The Academic Study of the History of Technology

Had it been solely a matter of technological and/or scientific genius it seems probable that industrial revolution would first have occurred in (politically) revolutionary France which had an abundance of first rate engineers trained by and associated with the École Polytechnique.

Prony Girard , “Report on a Memoir of M. Burdin entitled ‘Hydraulic turbines, or high speed rotative machines’”, Annales de chimie et de physique , xxvi (1824) 207.

de Borda Chevalier , “Memoir on water-wheels”, Histoire et mémoires de l'Académie Royale des Sciences (1767), pp. 149, 270.

For a rough indication of the failure rate see the excellent Abridgments of specifications of patents and inventions . The volumes relating to steam engines (London, 1871), hydraulics (London, 1874) and air, gas and other motive engines (London, 1873) are particularly interesting.

Scheele C. W. , Treatise on air and fire (1777). Printed with his collected papers and translated by Dobbin L. (London, 1931).

See, for example, Lynn White Jr. , Medieval technics and social change (Oxford, 1964), Keller A. G. , A theatre of machines (London, 1964) and the relevant chapters of Crombie's A. C. Augustine to Galileo , 2nd ed., 2 vols (London, 1961).

To be seen in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

To be seen at the Science Museum, South Kensington.

It is a recurrent theme in his Technics and civilization (London, 1962 edition).

See Stillman Drake's notes to Galileo , On motion and On mechanics , translated by Drabkin I. E. Stillman Drake (Wisconsin, 1960).

Cardwell D. S. L. , “Some factors in the early development of the concepts of power, work and energy”, British journal for the history of science , iii (1967) 209–44.

von Guericke Otto , Experimenta nova Magdeburgica (Amsterdam, 1672; repr. Aalen, 1962).

Lynn White Jr ., argues (in Carlo L. Golino (ed.)), Galileo reappraised (Berkeley, 1966), 107–8) that because we know very little about Newcomen we cannot assume that he knew of atmospheric pressure and that therefore, failing further evidence, we must conclude that his invention of the atmospheric engine was purely empirical and independent of contemporary science. But would it not have been an extraordinary coincidence if Newcomen had invented such an engine empirically just after Huygens, Hautefeuille, Papin and Savery had all, with varying degrees of success, attempted to make one in the light of their knowledge of atmospheric pressure? Also Professor White is wrong when he wrotes that Newcomen's invention of the ‘snifting’ value could not have been based on science “because scientists of the day were not aware that air dissolves in water”. On the contrary, this had been established by Boyle (1670), Mayow (1673) and James Bernoulli (1690); see Partington J. R. , A history of chemistry , ii (London, 1962), pp. 525, 607, 629. Mariotte too called attention to this phenomenon.

Lynn White Jr ., “Eilmer of Malmesbury: An eleventh century aviator”, Technology and culture , ii (1961), 97–111.

Smeaton made contributions to astronomy and evidently studied Newton's Principia. He had a copy of the work in his library.

Jules Verne Wells H. G. wrote about space travel. That excellent populariser of astronomy, Camille Flammarion, predicted television (“téléphonoscopie”) in the speculative essay La fin du monde (Paris, 1894), 274.

This is eloquently argued by Sadi Carnot in the opening pages of Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu (Paris, 1824).

See the Introduction by Thomas P. Hughes , Selections from the lives of the engineers, with an account of their principal works , by Samuel Smiles (Cambridge, Mass., 1966).

I have found a book (in press) by a member of our Department ( Hills R. L. , Problems in the application of power in the early textile industry ) very informative in this respect.

Bury J. B. , The idea of progress (1955, Dover edition); Baillie J. , The belief in progress (1951); and Morris Ginsberg , The idea of progress: A revaluation (1953).

Jevons W. Stanley , The coal question (London, 1866 ed.)

Op. cit. , 140.

Ibid. , 164.