Abstract

In this monograph Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini aim to reinterpret the nature of “research” and the relations of science and industry in Europe between 1800 and 1914. They compare and contrast industrial developments in what they call the “slow‐lane” countries with those in the “fast lane” . They make their case by examining four large issues.The first is conceptions of applied research before 1870. Fox and Guagnini notably begin not with the English industrial revolution but with a discussion of how France's state‐supported savants and engineers in the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras helped bring science into the industrial realm, principally that of the chemical industry. By the mid‐nineteenth century, they argue, the British slowly, and the Germans quickly, began to change their attitudes toward applied science, while the French remained largely at a standstill. Yet the main result of these developments was not any dramatic impact of science on industry but, rather, the diffusion of a new rhetoric bearing the message that science could be applied to aid national industry, although to do so it must, paradoxically, also retain and advance its “pure” dimension.Fox and Guagnini next outline the functions of physics laboratories in Germany, France, and Britain. They stress that these laboratories grew part and parcel with the rise of new aspects of teaching and an increased interest in research in the discipline. They believe that the new teaching goals were probably the single most influential cause of the rise of physics laboratories. Especially by the 1870s and 1880s, the ideals of academic physics began to affect and were affected by applications of physics in industry; this development in turn initiated a never‐ending debate about the “demands of utility” versus “disinterested inquiry” .Third, the authors analyze the rise of electrical engineering as an academic discipline from the 1880s on. They discern two patterns: electrical engineering was introduced either as an integral part of the mechanical engineering curriculum or as a one‐year, advanced program based on a student's previous training in mechanical or civil engineering. They emphasize that teaching, not research, remained the principal activity of academic electrical engineers until late in the century. They argue that the search for novelty in electrical engineering occurred principally in the manufacturer's workshop or on work sites.Fourth and finally, Fox and Guagnini address “the realities of industrial research.” Although they fully recognize that many industrial research laboratories were first conceived and took embryonic form before World War I, they think that to understand the nature and loci of industrial research before 1918, scholars must consider two broad interpretations: first, that even in the nascent “research laboratories” in Germany and the United States there was a strong emphasis on “testing, quality control, and investigations directed at the protection of patents, rather than a preoccupation with the development of new products and processes” ; second, they assert that experimental work occurred largely on “the shop floor and the site by technical staff engaged in day‐to‐day work of design, production, and installation” .Fox and Guagnini persuasively argue that assessment of developments in the slow‐lane countries must be appreciated in terms of their demographies, politics, economies, and traditions of higher education. Innovation, they demonstrate, appeared in a variety of contexts and places in both fast‐lane and slow‐lane countries. They maintain that our understanding of “research” must be expansive enough to include the incremental sort that occurred in the workshops and sites as well as the more theoretical sort that occurred in academic and industrial research laboratories. Their thoughtful monograph should be carefully studied by all scholars concerned with the history of applied research and of the relations of science, technology, and the economy in general