialized world. The large pre-industrial companies were operating in segmented markets with uncertain dynamics. The large companies of the first industrialization had other large industrial companies, public, civil and military markets as their preferred customers. The technical objects developed within the framework of the oil/electricity/alloys system were primarily aimed at the public, as potential buyers or users. A new topic of thought is emerging among the most innovative, or quite simply the most clairvoyant, which is structured around three central themes: the dream, the fracture and the scientific management, which forms the basis of the Western innovation culture. It is now shared by all, but in the world of developers, however, it has become a technical culture, with computer-aided design (CAD) and “Big Data” facilitating it [GAR 16]. A new mode of appropriation of technical fact has resulted: the regime of technology.