It is a sobering thought that every man-made object of practical utility has passed through the process of conception, testing, design, construction, refinement, to be finally brought to a serviceable state suitable for the market. Aesthetics may have entered into the process of development and production at some stage, increasingly so in our present consumer age, although from a glance at some of the products on the market, one might well question the makers’ artistic sensibility.
It is important at the start to distinguish between science and technology, for science as such can have no place in this context. Though the dividing line is sometimes imprecise, it undoubtedly exists. In our context, at least, science is the product of minds seeking to reveal the natural laws that govern the world in which we live and, beyond it, the laws that govern the universe. Technology, on the other hand, seeks to find practical ways to use scientific discoveries profitably, ways of turning scientific knowledge into utilitarian processes and devices.
It is quite clear where the line must be drawn in most cases. The steam engine, for instance, the first source of mechanical power and the first heat engine, was to release man from reliance on his own or animal muscles or the fickleness of wind and water. For a short period in the seventeenth century scientists, mostly dilettantes, took a lively interest in the possibility of harnessing the power of steam, but little came of their curiosity. Nor did that of certain less scientific but more practical experimenters such as Sir Samuel Morland, ‘Magister Mechanicorum’ to King Charles II, Captain Thomas Savery or Denis Papin, the French scientist who invented the pressure cooker and worked for some time at the Royal Society, lead to the crucial breakthrough.
Claims may be, and have been made for any one of these to have ‘invented’ the steam engine but, without question, it was Thomas Newcomen, a Dartmouth ‘ironmonger’, who devised and built the world’s first practical steam engine, which was installed for mine-pumping at Dudley Castle in 1712. There is equally little doubt that Newcomen was a practical man, an artisan with little or no scientific knowledge or any training in scientific matters. Science and scientists had little direct or indirect influence on the early development of the steam engine. The prestigious Royal Society, founded as recently as 1662, did not even honour Newcomen.
The situation was little different when Sir Charles Parsons patented and produced the first practical steam turbine in 1884. True, Parsons had a topdrawer upbringing and education. Sixth son of the Earl of Rosse, he was privately tutored until he went to Trinity College, Dublin, and then to Cambridge University. There, the only pure science that he studied was pure mathematics, before starting an engineering apprenticeship. This was before there was any established School of Engineering at Cambridge, but he did attend such few lectures that were given on Mechanisms and Applied Mechanics. That was all the ‘scientific’ training given to the man who was to revolutionize both marine propulsion and the electrical supply industry.
But matters are not always so clear-cut. Take horology, for instance, or timekeeping. The men who evolved the first calendars, who observed the difference between the twelve cycles of the moon and the one of the sun, were astronomers, scientists. Admittedly they were working towards the practical solutions of how to predict the seasons, the flooding of the River Nile, the times for sowing and the time for harvest. But they were scientists. Technology entered into the matter only when mechanical timekeeping had arrived, when clock and watchmakers and their predecessors had devised practical instruments to cut up the months into days, the days into hours and the hours into minutes and, later, seconds. These were technologists. They were practical men who made their living by making instruments with which scientists and others could tell the time.
Human Condition and the Universal Message of Khayyam
