Thinking Again about Science in Technology

Author(s): Jennifer Karns Alexander

Source: Isis , Vol. 103, No. 3 (September 2012), pp. 518-526
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667975

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 Thinking Again about Science in
Technology

By Jennifer Karns Alexander*

ABSTRACT

How to characterize the relationship between science and technology has been a sensitive
issue for historians of technology. This essay uses a recent and controversial piece by Paul
Forman as a springboard for reexamining the concept of applied science and asks whether
“applied science” remains a useful term. Scholars have often taken “applied science” to
mean the subordination of technological knowledge to scientific knowledge—and thus the
subordination of history of technology to history of science. This essay argues that the
historical moment for sensitivity on the subject of applied science has passed, that even
in instances where technology can accurately be described as subordinate to science it
need not follow that its history is subordinate, and that the concept can be useful in
addressing issues in the history and contemporary practice of engineering education.

P AUL FORMAN HAS MADE AN IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION to discussions of

applied science by putting “the science–technology debate back on stage” in a couple
of recent and controversial articles.1 For some years Forman has been analyzing what he
terms the postmodern cultural elevation of technology over science, in a reversal of
modern cultural valuations that gave science priority. The primacy of science as a cultural
value, Forman argued, lay in people’s prizing its reliance on method, with the ends such
methods served justified by the sober, disinterested, and reasoned way they were achieved.
In contrast, the primacy of technology lies in its value as an assortment of flexible means
to be employed in people’s own entrepreneurial agendas. For Forman, the primacy of

* Department of Mechanical Engineering and Program in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine,
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455; jalexand@me.umn.edu.
I would like to thank Robert Bud for organizing this Focus section and the HSS panel on which it was based
and Robert Seidel for helping me envision my own contribution.
1 Ronald Kline, “Forman’s Lament,” History and Technology, 2007, 23:160 –166, on p. 162. Paul Forman’s

articles include the foundational “The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and
of Ideology in the History of Technology,” ibid., pp. 1–152 (it was this article to which Kline responded); “From
the Social to the Moral to the Spiritual: The Postmodern Exaltation of the History of Science,” in Positioning
the History of Science, ed. Jürgen Renn and Kostas Gavroglu (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 248)
(Berlin: Springer, 2007), pp. 49 –55; and “(Re)Cognizing Postmodernity: Helps for Historians— of Science
Especially,” Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2010, 33:157–175.

Isis, 2012, 103:518 –526

©2012 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021-1753/2012/10303-0005$10.00

518

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science as a cultural value was the mark of modernity. In postmodernity, he sees that S
primacy eclipsed by technology, and it makes him profoundly uneasy. In the most highly
developed of his contributions, published in 2007 in History and Technology, Forman
concludes that “what validated such [pure scientific] knowledge as knowledge was not its
serviceability to some preset end, but the propriety of the means, the method, with which
that knowledge was attained.” Technology offered a stark contrast, its “incapacity to
create and warrant its own ends” necessitating, under modernity, its subordinate cultural
rank. Lest that important subordination remain unclear, turn to a footnote to this founda-
tional paper, in which Forman gestures toward an even starker conclusion, although
admitting that it is not yet warranted: “If science is not regarded as separate and
distinguishable from technology in some culturally highly valued ways, and if the fact of
scientific laws is not regarded as a greater miracle than the fact that the machine works,
then it is ‘curtains’ for the scientific enterprise.”2
Applied science is in the thick of it. Forman’s provocative argument begins with applied
science and highlights the stakes involved for historians in characterizing science/tech-
nology relations. Many historians of technology have decisively rejected “applied sci-
ence” as a useful term, already seeing in it precisely the subordination to science that
Forman describes and thus a denial of the intellectual autonomy of their subject.3 The
peculiar trajectory of Forman’s History and Technology piece, which generated early and
impassioned responses, including a well-received panel at the fiftieth anniversary meeting
of the Society for the History of Technology, as well as some bursts of animus,4 but which
has since met with muffled silence among historians of technology, and which both
reflects and perpetuates former antagonisms between history of science and history of
technology, leads me to wonder whether it may be possible for historians of technology
to make constructive use of the concept of applied science or whether we should abandon
the term.
My contribution in this essay is to render the concept of applied science less incendiary
by noting that the historical moment for sensitivity on the subject has passed, that
historians of technology need not fear the subordination of their discipline even should
such subordination be demonstrated, and that the concept can be helpful in addressing
issues in the history and contemporary practice of engineering education. These remarks
apply particularly to the North American context; quite different understandings of
applied science and the science/technology nexus appear in the history of technology
elsewhere in the globe.

MEANINGS OF “APPLIED SCIENCE”

Various definitions of “applied science” bear out the antagonism between science and
technology implied in Forman’s piece.5 Here I offer three definitions, two informal and

2 Forman, “Primacy of Science in Modernity,” pp. 71, 127 n 420. Kline also made note of this passage; see

Kline, “Forman’s Lament,” pp. 162–163.

3 John Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, 1985), p. 120.

4 See “Forman: An Exchange between Bob Post and John Krige,” Hist. & Technol., 2008, 24:379 –381.

Forman described the inattention to science he sees among historians of technology as an anti-science ideology;
see Forman, “Primacy of Science in Modernity” (cit. n. 1), p. 84 n 81.
5 “Antagonism” is Forman’s term for the history of technology’s attitude toward science; see Forman,

“Primacy of Science in Modernity,” p. 56.

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520 FOCUS—ISIS, 103 : 3 (2012)

carrying implications of subordination, one formal and silent on the matter. The point is
not to provide a descriptively or theoretically satisfying characterization of either science
or technology or their interaction, but to prepare for a survey of what is at stake in using
the term “applied science.” Explicit and careful definitions of “applied science” have not
been a marked part of discussions so far, let alone definitions of “technology” and
“science.”6
The first definition comes from John Staudenmaier, longtime editor of Technology and
Culture, the journal of the Society for the History of Technology and preeminent in the field;
it asserts the cognitive superiority of science. “Applied science,” in Technology and Culture
articles presenting it as a useful description, described science as the “necessary prerequisite
for modern technological progress.” An article from Mario Bunge pressed the point most
directly: “a theory of flight is essentially an application of fluid dynamics. . . . Substantive
technological theories are always preceded by scientific theories.” The philosopher of
technology Carl Mitcham provides the second definition, of the so-called linear model that
emphasizes the chronological priority of science: “autonomous science necessarily pre-
cedes [technological] development into military, medical, and economic applications.”
The linear model can be seen in Vannevar Bush’s influential report on science for
peacetime ends, presented to President Truman in the summer of 1945; Bush’s paradigm
“was a distinctly linear one, with basic research preceding applied, which in turn preceded
new technology.” From the Oxford English Dictionary comes the third definition, em-
phasizing usefulness: “Applied, applied science, ‘Put to practical use; practical.’” Richard
Westfall used such a construction in his study of scientists’ participation in technology
during the scientific revolution, where he asserted that technology is “inherently directed
toward human use and not solely toward increasing understanding.” Ronald Kline
similarly emphasized something put to use in his conception of applied science as
marked by technical knowledge gained not from mechanical practice but by “more
scholarly means” that can be either dependent on science, by importing scientific
theories into technological practice, or autonomous, in using scientific methods within
work defined by technological goals.7 Kline’s remains a definition of “applied sci-
ence”; it is not a definition of “technology.”

6 Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers (cit. n. 3), pp. 95–103. Forman’s “Primacy of Science in Moder-

nity” was published in a forum along with four other essays, solicited by the editor of History and Technology:
Martin Collins, “Values, Intellectual History, and the Standpoint of Critique,” Hist. & Technol., 2007, 23:153–
160; Kline, “Forman’s Lament” (cit. n. 1); Chunglin Kwa, “Shifts in Dominance of Scientific Styles: From
Modernity to Postmodernity,” Hist. & Technol., 2007, 23:166 –175; and Philip Mirowski, “Invention as the
Mother of Necessity: Reflections on Paul Forman’s ‘The Primacy of Science in Modernity,’” ibid., pp. 176 –184.
The comments contained pointed and often harsh criticisms. Critics responding to Forman’s article objected to
his definitions, labeling his idea of technology “ahistorical” (Collins, “Values, Intellectual History, and the
Standpoint of Critique,” p. 156; and Kline, “Forman’s Lament,” p. 162) and his idea of science reified (Mirowski,
“Invention as the Mother of Necessity,” p. 181).
7 Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers, pp. 98, 97 (quoting Mario Bunge, “Technology as Applied

Science,” Technology and Culture, 1966, 7:329 –347); Carl Mitcham, “Petroski’s Policy: Henry Petroski, The
Essential Engineer,” ibid., 2011, 52:380 –384, on p. 381; Henry Petroski, The Essential Engineer: Why Science
Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems (New York: Vintage, 2010), p. 109 (describing Bush’s paradigm); Oxford
English Dictionary, s.v. “applied,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/9713”redirectedFrom⫽%22applied
%20science%22#eid385383 (accessed 22 Nov. 2011); Richard S. Westfall, “Science and Technology during the
Scientific Revolution: An Empirical Approach,” in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Crafts-
men, and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 63–72, on p. 64 n 3; and Ronald Kline, “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied
Science’: Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1880 –1945,” Isis, 1995, 86:194 –221,
on p. 197.

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Of these definitions, the first two may be characterized as antagonistic, the first S
emphasizing the cognitive superiority of science and the second its necessary temporal
priority. They thus suggest the subordination of technological to scientific knowledge. It
should be noted that neither definition is particularly strong. Although Staudenmaier found
other evidence of a belief in the superiority of science, the definition itself comes out of
a single journal article; as for the linear model, David Edgerton argues that it was always
a straw man, erected by historians to justify the intensity with which they pursued new
concepts of technological knowledge, and Bush himself later emphasized that engineering
was on a par with science rather than its offspring.8 The most robust of these definitions
is the last, from the OED, emphasizing practical use. Westfall’s elaboration is perhaps too
simple, but Kline’s allows for a variety of cognitive activities of the highest sort and
suggests neither technology’s subordination to nor its inherent need of science.

SURVEYING THE STAKES

Although much may thus be at stake in characterizing science and technology, and if and
how they are connected, such efforts need not be antagonistic. How historians of tech-
nology wish to remember the founding of their field is at issue, as is the field’s perceived
autonomy from history of science. The risks for historians of technology are two: a
historical one, that in rejecting the concept of applied science they will not recognize
significant elements of the cultural context in which they themselves work; and a
historiographical one, that by using the category of applied science they will be seen to
agree that technology lacks autonomy and thus to betray the commitment to technology’s
unique cognitive form (as technological knowledge) that has become a hallmark of the
field. If historians of technology are ideologically opposed to science (as Forman charges),
then they may indeed face the first risk. The second is primarily an issue for scholars
wishing to defend or to extend the practice of the founding generation of historians of
technology from the 1950s. Recognizing two points will help make it possible to discuss
these risks without animus: that the acute sensitivity to descriptions of science/technology
relations surveyed below is the product of a historical moment that has passed and thus
need not inhibit current scholars; and that the subordination of technology to science, even
if it can be demonstrated, does not entail the subordination of history of technology to
history of science.
The historical issue, and the attendant characterization of the current cultural moment,
turns on general interactions between science and technology. There is some agreement on
the historical question: an empirical shift in the relative cultural value of science and
technology has been recognized by scholars other than Forman, as Chunglin Kwa and
Philip Mirowski point out in responses to Forman’s History and Technology essay. Kwa
describes the change as a move from deduction as the highest criterion of scientific
demonstration to performance, still within science but technologically driven. Mirowski
agrees with Forman about the timing of the shift in the early 1980s but sees it as something

8 David Edgerton, “‘The Linear Model’ Did Not Exist: Reflections on the History and Historiography of

Science and Research in Industry in the Twentieth Century,” in The Science–Industry Nexus: History, Policy,
Implications, ed. Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and Sven Widmalm (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History
Publications, 2004), pp. 31–57; Edgerton, “Innovation, Technology, or History: What Is the Historiography of
Technology About?” Technol. & Cult., 2010, 51:680 – 697; and Vannevar Bush, “The Engineer,” in Listen to
Leaders in Engineering, ed. Albert Love and James Saxon Childers (Atlanta: Tupper & Love/David McKay,
1965), pp. 9 –12.

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522 FOCUS—ISIS, 103 : 3 (2012)

much larger: “the progressive abandonment of one comprehensive system for integrating
institutions, practices and their justifications for another very different system.” Forman
himself alludes to this broader abandonment in a piece critical of the contemporary
intellectual move away from disciplinarity and into the “postmodern boundariless, all-
on-one-plane flatland culture.”9
A number of scholars have offered the idea of “technoscience” to characterize the
recent situation. The rise of the term coincides with Forman’s dating of the cultural shift,
and it became prominent in the work of Bruno Latour, who used it “to describe all the
elements tied to the scientific contents no matter how dirty, unexpected or foreign they
seem.”10 In contemporary sociology and anthropology the term refers to science as a
practical endeavor, technology-driven and under pressure to yield applications and often
considering subjects that may be themselves technological, not natural, such as the
human-made ozone hole or animals infected with disease in a laboratory. Wybo Houkes
offers “technoscience” as a way out of problematic philosophical attempts to describe
technology’s intellectual independence; at its most basic, “technoscience” makes apparent
an interdependent relationship between science and technology, but it can also obviate the
very notion of relationship, suggesting a merged or fused new entity. Technoscience may
not be adequate as a historical category, however, and a pressing issue is whether the word
can be used to describe any but the most recent configurations of its two components.11
Whether technology is independent was the incendiary issue lurking behind discussions
of applied science in the early years of the field of history of technology. Behind
historians’ assertions of the independence of technological knowledge was their claim for
the intellectual status of their own work, a claim forged in opposition to claims for the
superiority of scientific cognition through assertions of its value-free orientation and of the
validity of the experimental methods it employed. Staudenmaier characterized the applied
science claim as absolute and tending to polarize discussions because it “radically
subordinates all nonscientific cognition to the inferior status of prescientific intellectual
infancy or postscientific application.” As James McCllelan put it, “What could the
grandeur of science have to do with rubber washers in our washing machines?”12
The early historical literature addressing questions of applied science thus grew out of
contention between historians of technology and historians of science (alongside positive
connections with engineering education, discussed below). The Society for the History of

9 Kwa, “Shifts in Dominance of Scientific Styles” (cit. n. 6), esp. p. 167; Mirowski, “Invention as the Mother

of Necessity” (cit. n. 6), p. 177 (Mirowski takes issue most fundamentally with Forman’s conception of culture,
asking how he has failed to notice the complete disintegration of the concept of culture itself ); and Forman,
“From the Social to the Moral to the Spiritual” (cit. n. 1), p. 50.
10 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), p. 174.

11 Martin Carrier and Alfred Nordmann, “Science in the Context of Application: Methodological Change,

Conceptual Transformation, Cultural Reorientation,” in Science in the Context of Application, ed. Carrier and
Nordmann (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), pp. 1–7, esp. pp. 1, 4; Nordmann, “Science in the Context of Technol-
ogy,” ibid., pp. 467– 482, esp. p. 469; and Wybo Houkes, “The Nature of Technological Knowledge,” in
Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences, ed. Anthonie Meijers (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009), pp.
309 –350. John Pickstone uses the term to describe the rise of institutional collaborations between science and
technology late in the nineteenth century; Kline, similarly, writes that “technoscience” is accurately applied only
to specific technical and scientific endeavors around the same time. See John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A
New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 163–165; and
Kline, “Forman’s Lament” (cit. n. 1), p. 162.
12 Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers (cit. n. 3), p. 99; and James E. McClellan III, “What’s Problematic

about ‘Applied Science,’” in The Applied Science Problem, ed. McClellan (Jersey City, N.J.: Jensen/Daniels,
2008), pp. 1–36, on p. 17.

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Technology was itself founded after proposals by historians seeking a place for technol- S
ogy within the History of Science Society were turned down at a 1957 meeting with Henry
Guerlac; Melvin Kranzberg described Guerlac as unwilling to “‘condescend’ to include
the history of technology” within the history of science. McClellan recently observed that
the two communities remain “largely separate and mutually wary,” and although many
scholars are members of both societies and publish in both fields—and do not seem to
register this wariness—there have been only a few efforts at scholarly integration of the
fields as represented by their societies.13
The emancipation of technology from science was a pressing issue for the founding
generation of historians of technology of the 1950s and 1960s, but by the mid 1970s
interest was petering out. Special issues of Technology and Culture on science/technology
relations appeared several times during the 1960s, and in 1976 the journal devoted an issue
to industrial-era interactions between science and technology, proceedings of a conference
at the Burndy Library in 1973; participants already expressed weariness with the science/
technology debate. From the late 1970s and into the 1980s historians of technology
developed something of a consensus on an alternative to the applied science model, what
Ed Layton termed an “interactive model” of science/technology relations. Even as the
view that technology was only applied science was “demolish[ed]” and shown to be a
myth—Ron Kline could argue in 1995 that this had long since occurred— historians of
technology were developing an understanding of technological knowledge as a distinct
form of cognition, needing definition not primarily in terms of scientific concepts but also
with reference to engineering theory, technical skill, and problematic data that arise during
pragmatic endeavors.14
This understanding of technological knowledge emerged in opposition to applied
science models and illustrates the collapse of two different categories of autonomy in
these debates. Two categories of autonomy are involved: the autonomy of technology
itself, and the autonomy of its historians. Granting that technology is dependent on science
does not entail for its historians a parallel and dependent status; this presumption none-
theless underlay much of the writing on the subject in the early years of the organized
history of technology. The two categories thus often appeared to have collapsed. Stauden-
maier, examining the first twenty-five years of Technology and Culture, found that the
majority of those critical of the applied science model treated applied science not as a
subject of investigation itself but as a category against which authors established the

13 Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers, p. 1 (Kranzberg on Guerlac’s attitude); and McClellan, “What’s

Problematic about ‘Applied Science,’” p. 17. McClellan cites the practice of co-locating HSS and SHOT
meetings every few years, rather than holding occasional joint meetings. Several joint sessions took place at the
most recent co-located meeting, held in Cleveland in fall 2011.
14 Edwin T. Layton, Jr., “Through the Looking Glass; or, News from Lake Mirror Image,” Technol. & Cult.,

1987, 28:594 – 607, on p. 597; Kline, “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Science’” (cit. n. 7); McClellan,
“What’s Problematic about ‘Applied Science,’” pp. 16 –19; and Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers, pp.
103–120. Arguments that applied science was a myth take several forms: that technologies often preceded
scientific explanations for how they worked (that steam technology stimulated work in thermodynamics is a
common example); that engineering research was more important to commercial products than was basic
scientific research (see Ronald R. Kline and Thomas C. Lassman, “Competing Research Traditions in American
Industry: Uncertain Alliances between Engineering and Science at Westinghouse Electric, 1886 –1935,” Enter-
prise and Society, 2005, 6:601– 645, esp. p. 639); and that design is a distinguishing and unique feature of
engineering, not in applying scientific concepts but in bridging between incomplete cognitive models and
real-world complexities (see Barry Allen, Art and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience [Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2008]).

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524 FOCUS—ISIS, 103 : 3 (2012)

unique character of this new subject, technological knowledge.15 The success of this
enterprise does reveal applied science to have been a straw man, albeit a productive one.
That success also means that the moment of contention has passed, and there is no longer
reason for historians of technology strenuously to defend the autonomy of their subject.
In any case, it is important to recognize that the potential subordination of her subject need
not entail a historian’s own intellectual subordination; the two categories of autonomy
remain separate.

ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Applied science is a useful category in discussing engineering and engineering education.

Historians of technology may have abolished the myth that “applied science” is an
adequate description of engineering, but the term remains in use within engineering
circles. It had historical saliency in developments in engineering education in the postwar
United States; engineering education was also significant for the founding of the field of
history of technology. “Applied science” also has importance for contemporary discus-
sions of engineering education among historians of technology.
Engineering as applied science continues to dominate the public imagination. The
engineer and influential author Henry Petroski’s most recent book, The Essential Engi-
neer, distinguishes science from other various activities that are often grouped under its
umbrella, including medicine, engineering, and high technology. Petroski cites Irwin
Goodwin’s criticism of the National Academy of Engineering’s list of the top engineering
feats of the twentieth century for having taken engineering credit where physics credit was
due: the list “neglect[ed] attributing feats to physics.” Goodwin quoted the chair of the
NAE panel saying that the list demonstrates the importance of physics to the technologies
of the modern world; in addition to claiming science’s priority, the list thus also demon-
strates science’s applicability. But Petroski’s point was larger than the persistence of the
vision of engineering as applied science. His book is subtitled “Why Science Alone Will
Not Solve Our Global Problems,” and he argues that the belief in engineering as applied
science, including its occasional description as “an occupation for second-rate minds,” has
undercut the ability of engineers to address pressing contemporary issues in climate,
health, and food production, among others.16 Students seeking creative work are not
attracted to the engineering fields, and engineers do not have a platform to speak publicly
unless they are employed by the public—and then speak only within the parameters of
their job titles. The restricting functions of applied science as a social category are well
worth attention.
Engineering has historically had close ties to the history of technology, and examining
those ties reveals two possibilities for approaching applied science constructively as a
historical question. First, engineering education in the postwar United States was heavily
influenced by the established scientific disciplines, and it makes historical and scholarly
sense to speak of applied science when discussing the training of the generation of
engineers who completed their credentials in the 1950s and 1960s. Second, engineering
education was especially important in the founding of the Society for the History of
Technology, and considering applied science in light of engineering education links it not

15Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers, p. 99.

16Irwin Goodwin, “Engineers Proclaim Top Achievements of Twentieth Century; Neglect Attributing Feats
to Physics,” Physics Today, May 2000, 53:48 – 49; and Petroski, Essential Engineer (cit. n. 7), p. 45.

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only to the intellectual concerns of the early society discussed above but also to the S
historical context within which the society was founded. Petroski describes his own
engineering training in the postwar years as founded in the physical sciences, beginning
with physics, chemistry, and mathematics, and only in the later stages turning to subjects
labeled “engineering”; and Bruce Seely has described the rise of engineering science in
the academy in the late 1950s as part of an appeal for federal research funds, emphasizing
the connection of engineering to the more fundamental sciences.17 In both of these
instances the category of applied science might be deployed as a scholarly tool rather than
as the straw man Edgerton discerned.
Connecting the applied science model to engineering education will help to illuminate
the context within which technology became a professional specialty within historical
study. Engineering education was intimately connected to the founding of history of
technology as a field. Its primary society, the Society for the History of Technology, was
formed in connection with the American Society for Engineering Education, and in fact
the delegation that met with Henry Guerlac in Ithaca in 1957 to discuss a technology
specialty within the History of Science Society was in town for an ASEE meeting. Rather
than forming their own society in response to a rebuff from the history of science, the
founders of the field already had in place several potential partners within the engineering
education community. The new society recruited engineers as members; many of its
members were also active in engineering societies; and it had particularly close ties to the
humanities program for engineers at Case Institute of Technology. Seely argued that
historians and engineers had made little effort to distinguish between science and tech-
nology before the late 1950s and that it was attention to engineering that allowed
historians after that time to make claims about their differences. He concluded that the
history of technology grew not so much out of antagonism with the history of science but
primarily from “the juxtaposition of HSS, SHOT, and engineering education in the late
1950s.”18 It was during the 1950s and in the decade following that the concept of
technology as applied science had particular saliency within engineering education.
The concept of applied science has both currency and impact in the current context of
increasing scholarly attention to engineering formation, both as a subject of historical
study and through institutional service. Recent historical studies of engineering have
focused largely on engineering education, and engineering education also features prom-
inently in the professional lives of historians who find themselves teaching service courses
within the engineering schools where they hold their appointments, often to students who
firmly believe that “applied science” does indeed describe their field of study. Many
historians of technology have begun offering the ethics training now required for accred-
itation of engineering departments by ABET (formerly the Accreditation Board for
Engineering and Technology), which some in the field have seen as a particularly fruitful
possible avenue for making their work relevant to their employers. The guest editors for
a recent special issue of Technology and Culture on engineering history noted that one of
its primary goals was to provide useful histories for engineers, and a new society formed
in 2004, the International Network for Engineering Studies, is dedicated to informing

17 Bruce E. Seely, “The Other Re-Engineering of Engineering Education, 1900 –1965,” Journal of Engineer-

ing Education, 1999, 88:285–294; see also Seely, “Research, Engineering, and Science in American Engineering
Colleges: 1900 –1960,” Technol. & Cult., 1993, 34:344 –386.
18 Bruce E. Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technol. & Cult., 1995,

36:739 –772, on p. 771.

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526 FOCUS—ISIS, 103 : 3 (2012)

engineering knowledge and service. This context provides an opening for discussions of
applied science informed not by antagonism to science nor by the desire to “‘mess up the
minds’ of engineering students” who think of technological development as progress, but
by careful consideration of what it means to put something to practical use and what it
means to employ methods developed in one field in another (harkening back to Ron
Kline’s definition).19

CONCLUSION

Forman’s provocative piece provides the impetus for reopening discussions about applied
science; in fact, he makes use of something very like the linear model in describing the
former primacy of science over technology. His foundational essay remains one of the
most widely cited from History and Technology, and although it has been subjected to
heavy and telling criticism it remains a powerful call to historians of technology to think
again about the role of science in their field. Such rethinking need not be antagonistic; the
history of technology has established itself as an independent discipline with a unique
focus, and it no longer needs the straw man of science against which to form its own
identity. The field even has an alternate creation story, in which collaboration with
engineering educators rather than a rebuff from historians of science was decisive in
shaping its character. Scholars studying the history of engineering education can make use
of applied science as a historical category; historians working within institutions of
engineering education can make use of applied science in efforts to convince engineering
students that the concept is not big enough to cover all that they will do in the fields they
have chosen for their life’s work. “Applied science” is not synonymous with “technol-
ogy,” and more careful definitions along the lines of Ron Kline’s, offered above, will go
far toward making applied science a useful category of discussion.

19 John K. Brown, Gary Lee Downey, and Maria Paula Diogo, “The Normativities of Engineers: Engineering

Education and History of Technology,” Technol. & Cult., 2009, 50:737–752, on pp. 742, 747 (quoting
participants in a 2007 conference discussion about renewing interest in engineering history).

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