For a full survey, see Mokyr, “Editor's Introduction,” pp. 1–127.

The opus classicus on this topic remains Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology. For the best recent statement, see Jacob, Scientific Culture and “Cultural Foundations,” pp. 67–85.

Gillispie, Science … End of Old Regime, p. 336. For canonical statements on the “unimportance of science” see Hall, “What Did the Industrial Revolution?”; Neil McKendrick, “Role of Science”; Mathias, “Who Unbound Prometheus?” John R. Harris has been even more skeptical of the importance of science relative to “tacit” skills and has even argued that France's backwardness in steelmaking was in part due to its reliance on scientists, who at first gave misleading and later rather useless advice to steel makers; compare Harris, Industrial Espionage, pp. 219–21.

Price, “Notes towards a Philosophy.” Rosenberg, Perspectives and “How Exogenous is Science?”

For more details, see Mokyr, Gifts, chap. 2, and “Long-term Economic Growth.”

One of the most cogent statements is by McNeil, Under the Banner, pp. 24–25, who notes the importance of a “faith in science that brought the legacy of the Scientific Revolution to bear on industrial society … it is imperative to look at the interaction between culture and industry, between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.” As Spadafora has noted, the belief in the possibility (if not the inevitability) of progress was necessary if the West was to actually experience anything like it. Spadafora, Idea of Progress.

The Scottish philosopher George Campbell (1719–1796) noted for example in 1776 that “for some centuries backwards, the men of every age have made great and unexpected improvements on the labours of their predecessors. And it is very probable that the subsequent age will produce discoveries and acquisitions which we of this age are as little capable of foreseeing as those who preceded us in the last century were capable of conjecturing the progress that would be made in the present” (cited by Spadafora, Idea, p. 56).

Sargent, ed., Francis Bacon, pp. xxvii–xxviii. In a wonderful piece of doggerel entitled Ode to the Royal Society, written by the now (deservedly) neglected poet Abraham Cowley (one of the Society's co-founders) and reprinted as a preface to Thomas Sprat's celebrated History of the Royal Society of London, the gratefulness of the scholars of the time to Bacon was well-expressed: “From these and all long Errors of the Way; In which our wandring Predecessors went; And like the old Hebrews many Years did stray; in Desarts but of small Extent; Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last; The barren Wilderness he past; Did on the very Border stand; of the blest promis'd Land; And from the Mountain's Top of his exalted Wit; Saw it himself and shew'd us it.”

As always, there were earlier expressions of such ideas, not always wholly acknowledged by Bacon. One example is the sixteenth-century French theologian Pierre de la Ramée (Peter Ramus), with whom Bacon would have agreed that “the union of mathematics and the practice of scholarly arts by artisans would bring about great civic prosperity” (Smith, Business, p. 36).

Farrington, Francis Bacon. Vickers, “Francis Bacon.” Bacon's influence on the Industrial Enlightenment can be readily ascertained by the deep admiration the encyclopédistes felt toward him, exemplified by a long article on Baconisme written by the Abbé Pestre and the credit given him by Diderot himself in his entries on Art and Encyclopédie. The Journal Encyclopédique wrote in 1756 “If this society owes everything to Chancellor Bacon, the philosopher does not owe less to the authors of the Encyclopédie” (cited by Kronick, History, p. 42). The Scottish Enlightenment philosophers Dugald Stewart and Francis Jeffrey agreed on Baconian method and goals, even if they differed on some of the interpretation (Chitnis, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 214–15). A practical enlightenment scientist such as Humphry Davy had no doubt that Bacon was “… was the first philosopher who laid down plans for extending knowledge of universal application; who ventured to assert, that all the science could be nothing more than expressions or arrangements of facts … the pursuit of the new method of investigation, in a very short time, wholly altered the face of every department of natural knowledge. Davy, “Sketch,” pp. 121–22. Across the channel, the French minister of the Interior, Nicolas-Louis François de Neufchâteau invoked the spirit of Francis Bacon when opening the 1798 French industrial exhibition. See Jacob, “Putting Science.”

Rosenberg, “Adam Smith,” p. 137.

A typical passage in this spirit was written by the British chemist and philosopher Joseph Priestley: “If, by this means, one art or science should grow too large for an easy comprehension in a moderate space of time, a commodious subdivision will be made. Thus all knowledge will be subdivided and extended, and knowledge as Lord Bacon observes, being power, the human powers will be increased … men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable.” Priestley, Essay, p. 7.

McClellan, Science Reorganized, p. 52.

As Musson and Robinson stress in Science and Technology, p. 16, “Bacon's influence can be perceived everywhere among men of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, constantly encouraging them to comprehend workshop practices.”

Calvin in the sixteenth century still followed St. Augustine's condemnation of curiosity as a “vanity.” By way of contrast, in the 1660s, Thomas Sprat felt that gentlemen were suitable to research precisely because they were “free and unconfined.”

Thus in 1710 the Tatler wrote that “It is the duty of all who make philosophy the entertainment of their lives, to turn their thoughts to practical schemes for the good of society, and not pass away their time in fruitless searches which tend rather to the ostentation of knowledge than the service of life.” Cited by Shapin, “Scholar,” p. 309. In a similar vein, The Gentleman's Magazine wrote in 1731 that “our knowledge should be in the first place that which is most useful, then that which is fashionable.” Cited by Burke, Social History, p. 111.

Cohen, “Inside Newcomen's,” p. 127, points out that the Baconian ideology “went under the sainted name of Newton.”

Desaguliers, Course, vol. 1, p. iii.

Furbank, Diderot, p. 110. Hankins, Science, p. 45. Hankins add that “Diderot was wrong … in the years between 1780 and 1840 … mathematics and mechanics found a place precisely where Diderot thought they had no place.”

See above all, Reynolds, Stronger, pp. 233–50. Another example of such an application of mathematical knowledge to a mundane problem is Colin MacLaurin's ingenious solution (1735) to the problem of measuring the quantity of molasses in irregularly shaped barrels by the use of classical geometry. Not only did he solve the rather difficult mathematical problem with uncommon elegance, he also provided simple formulas, tables, and algorithms for the customs officers, that were used for many years. See Grabiner, “Some Disputes,” pp. 139–68.

One source of confirmation of the belief in the possibility of economic progress may have been perceptions of agricultural progress. As John Gascoigne has recently noted, “as the land bore more, better, and increasingly diversified fruits as a consequence of patient experiment with new techniques and crops, so, too, the need to apply comparable methods to other areas of the economy and society came to seem more insistent.” Gascoigne, Joseph Banks, p. 185.

A good early example of such hope was the work of the Scottish botanist and physician, Sir Robert Sibbald (1641–1721), whose widespread interests, extensive correspondence network, and continental education were harbingers of things to come in the eighteenth century. Sibbald was extremely active in reforming the University of Edinburgh and helped establish the Royal College of Medicine as well as an early botanical garden in town. Yet as Paul Wood remarks, much of Sibbald's work failed to bear fruit in his lifetime, and his dream to turn learning into material benefit was largely disappointed in his lifetime. See Wood, “Science.” For a general discussion of the quest for patronage through claims for usefulness, see especially, Spary, Utopia's Garden, p. 127.

Censer, “Journals,” p. 311, though he should have added “informed” to the “rational.”

The classic example of such an invention during the Industrial Revolution is surely Cort's patent for the second half of his puddling and rolling process, in which the common rolling mill was used to weld together pieces of scrap iron at a sufficiently high temperature. His invention “clearly inspired” a naval contractor named William Forbes who used grooved rollers to produce improved copper bolts for naval ships (Harris, “Copper,” p. 183). For a theoretical discussion of recombination in technological change, see Weitzman, “Hybridizing,” pp. 207–13.

McGee, “Rethinking Invention.”

I use the term “effective” rather that “correct” because terms such as “true” or “correct” are irrelevant and inappropriate here. The best we can do is to say that a piece of knowledge held in the past was “right” or “wrong” in the sense that it is inconsistent with our beliefs. By “effective” I mean such knowledge on which certain techniques rest that perform better than techniques based on some other base according to some prespecified criterion. For instance, bloodletting might have been effective simply because it did help patients if only through a placebo effect.

As Voltaire noted in his The Age of Louis XV, written late in his life in 1770: “pure natural philosophy has illustrated the necessary arts; and these arts have already begun to heal the wounds of the state caused by two fatal wars. Stuffs manufactured in a cheaper manner, by ingenuity of the most celebrated mechanics” (Vol. 2, pp. 369–70).

Young, Political Essays, p. v., emphasis in original.

One telling example is Neilson's hot blast (1828), a fuel-saving innovation from the “second stage” of the Industrial Revolution. Neilson had learned of Gay-Lussac's calculation of the rate of expansion of oxygen and nitrogen between 0° and 80° C and used laboratory experiments to persuade Scottish ironmasters to apply it, which proved “the salvation of the Scottish iron industry” (Clow and Clow, Chemical Revolution, p. 356).

For a more detailed analysis of the economics of tacit knowledge, see Cowan and Foray. “Economics,” pp. 595–622.

Harris, “Skills.” Epstein, “Knowledge Sharing,” especially pp. 15–20. Eighteenth-century Europe was crisscrossed by a variety of technological informants and spies such as Gabriel Jars (studying metalmaking) and Nicolas Desmarest (papermaking) (Gillispie, Science … End of Old Regime, pp. 429–37, 444–54). For a discussion of the importance of geographical mobility on the diffusion of artisanal skills in Italy, see Belfanti, “Guilds.” The effect of traveling was also notable in the improved access to agricultural knowledge, as attested to by the many Frenchmen who visited Britain after 1750 to study farm methods and techniques. See Bourde, Influence.

Harris, “Industrial Espionage,” pp. 164–75, and Industrial Espionage. British legislation to prevent the outflow of skilled craftsmen and certain kinds of machinery were in the long run doomed to failure, though it is hard to disagree with Harris's assessment that they raised access costs and had a retardative effect on the diffusion of technology.

In Britain, better-built roads and coaches sharply reduced internal travel time in the eighteenth century: the coach from London to Edinburgh still took 10–12 days in the mid 1750s, whereas in 1836 (just before being replaced by a railroad) it could cover the distance in 45.5 hours. In France, travel times were halved or better on many routes between 1765 and 1785. See data reported by Szostak, Role, p. 70.

Thomas Newcomen surely must have seen Papin's sketches of his models of proto-engines and pumps, published in various issues of Philosophical Transactions between 1685 and 1700. One example of a book that codified a great deal of formerly tacit knowledge was Bernard de Bélidor's famed Architecture Hydraulique, published in four volumes in 1737. It discussed almost all fields of civil engineering, and the great British engineers John Smeaton, John Rennie, and Thomas Telford all owned copies. Charles Plumier (1646–1704) wrote a book on the art of using a lathe (l'Art de Tourner), which—whether of use to craftsmen or not—was sufficiently regarded to be translated into Russian, the translation attributed to Emperor Peter the Great himself.

For a study of Pierre Montgolfier, one of the most progressive paper manufacturers of eighteenth-century France, see Rosenband, Papermaking.

Jones, “Culture,” p. 13.

Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology, p. 113. In 1697 the rev. Thomas Bray [1697, (1967)] called for 400 lending libraries to be established throughout Britain, believing that making knowledge more accessible would “raise a Noble Spirit of Emulation in those Leaned Societies and would excite more of the members thereof to exert themselves in being serviceable to the world” (p. 11).

See Outram, Enlightenment, p. 21.

The Swedish metallurgist Tobern Bergman published his major work, De Praecipitatis Metallicis (a major theoretical essay on the nature of steel) in Latin as late as 1780. An English translation, by no less a scholar than William Withering, a founding member of the Lunar Society, came out in 1783.

A study of the contents of French private libraries (probably unrepresentative) shows only about 3.2 percent of all books devoted to what we may call useful knowledge, more than half being novels and 32 percent being devoted to history or theology. See Mornet, “Enseignements,” p. 457.

The “Natural Science” section of J. D. Reuss's Repertorium (Index of scientific literature) published between 1801 and 1821 (covering only a small part of the scientific journals) indicates that astronomy accounted for 19 percent of the scientific papers published between 1665 and 1800 and zoology for 18 percent, whereas mechanics accounted for 4 percent and chemistry for 6 percent. See Gascoigne, Historical Catalogue, p. 100.

Harris, “Skills,” pp. 21–23. It might be added that Harris writes specifically about mining and coal-using technology, and that outside geology and the adoption of steam-powered pumps, there was actually little technological progress in the mining sector.

Thus the Portuguese instrument maker Jean Hyacinthe de Magellan—who had worked with Priestley in the 1770s—bought thermometers from Wedgwood, and sold the needed instruments to Alessandro Volta. Volta in turn used these to construct his eponymous pile (reputedly upon hints received from William Nicholson in London). See Stewart, “Laboratory,” p. 13.

Adam Smith expressed this kind of elitism in his “Early Draft,” in which he noted that “to think or to reason comes to be, like every other employment, a particular business, which is carried on by very few people who furnish the public with all the thought and reason possessed by the vast multitudes that labour.” The benefits of the “speculations of the philosopher … may evidently descend to the meanest of people” if they led to improvements in the mechanical arts. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 569–72. Soame Jenyns, a mid-eighteenth-century writer, advocated ignorance for the poor as “the only opiate capable of infusing the insensibility which can enable them to endure the miseries of poverty and the fatigues of the drudgeries of life.” See Jenyns, Free Inquiry, pp. 65–66. As Rosenberg points out, such a division of knowledge was increasingly pertinent to a sophisticated (“civilized”) society in which specialized “philosophers” would account for technological progress. Compare Rosenberg, “Adam Smith,” pp. 134–36.

Well-known examples were the wondrous Dr. John Brown (1735–1788), whose popularity was based on his insistence that all diseases could be cured by either alcohol or opium, and the notorious fraud Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–1795), who peddled elixirs of youth and love powders to the high and mighty, and whose séances had become the rage of fashionable society in Paris by 1785, until he found himself in the Bastille.

For example, von Hayek, “Legal and Political Philosophy,” p. 106.

Plumb, “Reason,” pp. 5, 23.

Steven Shapin has outlined the changes in trust and expertise in Britain during the seventeenth century, associating expertise, for better or for worse, with social class and locality. Although the approach to science was ostensibly based on a “question authority” principle (the Royal Society's motto was nullius in verba—on no one's word), in fact no system of shared useful (or any kind of) knowledge can exist without some mechanism that generates trust. The apparent skepticism with which scientists treated the knowledge created by their colleagues increased the trust that outsiders could have in the findings, because they could then assume—as is still true today—that these findings had been scrutinized and checked by other “experts.” See Shapin, Social History.

By “tight,” I mean knowledge that is believed to be true by a consensus, and that this consensus is based on considerable confidence.

As Hilaire-Pérez put it, “the value of inventions was too important an economic stake to be left to be dissipated among the many forms of recognition and amateurs: the establishment of truth became the professional responsibility of academic science.” (Hilaire-Pérez, Invention Technique, p. 60).

In the scientific world of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a network of trust and verification emerged in the West that seems to have stood the test of time. It is well described by Polanyi; the space of useful knowledge is divided in small neighboring units. If an individual B is surrounded by neighbors A and C who can verify his work, and C is similarly surrounded by B and D and so on, the world of useful knowledge reaches an equilibrium in which science, as a whole, can be trusted even by those who are not themselves part of it. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. 216–22.

Rider, “Measure,” p. 115.

The triumph of Lavoisier's chemistry over its British opponents in the later 1790s is a good example. See Golinski, “Nicety.”

Heilbron, “Introductory Essay,” p. 9. These methods soon were applied to mundane purposes. An example is Dougharty, General Gauger. The first half or so of the book lays out arithmetic manipulations, starting from the basics.

Smeaton, Experimental Enquiry. Beighton's Table is reproduced in Desaguliers, Course of Experimental Philosophy, p. 535. Desaguliers remarked that “Mr. Beighton's table agreed with all the experiments made ever since 1717.” For more details on Beighton, a remarkable early example of the Industrial Enlightenment, see Stewart, Rise, pp. 242–51.

Desaguliers, Jewellers Accounts.

Playfair, The Commercial and Political Atlas. “As knowledge increases amongst mankind, and transactions multiply, it becomes more and more desirable to abbreviate and facilitate the modes of conveying information.” Cited by Headrick, When Information, p. 127. This text does not appear in the 1786 original edition. Playfair's book was concerned with economic data, not science and technology.

James Watt, Playfair's employer, advised him “that it might be proper to give in letter press the Tables from which the Charts have been constructed.” Cited by Spence, “Invention,” p. 78.

Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 357.

For an excellent discussion of the growing mobility of scientific and technological knowledge in the eighteenth century, see Inkster, “Mental Capital.”

Darnton, “Unity.” The idea of the Respublica Litteraria goes back to the late middle ages, and by the eighteenth century had extended to mechanical and technical knowledge. John R. Harris has noted that as early as the 1720s the development of the early steam engine was the center of intense interest in the European scientific community, and “international intelligence about the engine diffused with great speed, the speed of correspondence between the scientific luminaries of Europe of that period.” See Harris, Industrial Espionage, p. 296.

Robert Hooke taught himself Dutch to read Leeuwenhoek's famous letters on microscopy, and a century later John Smeaton taught himself French to be able to read the papers of French hydraulic theorists such as de Parcieux and traveled to the Netherlands to study their use of wind power firsthand.

Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 27. The movement of translations was symmetrical. In 1780 a French publisher published a whole bundle of Ouvrages sur l'économie politique et Rurale, traduit de l'Anglais including work by Arthur Young and John Arbuthnot (who had written an important work on ploughs). Bourde, Influence, p. 97. In agriculture, as Gillispie correctly points out, the impact of such information flows “beyond the circle of persons who wrote, printed and read the books,” was probably small. See Gillispie, Science … End of Old Regime, p. 367.

Schofield, Lunar Society, p. 378.

de Beer, Sciences, passim.

Burke, Social History, chap. 5.

Darnton, Business, p. 286.

Heilbron, “Introductory Essay,” p. 20, notes that Diderot and d'Alembert were but indolent in comparison with the massive (64 volumes) work published by J. H. Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon aller Wissenschafte und Künste, published 1732–1754.

Pannabecker points out that the plates in the Encyclopédie were designed by the highly skilled Louis-Jacques Goussier who eventually became a machine designer at the Conservatoire des arts et métiers in Paris. They were meant to popularize the rational systematization of the mechanical arts to facilitate technological progress. Pannabecker, “Diderot,” pp. 6–22, and “Representing Mechanical Arts.”

Broberg, “Broken Circle,” pp. 45–71.

The “Philosophical Transactions” published by the Royal Society and the “Histoire et Mémoires” published by the Académie Royale des Sciences were among the most influential publications of their time. They were routinely reported on in the wide-circulation Gentleman's Magazine and abridged, abstracted, and translated all over the Continent.

Cole and Watts, Handicrafts. Gillispie, Science … End of Old Regime, p. 344.

For instance, Jaubert, Dictionnaire Raisonné; Hall, New Royal Encyclopædia; and Society of Gentlemen, New and Complete Dictionary.

William Ellis's Modern Husbandman or Practice of Farming (1731) gave a month-by-month set of suggestions, much like Arthur Young's most successful book, The Farmer's Kalendar (1770). Summaries of this information often took the form of frequently updated dictionaries and compendia, such as Society of Gentlemen, Complete Farmer first published by the Society of Arts in 1766. Most of these writings were empirical or instructional in nature, but a few actually tried to provide the readers with some systematic analysis of the principles at work. One of those was Francis Home's Principles of Agriculture and Vegetation (1757). Some of the great private data collection projects of the time were Arthur Young's famed Tours of various parts of England and William Marshall's series on Rural Economy (Goddard, “Agricultural Literature”). They collected hundreds of observations on farm practice in Britain and the continent, although at times Young's conclusions were contrary to what his own data indicated. See Allen and Ó Gráda, “On the Road.” In France, Duhamel de Monceau's Traité de la Culture des Terres (1753) found a wide readership and was translated into English and published in 1759. His textbook Élements d'agriculture (1762) was also widely translated and reprinted. The French repaid the honor in 1801/02 by publishing an 18-volume translation of Arthur Young's works on agriculture and politics under the title Le Cultivateur Anglais.

Macquer, Dictionary of Chemistry. Originally printed in 1771, a fifth edition had already been published by 1777, indicating the success of the work.

Walkingame, Tutor's Assistant. By the end of the century, student guidebooks to the Tutor's Assistant had appeared. See Wallis, “Early Best-seller,” pp. 199–208. Walkingame included mathematical methods employed by glaziers, painters, plasterers, and bricklayers, pointing to the applied and pragmatic nature of the mathematics he taught.

This point was first made by Edward Zilsel in 1942, who placed the beginning of this movement in the middle of the sixteenth century. Although this may be too early for the movement to have much economic effect, the insight that technological progress occurs when intellectuals communicate with producers is central to its historical explanation. Compare Zilsel, “Sociological Roots of Science,” pp. 544–60. For a recent restatement, see Jacob, Scientific Culture.

Thomas Sprat recognized this in the 1660s when he wrote that no New Atlantis (Bacon's ideal scientific community) was possible unless “Mechanick Labourers shall have Philosophical heads; or the Philosophers shall have Mechanical hands.” See Sprat, History, p. 397. In its early days, the Royal Society invested heavily in the study of crafts and technology and commissioned a History of Trades, but this effort in the end failed. Compare Hunter, Establishing the New Science.

Humphry Davy felt in 1802 that “in consequence of the multiplication of the means of instruction, the man of science and the manufacturer are daily becoming more assimilated to each other.” Davy, Discourse, vol. 2, p. 321. Not all agreed at the time: William Thompson, Count Rumford, noted in 1799 that “there are no two classes of men in society that are more distinct, or that are more separated from each other by a more marked line, than philosophers and those who are engaged in arts and manufactures” and that this prevented “all connection and intercourse between them.” He expressed hope that the Royal Institution he helped found in 1799 would “facilitate and consolidate” the union between science and art and to direct “their united efforts to the improvement of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, and to the increase of domestic comfort.” See Thompson, Complete Works, pp. 743–45.

Wood, “Science,” p. 109.

Outram, Enlightenment, p. 60.

Oxford and Cambridge have been given little credit for teaching much of value to a vibrant economy, and their enrollments declined in the eighteenth century. Adam Smith in a famous sentence remarked sarcastically that at Oxford the dons had “long ago given up all pretence of teaching,” and Priestley compared them to “pools of stagnant water.” There were a few exceptions, especially in Cambridge where Richard Watson was “chiefly concerned with manufacturing processes rather than with the advancement of pure science” and John Hadley who showed a “noticeable interest in industrial-chemical processes” (Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology, pp. 168, 36). His colleague in Magdalene College, John Rowning, was a mathematician who wrote a popular Compendious System of Natural Philosophy that went through seven editions between 1735 and 1772. Birse has collected data that show that out of 498 applied scientists and engineers born between 1700 and 1850, 91 were educated in Scotland, 50 at Oxbridge, and 329 (about two-thirds) had no university education at all. See Birse, Engineering, p. 16. Over the eighteenth century, moreover, the number of engineers and applied scientists who received a formal institutionalized education declined.

Schofield, Lunar Society, p. 195.

Inkster, “Social Context,” pp. 277–307.

Roderick and Stephens, Education, pp. 54–60.

Of the itinerant lecturers, the most famous was John T. Desaguliers. Desaguliers, a leading proponent of Newton with an international reputation (he lectured in the Netherlands) received a royal pension of £70 per annum as well as a variety of patents, fees, and prizes. His Course of Mechanical and Experimental Philosophy (1724) was based on his hugely popular lectures on science and technology. William Whiston, one of Newton's most distinguished proponents and successor at Cambridge “entertained his provincial listeners with combinations of scientific subjects and Providence and the Millennium.” James Jurin, master of the Newcastle Grammar School, gave courses catering to the local gentlemen concerned with collieries and lead-mines. (See Stewart, Rise, p. 147). Other British lecturers of note were Peter Shaw, a chemist and physician, the instrument maker Benjamin Martin, Stephen Demainbray who lectured both in France and England and later became Superintendent of the King's Observatory at Kew, and the Reverend Richard Watson at Cambridge whose lectures on Chemistry in the 1760s were so successful that he drew a patronage of £100 for his impoverished chair. In France the premier lecturer and scientific celebrity of his time was Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet, whose fame rests on early public experiments with electricity (he once passed an electrical charge from a Leyden jar through a row of Carthusian monks more than a mile long). Nollet also trained and encouraged a number of his disciples as lecturers, as well as some of the most celebrated scientists of his age, such as Lavoisier and Monge. Similarly, Guillaume-François Rouelle's lectures on chemistry in the Jardin du roi drew an audience that included Rousseau, Diderot, and even Lavoisier himself. Compare Stewart, “Laboratory.” In Napoleonic France, the “best scientific minds of the day” were lecturing to the public about steam engines, and it became common to regard some scientific training as a natural prelude for entrepreneurial activity (Jacob, “Putting Science”).

For a magisterial survey, see Musson and Robinson, Science, pp. 87–189.

In the closing years of the seventeenth century, the Marine Coffee House in Birchin Lane behind the Royal Exchange in London was the first location for an organized set of lectures on mathematics given by the Reverend John Harris, to be followed by a series on experimental philosophy. See Stewart, “Selling of Newton,” p. 180. Among the best-known private eighteenth-century Paris salons were those of Mme de Tencin and Mme l'Espinasse.

Levere and Turner, Discussing Chemistry. Its membership reads like a veritable list of the “Who's who” of the British Industrial Enlightenment of the 1780s. Needless to say, many of these lecturers structured their lectures around topics that had no immediate or even remote applicability, presented theories that were bogus even by the standards of the time, and at times they showed a bias toward the flashy and dramatic experiment over the strictly useful. Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy,” pp. 1–43. Desaguliers himself admitted that “a great many persons get a considerable knowledge of Natural Philosophy by way of amusement” (cited by Schaffer, “Machine Philosophy,” p. 159). But as Stewart (“Laboratory,” p. 8) remarks, “a sense of practical consequence was not immediately excluded by the spectacular.”

On the significance of Masonic Lodges, see Jacob, Living the Enlightenment; and Im Hoff, Enlightenment, pp. 139–45.

Elliott, “Birth,” p. 96, apparently influenced by notions of the “Habermasean public sphere,” thinks that their attractiveness came from their being intellectually challenging, morally uplifting, and that they enhanced polite education while not being socially disruptive and offering no threat to peace and stability. This would equally apply to lectures on classical sculpture or cooking classes.

This is most eloquently expressed by Uglow, Lunar Men. See also the classic Schofield, Lunar Society.

In 1776 Josiah Wedgwood consulted his fellow Lunar Society member, the chemist James Keir, on matters of heating vitreous substances, and together they discovered a way to reduce the veins and streaks that disfigured glass at the time. See Schofield, Lunar Society, p. 172. Henry Cort, whose invention of the puddling and rolling process was no less central than Watt's separate condenser, also consulted Joseph Black during his work. Compare Clow and Clow, Chemical Revolution.

Its membership included most of the distinguished scientists of France in the eighteenth century including d'Alembert, Buffon, Clairaut, Condorcet, Fontenelle, Laplace, Lavoisier, and Reaumur. It published the most prestigious and substantive scientific series of the century in its annual proceedings Histoire et Memoires and sponsored scientific prize contests such as the Meslay prizes. It recognized achievement and rewarded success for individual discoveries and tried to enhance the social status of scientists by granting salaries and pensions. A broad range of scientific disciplines were covered, with mathematics and astronomy well represented, and botany and medicine not less prominent.

McClellan, “Academie Royale des Sciences,” p. 547.

Hilaire-Pérez, L'invention technique, pp. 37, 50. Gillespie, Science … End of Old Regime, pp. 81–99, 461–63.

For a recent statement, see Jacob and Stewart, Practical Matter, p. 119.

The first of these was established in Haarlem in 1752, and within a few decades the phenomenon spread (much as in England) to the provincial towns. The Scientific Society of Rotterdam known oddly as the Batavic Association for Experimental Philosophy was the most applied of all, and advocated the use of steam engines (which were purchased in the 1770s but without success). The Amsterdam Society, known as Felix Meritis, carried out experiments in physics and chemistry. These societies stimulated interest in physical and experimental sciences in the Netherlands, and they organized prize-essay contests on useful applications of natural philosophy. A physicist named Benjamin Bosma for decades gave lectures on mathematics, geography, and applied physics in Amsterdam. A Dutch Society of Chemistry founded in the early 1790s helped to convert the Dutch to the new chemistry proposed by Lavoisier (see Snelders, “Professors”). The Dutch high schools, known as Athenea, taught mathematics, physics, astronomy, and at times counted distinguished scientists among their staff.

Lowood, Patriotism, pp. 26–27.

Lowood, Patriotism, has argued that the German local societies were predominantly private institutions, unlike state-controlled academies, which enabled them to be more open, with few conditions of entry, unlike the selective, elitist academies. They broke down social barriers, for the established structures of Old Regime society might impede useful work requiring a mixed contribution from the membership of practical experience, scientific knowledge, and political power. Unlike the more scientifically inclined academies, they were open to a wide circle of occupations, including farmers, peasants, artisans, craftsmen, foresters, and gardeners, and attempted to improve the productivity of these activities. Prizes rewarded tangible accomplishments, primarily in the agricultural or technical spheres. Unlike earlier academies, their goal was not to advance learning, but rather to apply useful results of human knowledge, discovery, and invention to practical and civic life.

The lectures given by Humphry Davy were so popular that the carriages that brought his audience to hear him so clogged up Albermarle Street in London that it was turned into the first one-way street of the city.

Allan, “Society,” pp. 434–52.

For a good summary see McClellan, “Learned Societies,” pp. 371–77. See also the six entries under “academies” in id., vol. 1, pp. 4–17.

The first agricultural “improvement society” in Britain was the Scottish Honorable Society of Improvers of the Knowledge of Agriculture (founded in 1723 and disbanded in 1745 after the rebellion). Ireland followed suit in 1731 with the Dublin Society established “to promote the development of agriculture, arts, science and industry in Ireland.” The 1750s and 1760s witnessed the founding of such agricultural societies as the Scottish Gordon's Mill Farming Club, founded in 1758, by Thomas Gordon of Aberdeen University on the idea that “agriculture ought to be considered as a noble & important branch of natural Philosophy.” The Continent was not far behind. The idea of agricultural progress on the eighteenth-century Continent was personified in the work of Duhamel du Monceau, a French agronome and “specialist in things English” and in that of the German Albrecht Thaer. The Florence Accademia dei Georgofili (1753) and the Société d'Agriculture, de Commerce et des Arts de Bretagne (1757) in Rennes were followed by the Académie d'Agriculture de la France (1761), the Royal Danish agricultural society (1769) and many others. Terms such as “useful knowledge” start cropping up increasingly after 1750, in the names and charters of institutions such as the Akademie Gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt and the British Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (both founded in 1754).

Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 36.

This was well expressed by Eric Jones 20 years ago: “Much of the activity of the science subculture, the club meetings, the flooding exchange of information by mail, fell by the wayside as far as material gain was concerned at the hands of tired or dilettantish or unlucky individuals … Nevertheless there was so very much activity … that some seeds from hobby science and technological curiosity were almost certain not to fall on stony ground.” Jones, “Subculture,” p. 877.

Simon and Sullivan, “Population Size,” pp. 21–44. They find the growth of publications and patenting to depend on population size and the relative price of food products. The problem of course is that if the relative price of agricultural goods explains publication of tracts on farming technology, how can we explain the increase of works in chemistry, mechanics, and mathematics?

For details on their careers, see Jacob and Stewart, Practical Matter, pp. 61–92

Stewart, “Selling,” p. 181.

Such markets often concerned technical consultants such as the great John Smeaton and the “Smeatonian” engineers that followed his example. Soho-trained engineers traveled widely through Britain, dispensing expertise. The clock- and instrument maker John Whitehurst, a charter member of the Lunar Society, consulted for every major industrial undertaking in Derbyshire, where his skills in pneumatics, mechanics, and hydraulics were in great demand; Joseph Priestley worked as a paid consultant for his fellow “lunatics” Wedgwood and Boulton. See Elliott, “Birth,” p. 83. Schofield, Lunar Society, pp. 22, 201. Another striking example is the emergence of so-called coal viewers who advised coal mine owners on the optimal location and structure of coal mines, the use of equipment, and similar specific issues. Sidney Pollard recounts that these consultants were often called to check on one another, which clearly enhanced their credibility, and that they were generally the “fountain-head” of managerial and engineering talent in the engineering industry. Pollard, Genesis, p. 153.

Allan, William Shipley, p. 192.

Lettsom, Natural History. Lettsom was only one of many who translated experimental and empirical data about tea into positive medical recommendations. See MacFarlane, Savage Wars, pp. 146–47.

Nicholson was also a patent agent, representing other inventors. Around 1800 he ran a “scientific establishment for pupils” on London's Soho square. The school's advertisement announced that “this institution affords a degree of practical knowledge of the sciences which is seldom acquired in the early part of life,” and promised to deliver weekly lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry “illustrated by frequent exhibition and explanations of the tools, processes and operations of the useful arts and common operations of society.”

In it, leading scientists including John Dalton, Berzelius, Davy, Rumford, and George Cayley communicated their findings and opinions. Yet it also contained essays on highly practical matters, such as an “Easy Way of churning Butter” or a “Description of a new Lamp upon M. Argand's Principle.”

His “Essay on Phlogiston” was translated by none other than Mme. Lavoisier herself, with adverse commentaries appended by her husband, as well as Berthollet, Monge, and Morveau. In 1791 Kirwan admitted his conversion to the antiphlogistonist position. Lever and Turner, Discussing Chemistry, passim. See also Reilly and O'Flynn, “Richard Kirwan,” pp. 298–319.

Drayton, Nature's Government, chap. 4. Gascoigne, Joseph Banks, passim.

Porter, Creation, p. 149.

For details see Bourde, Agronomie, pp. 253–76, 313–68. Gillispie, who also studied Duhamel in some detail summarized his intellectual persona: “his hallmark was neither style nor wit but usefulness.” Condorcet, in his eulogy, wrote of him that in his writings he expected little prior knowledge of his readers and composed his works, not for scientists but for persons who would put what they had learned to use. See Gillispie, Science … End of Old Regime, p. 338.

McClellan, “Scientific Journals,” pp. 45–46. Gillispie, Science … End of Old Regime, p. 188.

Jacob, “Putting Science to Work.” An excellent survey of Chaptal's career and importance is contained in Horn and Jacob, “Jean-Antoine Chaptal,” pp. 671–98. See also Gillispie, Science … Napoleonic Years, pp. 611–34.

The paper established beyond any doubt the chemical differences between cast iron, steel, and wrought iron, and attributed the differences in physical properties to differences in carbon content without the use of phlogiston. See Gillispie, Science … End of Old Regime, pp. 438–44.

de la Plombanie, La France Agricole, pp. 342–462. In Bourde's assessment, he combined beauty with truth in his description and depiction of these tools.

Smith, Business, characterizes his career as “halfway between the world of artisans and that of scholars, he became an intermediary—both physical and intellectual—between them” (p. 5, see also pp. 71–77).

Kranakis, “Hybrid Careers,” pp. 177–204. One of her examples is the French engineer and mathematician Claude-Louis Navier (1785–1836), who, among others, used the recently developed Fourier analysis to analyze the vibration in suspension bridges, and did pioneering work in fluid dynamics for which he is still famous. His work, and that of other polytechniciens, was highly abstract and mathematical, and of long-term rather than immediate applicability.

As I have argued elsewhere, the adoption of the scientific method by inventors and engineers in the eighteenth century was central to the acceleration of technological progress. See Mokyr, Gifts, pp. 36–38.

Richard Kirwan was “philosophically indifferent to money,” and William Nicholson was “continually occupied in useful work but failed to derive any material advantages from his labour.” (Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 11, p. 229; vol. 14, p. 475. Not all scientists eschewed such profits: the brilliant Scottish aristocrat Archibald Cochrane (Earl of Dundonald) made a huge effort to render the coal tar process he patented profitable, but failed and ended up losing his fortune.

Dickinson and Jenkins, James Watt, p. 16.

Hills explains that Black's theory of latent heat helped Watt compute the optimal amount of water to be injected without cooling the cylinder too much. More interesting, however, was his reliance on William Cullen's finding that in a vacuum, water would boil at much lower, even tepid temperatures, releasing steam that would ruin the vacuum in a cylinder. In some sense that piece of propositional knowledge was essential to his realization that he needed a separate condenser. Hills, Power, p. 53.

Richard Trevithick, the Cornish inventor of the high pressure engine, posed sharp questions to his scientist acquaintance Davies Gilbert (later President of the Royal Society), and received answers that supported and encouraged his work. See Burton, Richard Trevithick, pp. 59–60.

Thermodynamics not only made essential contributions to the design of steam engines, such as pointing to the advantages of compounding and steam-jacketing, but also created an entirely new way of thinking about what thermal efficiency was and how to measure it. Most important, the widening of the understanding of power technology in this direction pointed to what could not be done, for example the realization that John Ericsson's caloric engine (1853) based on the idea that energy could be “regenerated” (that is, used over and over again) was impossible. See Bryant, “Role.”

Stewart, “Meaning.”

In Leeds, for instance, both the flax-spinner John Marshall and the woolen manufacturer Benjamin Gott had wide-ranging interests in hydraulics, bleaching, mechanics, and related topics. In Manchester, M'Connell and Kennedy, one of the most successful early cotton manufacturers were highly technologically “literate” and closely involved with the Manchester Philosophical and Literary society.

Cohen, “Causes.” In a similar vein, Mark Elvin, “Some Reflections,” p. 58, notes whereas Giambattista Dellaporta, who dominated the Accademia dei Lincei in its early days, can be compared to a Chinese intellectual of that time, he was replaced by Galileo, who cannot.

As J. H. Plumb has noted, “Too much attention … is paid to the intellectual giants, too little to their social acceptance. Ideas acquire dynamism when they become social attitudes, and this was happening in England,” compare Plumb, “Reason,” p. 24.

Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p. 48.

Reprinted in Jacob, Enlightenment, p. 104. Voltaire himself did as much as anyone to popularize Newton's work on the Continent, including his Elémens. An interesting case in this regard is the career of Voltaire's companion, the Marquise de Châtelet (1706–1749), one of the most remarkable female Enlightenment figures, who published one of the more user-friendly translations of Newton's work into French. In a touching preface, Voltaire dedicated his work to this “vaste et puisante génie, Minerve de la France, immortelle Emilie, disciple de Neuton & de la Verité.”

Cassirer, Philosophy, pp. 51–56.

Thus Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the biologist and himself a charter member of the Lunar Society and an archetypical member of the British Industrial Enlightenment, complained in 1800 that Agriculture and Gardening had remained only Arts without a true theory to connect them. For details about Darwin, see especially McNeil, Under the Banner; and Uglow, Lunar Men.

George Campbell, an important representative of the Scottish Enlightenment noted that “All art [including mechanical art or technology] is founded in science, and practical skills lack complete beauty and utility when they do not originate in knowledge” (cited by Spadafora, Idea, p. 31).

Heilbron, “Introductory Essay,” p. 5. This tradition, of course, goes back in a sense to Newton and is central to the methodologies of mid-eighteenth-century chemists such as William Cullen and Joseph Black, who insisted on separating empirical knowledge and theoretical explanation—and often did little of the latter.

Lundgren, “Changing Role,” pp. 263–64.

See especially Headrick, When Information, pp. 142–43. Daniel Roche (France, pp. 574–75) notes that “if the Encyclopédie was able to reach nearly all of society (although … peasants and most of the urban poor had access to the work only indirectly), it was because the project was broadly conceived as a work of popularization, of useful diffusion of knowledge.” The cheaper versions of the Diderot-d'Alembert masterpiece, printed in Switzerland, sold extremely well; the Geneva (quarto) editions sold around 8,000 copies and the Lausanne (octavo) editions as many as 6,000.

See Jacob, “Putting Science.”

Hartley, a deeply religious man, made this point in the context of the diffusion of Christian beliefs, but then added that “the great increase in knowledge, literary and philosophical, which has been made in this and the two last centuries … must contribute to promote every great truth … the coincidence of the three remarkable events, of the reformation, the invention of printing, and the restoration of letters … deserves particular notice here.” See Hartley, Observations, p. 528.

The best summary of this aspect of the Industrial Enlightenment was given by Diderot in his widely quoted article on “Arts” in the Encyclopédie: “We need a man to rise in the academies and go down to the workshops and gather material about the [mechanical] arts to be set out in a book that will persuade the artisans to read, philosophers to think along useful lines, and the great to make at least some worthwhile use of their authority and wealth.”

A few quantitative assessments exist, though it is not clear how they were arrived at. Thus Richard Herr has estimated that less than 1 percent of the Spanish population “welcomed” the Enlightenment, a tenth as many as in France. See Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, pp. 198–200.

For a devastating rebuttal to the first of these two statements, see Porter, Creation. For a qualification of the latter, see Mokyr, “Long-term Economic Growth.”

Kors, ed., Encyclopedia. The procedure followed the extensive index in vol. 4. If an essay on a general topic mentioned a country or region, we counted the lines that discussed that area only. If an article was devoted to a geographical concept (e.g., “Scandinavia” in vol. 4, pp. 20–25) we counted all the lines in that article. The article on “academies” includes a subheading on “Scandinavia” (vol. 1, pp. 18–19) which was then counted in its entirety. The article on “Education, reform” (vol. 1, p. 385) has a three line sentence that mentions Scandinavia, as well as France, England, and Scotland; those three lines were then entered for all four countries.

Of the nine members of the board of editors, six are affiliated with universities in the United States, one in Canada, one in Ireland, and one in France. The composition of the board, however, cannot be accused of anti-French bias, as two of its American members are noted experts on eighteenth-century France and the French revolution. In that limited sense it is a more unbiased source to study the spread of the enlightenment than Delon, ed., Encyclopedia, which is written by a preponderant majority of French scholars. The Delon volumes, in any case, did not have an index that was useful for our purpose, so no direct comparison could be made.

Some of these towns reflect topics of classical rather than eighteenth-century interest, e.g., the 174 lines devoted to Pompeii and Herculaneum or the 31 devoted to Sparta. Neither of those were included.

See especially McClellan, “Scientific Journals.”

Kronick, Scientific and Technical Periodicals and History

At times, periodical titles could be misleading. The Ladies' Diary, edited by the engineer, surveyor, and mathematician Henry Beighton, was full of essays on mathematical and physical topics including his famous 1718 table on the capacity of the Newcomen engine cited previously. The Gentleman's Diary, edited by Thomas Peat between 1756 and 1780, was similarly largely devoted to the solution of mathematical problems See Musson and Robinson, Science, p. 47; and Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 15, p. 625.

The analysis here differs somewhat from the one Kronick conducts himself in that I make no distinction between “substantive” journals, “society proceedings,” and journals of abstracts and reviews. My main purpose here is to illustrate the decline in access costs, and journals that published abstracts and reviews served a similar purpose.

Kronick, History, p. 239.

Gascoigne's sample of the most important scientists born in the period 1665–1780 shows that a full 65 percent of them published in scientific journals, though there is no real way of telling whether such journals were their main channel of communication. The percentages rises steeply over time: for scientists born in 1600–1609 it is 17 percent, for those born in 1700–1709 it is 65 percent and for those born in 1770–1779 it is 85 percent. These statistics entirely exclude engineering, medical, and agricultural journals. See Gascoigne, Historical Catalogue, p. 92.

This is pointed out by Kronick, History, pp. 86–87. Elsewhere (p. 160) he notes that in Germany “the lack of political centralization was reflected in the large number of regional journals, every intellectual center or University town in Germany had its own journal of learned and scholarly news.”

http://www.scholarly-societies.org. The database was put together by its editor Jim Parrott. I am grateful to Mr. Parrott for his advice and assistance.

Among those are Lowood, Patriotism; McClellan, Science Reorganized; Daniel Roche, Le Siècle des Lumières; and Cochrane, Tradition.

A good example is the Societas Disputatoria Medica Haunienis (Medical Debating Society of Copenhagen), founded in 1785 as the result of a disagreement between two Danish physicians. It folded two years later.