Inventive Intersections: Sites, Artifacts and the Rise of Modern Science and Technology

Pomona College, Claremont CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions are usually regarded as two of the most important landmarks of European history. Traditionally, historians have connected them by developments. More generally, the relationship between the history of science and technology has long been viewed in similar binary terms: did technology develop independently or should it be viewed as "applied science"? The workshop proposed here offers a different perspective. It begins by replacing the historiographically reified distinction between science and technology with an historical examination of natural inquiry and invention during the period between the so-called Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Not only are the terms "natural inquiry" and "invention" historiographically neutral, they allow for the fact that inquiry and invention could and did lead to both scientific and technological development. In other words, it is not the case that natural inquiry falls under the domain of the history of science and invention under the history of technology; their dynamic interaction helped give rise to what institutionally evolved as two domains. The proposed workshop will be organized by focusing on key sites and artifacts that provided points of intersection for a broad range of actors who inquired into and inventively engaged with nature and art. Participants will analyze how the various interests and activities of philosophers, doctors, merchants, courtiers, governmental and private patrons, artisans, apothecaries and engineers were fused by their passage through these materialized crossroads to give rise to both technological development and scientific formation. The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions are hereby reconfigured as episodes in an historical process whereby the processes and results of natural inquiry and invention gained increasingly regularized and institutionalized form, culminating in what we have since come to recognize as modern science and technology. This project is part of an ongoing conversation in the history of science and technology, offering a challenging response to some of the field's central questions. How do we account for the development and interaction between these two paramount and important elements of (post-) modern culture? What do we mean when we use terms such as the "Scientific Revolution" and "Industrial Revolution"? What historical developments tied these two "revolutions" together? How can the lessons of history sensitize us to our current identities as scientists, technologists and citizens? The major sponsor of this workshop, to be held in Amsterdam in September 2004, is the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW). This proposal requests funds solely to fund participation by American scholars.