How Did Science Drive the Industrial Revolution?
Precision instruments, the culture of measurement, the workshops, the steam engine, the textile machinery, and the chemical industries — the long bridge from natural philosophy to industry.
How Did Science Drive the Industrial Revolution?
The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the late eighteenth century and spread across Europe and North America in the nineteenth, transformed the European economy from an agricultural to an industrial basis, multiplied per-capita output by an order of magnitude, and produced a new social class — the industrial working class — that would become one of the principal actors of modern history. The question of how the new science of the seventeenth century contributed to that transformation is one of the central questions in the history of technology. The answer, in short, is that the Scientific Revolution created the conceptual, instrumental, institutional, and cultural conditions without which the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible, but the relationship was indirect, gradual, and mediated by a wide range of practical figures who stood between the natural philosopher and the factory floor. This article follows the main lines of that long bridge. For a broader account of the relationship between science and industry, see Technology, Industry, and the Useful Sciences. For the catalogue of key inventions produced by the Scientific Revolution, see What Inventions Came From the Scientific Revolution?. And for the broader social impact of the revolution, see The Impact of the Scientific Revolution on Society.
The Standard View and Its Critics
The standard view of the relationship between the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution was, for most of the twentieth century, a heroic one. The natural philosophers of the seventeenth century — Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Hooke — were presented as the intellectual ancestors of the industrialists of the late eighteenth, and the steam engine, the textile machinery, and the chemical industries were presented as the practical applications of the new science. The standard view was popularized in textbooks and popular histories, and it shaped the way generations of students understood the history of technology. The standard view came under sustained criticism from historians of technology in the second half of the twentieth century. The critics, led by scholars such as John U. Nef, A. E. Musson, and Eric Robinson, argued that the Industrial Revolution was primarily the work of practical craftsmen and entrepreneurs, with little direct contact with the world of natural philosophy. The new technologies, in this view, were developed in workshops, mines, and factories, by men with practical training and practical problems, not by natural philosophers in their studies. The standard view, the critics argued, was a Whiggish distortion that read the history of the Industrial Revolution backward through the lens of modern science. The current view is a more nuanced one. The critics were right that the Industrial Revolution was primarily the work of practical craftsmen and entrepreneurs. But the craftsmen and entrepreneurs were working in a culture that had been transformed by the Scientific Revolution, and they were using instruments, methods, and conceptual resources that were the direct legacy of the new science. The bridge from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution was a long one, and it was built by many hands, but it was a real bridge.
The Diffusion of Precision Instruments
The most direct way in which the Scientific Revolution contributed to the Industrial Revolution was through the diffusion of precision instruments. The telescope, the microscope, the barometer, the air pump, the pendulum clock, the thermoscope, and the calculating machine were all products of the seventeenth-century natural philosophy, and they were all produced in workshops that developed new techniques for the grinding, cutting, polishing, and assembly of precision components. The workshops that produced these instruments — the lens-grinders of Middelburg, the clockmakers of London, the instrument makers of Nuremberg — were the training grounds of the precision-engineering industry of the nineteenth century. The workshop skills developed for the production of scientific instruments were directly transferable to other industries. The techniques for the production of accurate gears, developed for clockmaking, were directly applicable to the production of textile machinery. The techniques for the production of accurate screws, developed for the adjustment of telescopes and microscopes, were directly applicable to the production of lathes and other machine tools. The techniques for the production of accurate scales and weights, developed for the weighing of chemicals in the new chemistry, were directly applicable to the standardization of industrial production. The precision-instrument industry, in other words, was the cradle of the modern engineering industry. The case of James Watt is a good illustration. Watt was trained as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, and he developed the separate condenser of his steam engine using the precision-instrument techniques he had learned in the university workshop. The Boulton & Watt works in Soho, near Birmingham, was one of the first industrial firms to apply the techniques of the precision-instrument industry to the production of large-scale machinery. The success of the Soho works depended on the precision of the components it produced, and that precision in turn depended on the workshop skills that Watt had brought from the Glasgow instrument shop.
The Culture of Measurement
The Scientific Revolution established a culture of measurement that was a necessary condition for the Industrial Revolution. In the medieval and early modern periods, measurement was a local and inconsistent affair, with different units of length, mass, and time in use in different towns and trades. The Scientific Revolution established standardized units and standardized procedures for the comparison and calibration of instruments. The growth of the metric system in revolutionary France, explicitly modeled on the methods of the new natural philosophy, was the culmination of a long process by which the new science established a uniform culture of measurement. The culture of measurement extended to the calibration of instruments, the standardization of procedures, the publication of tables, and the comparison of observations made by different observers. The Royal Society in London, from the 1660s onward, set new standards for the precision and reproducibility of experimental work. The Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1665, published detailed accounts of experimental procedures, so that the work could be replicated and verified. The establishment of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1675, with the specific aim of improving navigation, was a major step in the growth of a culture of measurement on an industrial scale. The practical consequences of the culture of measurement were enormous. The standardization of parts, the calibration of instruments, the use of statistical quality control, the growth of interchangeable manufacturing — all of these depended on the culture of measurement that the Scientific Revolution had established. The Industrial Revolution, in its mature form, was a measured revolution. The world of measurement and standardization that the new science had made possible was a necessary condition for the world of mass production and global trade.
The Role of Natural Philosophy in the Workshops
The natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not, as a rule, directly involved in industrial production. But many of them were actively engaged with the practical problems of the workshops, mines, and factories. The Royal Society, in its early years, established committees on agriculture, on mining, on navigation, and on the improvement of manufactures, and it served as a clearinghouse for practical information from across Europe. The Académie des Sciences, in its reformed program of the 1690s, was organized into working groups on the practical problems of the French state. The German mining academies, the Italian scientific societies, and the Dutch and English provincial academies all played similar roles. The natural philosophers contributed to industrial production in several ways. They provided the theoretical understanding on which the new technologies depended — the principles of mechanics, of heat, of chemistry, of electricity. They provided the mathematical analysis on which the design of machines, the calculation of stresses, and the optimization of processes depended. They provided the experimental methods on which the testing of new materials, the calibration of instruments, and the validation of new processes depended. And they provided the trained personnel — the chemists, the engineers, the mathematicians, the instrument makers — on which the new industries depended. The case of the steam engine is again illustrative. The growth of the Newcomen engine, in 1712, was the work of an ironmonger with a practical problem (the drainage of the Cornish tin mines) and a theoretical understanding of atmospheric pressure. The growth of the Watt engine, in the 1760s and 1770s, was the work of an instrument maker with a detailed understanding of the physics of heat. The growth of the high-pressure engine, by Richard Trevithick and others in the early nineteenth century, was the work of engineers with a detailed understanding of the thermodynamics of steam. Each step in the growth of the steam engine depended on the application of theoretical knowledge to practical problems, and that theoretical knowledge was the direct legacy of the Scientific Revolution.
The Steam Engine
The steam engine is the most famous case of the long bridge from natural philosophy to industry. The principle of the engine — that the pressure of steam can be used to do mechanical work — was understood in principle from the time of the Newcomen engine of 1712, but the practical development of the engine depended on a detailed understanding of the physics of steam, of the properties of materials at high temperatures, and of the geometry of cylinders and pistons. The new physics, established by Galileo, Torricelli, Boyle, Hooke, Newton, and their successors, provided the conceptual basis for the growth of the steam engine. The principle of atmospheric pressure, established by Torricelli and his successors, was the principle on which the Newcomen engine operated. The laws of motion, established by Newton, were the laws on which the dynamics of the engine depended — and the details of those laws, particularly Newton’s second law and the law of action and reaction, are summarized in Newton’s Three Laws. The study of heat, developed in the eighteenth century by Black, Lavoisier, and Watt himself, was the science that made possible the design of efficient steam engines. The study of the strength of materials, developed by Galileo, Hooke, Mariotte, and Coulomb, was the science that made possible the design of boilers and pistons that would not fail catastrophically under pressure. The growth of the Watt engine, with its separate condenser, its double-acting cylinder, and its centrifugal governor, was the work of an inventor who had absorbed the reformed natural philosophy and applied it systematically to the practical problems of the engine. Watt, trained as an instrument maker, had read his Newton and his chemistry, and he was in regular correspondence with the leading natural philosophers of his day. The Watt engine, in other words, was not the work of a craftsman working in isolation from natural philosophy; it was the work of a scientifically trained inventor working at the intersection of theory and practice.
The Textile Machinery
The textile machinery of the Industrial Revolution — the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the water frame, the mule, the power loom — was developed primarily by practical craftsmen with little formal contact with natural philosophy. But the growth of the textile machinery depended on several elements of the experimental science: the use of mathematical analysis in the design of machines, the use of precision-instrument techniques in the production of components, and the use of experimental methods in the testing of new designs. The case of the spinning jenny, invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, illustrates the limited but real connection. Hargreaves was a weaver with no formal scientific training, but he had absorbed the methods of the new natural philosophy through the culture in which he lived. The spinning jenny was not a straightforward application of a scientific principle, but it was the work of an inventor who had been shaped by the culture of the new philosophy of nature. The case of the water frame, invented by Richard Arkwright in 1769, is similar. The water frame was designed for production in a factory, and its design required the use of mathematical analysis to determine the speeds and tensions of the various components. The analytical work was done by Arkwright and his associates, not by a natural philosopher, but it was the kind of analysis that the new natural philosophy had made available. The case of the power loom, developed by Edmund Cartwright in 1785, is more complex. Cartwright was a clergyman and a man of letters, with no formal training in engineering. He was, however, familiar with the methods of the new natural philosophy, and he designed the power loom using the principles of mechanics that he had read in his Newton. The power loom, in other words, was designed by a man who had no practical training in engineering but who had absorbed the conceptual resources of the new learning.
The Chemical Industries
The chemical industries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — the alkali industry, the bleaching industry, the sulfuric acid industry, the dye industry, the gas-lighting industry — were the first industries to be developed in a systematic way on the basis of the new chemistry. The Lavoisierian revolution in chemistry, which replaced the phlogiston theory with the oxygen theory of combustion, was the chemical equivalent of the Newtonian revolution in physics, and it made possible the systematic development of applied chemistry. The first major industrial chemical process, the Leblanc process for the production of soda ash (1791), was developed by Nicolas Leblanc on the basis of the new chemistry. The chlorine bleaching process, developed by Berthollet in 1786 and applied industrially by 1799, was similarly based on the new chemistry. The contact process for sulfuric acid, developed by Peregrine Phillips in 1831, was another application of the new chemistry. The first research-based pharmaceutical firms, established in the mid-nineteenth century, were the culmination of the long development of applied chemistry. By the late nineteenth century, applied chemistry had become one of the principal industries of Europe, and it rested firmly on the foundation of the Scientific Revolution.
The Cultural Shift
The Scientific Revolution produced a cultural shift that was at least as important as any of its technical contributions. The shift was from a culture that valued the contemplative over the practical, the eternal over the temporal, the celestial over the terrestrial, to a culture that valued the useful, the productive, the practical, and the experimental. The shift was slow, contested, and incomplete, but it was real, and it was one of the principal drivers of the Industrial Revolution. The cultural shift was most visible in the new value attached to the “useful arts” — the arts of manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and trade. In the medieval and early modern periods, these arts were the work of the lower classes, and they were ranked below the contemplative life of the philosopher and the theologian. By the late eighteenth century, they were being celebrated as the foundations of national prosperity, and the men who practiced them were being celebrated as the heroes of the new industrial age. The celebration of the useful arts was one of the principal themes of the Enlightenment, and it was one of the principal drivers of the Industrial Revolution.
The Long-Term Legacy
The long-term legacy of the Scientific Revolution, in its industrial dimension, was the establishment of a culture in which the systematic application of natural knowledge to the production of useful goods was the norm rather than the exception. The Industrial Revolution, in its mature form, was the application of this norm to the major industries of the European economy. The application was not a single event; it was a long process, in which the seventeenth-century science, the new instruments, the new institutions, and the new cultural values gradually displaced the old. The story is told in Technology, Industry, and the Useful Sciences. The catalogue of the key inventions is given in What Inventions Came From the Scientific Revolution?. And the broader social impact of the revolution is set out in The Impact of the Scientific Revolution on Society.