Introduction: Technological Development and Science

Abstract

Almost two decades ago, in March 1973, the famous Burndy Library conference on The Interaction of Science and Technology in the Industrial Age took place.¹ One of the explicit aims of this conference was to bring together historians of science and technology to discuss the manner in which science and technology influence each other. In his Foreword to the proceedings of the conference, Robert E. Kohler remarked that a better insight into this matter required “a breaking down of barriers between the two groups of historians”.² Indeed, an adequate study of a topic such as the interaction between science and technology requires a trespassing of disciplinary boundaries, or even better the abolition of those boundaries. Kohler already saw a hopeful sign that something like that was happening: at universities historians of science and technology were increasingly placed in one and the same department. According to Kohler, this institutional development would insure that “the history of science will cease once and for all to be the history of isolated pieces of intellectual software, or the history of technology to be the history of isolated pieces of hardware”.³ Twenty years later, the cooperation between historians of science and technology seems indeed to have intensified, but the disciplinary boundaries are still operative.⁴