225At the opening of Josiah Mason’s Science College in Birmingham, Eng-
land, in 1880, Thomas Huxley explained why he strongly favored edu-
cation in science proper rather than its applications. “I often wish this
phrase, ‘applied science,’ had never been invented,” Huxley declared, “for
it suggests that there is a sort of scientifi c knowledge of direct practical
use, which can be studied apart from another sort of scientifi c knowledge,
which is of no practical utility, and which is termed ‘pure science.’ But
there is no more complete fallacy than this. What people call applied sci-
ence is nothing but the application of pure science to particular classes
of problems.”^1
Huxley’s lament marks one position in a long- running discourse among
scientists and engineers in Britain and the United States about the proper
relationship between what was generally called “science and the useful
arts” in the nineteenth century, “pure and applied science” from the 1880s
to World War II, and “science and technology” from the 1930s to the pres-
ent. The existence of multiple phrases in this discourse does not indicate
a confusion in terminology nor a search for the correct terms to name
timeless and spaceless referents. Instead, the multiplicity of key phrases,
each of which conveyed a variety of meanings, indicates the historical
complexity of debates about epistemology, the authority of science, and
the boundaries marking the fi elds of science and engineering in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries.^2
In calling certain words “keywords,” historian Raymond Williams em-
CHAPTER 9Science and Technology
Ronald R. Kline