108 COSMOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY 



quently repeated. Great advances in telegraphy and telephony, con- 

 ceivable in 1850, were achieved as (with the aid of a few scientists 

 like Lord Kehdn ) technology set out to explore to their ends the ruts 

 newly formed in the problem of communication. W'hat could not be 

 foreseen in 1850 was that Faraday's physical concept of "field" would 

 shortly lead to Maxwell's subtle electromagnetic theory, and that 

 in turn to certain experiments by Hertz. A few years after the turn of 

 the century Marconi's wireless signals would span the Atlantic. But 

 without the antecedent Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz there would be 

 no Marconi. Science breaks for technology trails not merely new but 

 previously inconceivable. 



Technology makes reciprocal conceptual contributions to science. 

 Today science has its own dynamism, generating internally a large 

 proportion of the problems, the excitement, the new colligative rela- 

 tions, and the analogic stock for which it once drew heavily on ex- 

 ternal sources like technology. Even today, however, technology re- 

 mains an important contributor of all, and not least important for its 

 supply of analogic stock. Earlier in this century the functioning of the 

 brain was conceived with the aid of the analogy furnished by the 

 telephone exchange. More recently cybernetics finds what appears a 

 more appropriate analogy, in electric networks with many negative- 

 feedback loops. "Feedback" is itself a concept of technologic origin- 

 first exemplified in the Watt engine-governor and, more recently and 

 abundantly, in electric circuitry. 



Material exchanges. Obvious, and obviously important, these ma- 

 terial exchanges will be no more than indicated. By supplying the 

 requisite elaborate glassware, the glass factory at Rouen played an 

 essential role in Pascal's enlightening variations of Torricelli's ex- 

 periment. The balances that served Lavoisier and Stas were fabri- 

 cated by the makers of balances for government mints. As the tools 

 of science become ever more complex, science becomes ever more 

 dependent on the technological resources it can tap. Influencing the 

 ways scientists attack their problems, this dependence may determine 

 even what problems can be attacked. 



A reciprocal flow of materials, tools, and techniques passes from 

 science to technology. Nowhere available outside the scientific labo- 

 ratory, the rare and expensive substance aniline is found by Perkin 

 to yield a valuable dye, mauve. To obtain mauve Perkin institutes a 

 wholly novel large-scale production, from coal tar, of aniline— which 



