INTRODUCTION 



The United States in the mid-twentieth century is not the same 

 kind of country it was in the mid-nineteenth centuty; the one thing on 

 which all can agree, whether they look at politics, the economic system, 

 or the life of the mind, is change. How did this change come about? 

 Most people, in trying to describe the changes in American civilization 

 over the last century, sooner or later mention the rise of science. There 

 is hardly a more conspicuous factor in American civilization or a more 

 potent force on the world scene than science. How did this force which 

 affects all other forces get loose in American culture? This is not the 

 kind of historical problem that can be answered by analyzing a par- 

 ticular decisive battle, by counting the votes in one particular election, 

 or by matching the arguments in one particular debate. The change that 

 we are looking for did not occur at one place or at one time, nor was 

 it limited only to the actions of statesmen and generals. What we are 

 looking for is a change of relationship, one that took place almost un- 

 awares in obscure places as well as in the light of publicity. 



Science itself is of course much older than 1865. As a tradition em- 

 bodying organized knowledge about nature, it had been widening its con- 

 trol of data and refining its methods of reasoning in a spectacular way 

 since at least the seventeenth century. And there were scientists in the 

 United States before 1865 who had developed institutions for communi- 

 cation and education. 



Likewise, the industrial revolution was already far advanced in 1865. 

 The textile industry had converted to the factory system long before 

 the Civil War, the railroad network was rapidly covering the continent, 

 and the iron and steel industry was rapidly becoming a massive operation 

 at the base of a machine economy. Yet the innovations which made the 

 industrial revolution possible — the inventions of the pre-Civil War era — 

 did not in most cases originate with science. They sprang from a tradi- 

 tion of practical invention far removed from the scientists of the day. 

 Reorganization, rather than technological innovation, was the major tool 

 of the captains of industry such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. 

 Rockefeller. Why, then, when they look at the twentieth century, do 

 most observers see the hand of science at work? We are seeing here 

 neither science nor technology, but a changed relationship between them. 



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[i] 



