Wrestling with Nature From Omens to Science

Science and Technology 227

physician Jacob Bigelow’s Elements of Technology (1829), which derived
from a course of lectures Bigelow had given on the “Application of the
Sciences to the Useful Arts,” the topic of his Rumford Chair at Harvard.
For the book, Bigelow had “adopted the general name, Technology, a word
suffi ciently expressive, which is found in some of the older dictionaries,
and is beginning to be revived in the literature of practical men at the
present day”:

Under this title it is attempted to include such an account as the limits of the

volume permit, of the principles, processes, and nomenclatures of the more

conspicuous arts, particularly those which involve applications of science,

and which may be considered useful, by promoting the benefi t of society

together with the emolument of those who pursue them.^7

Although Bigelow spoke of “technology” as applied in this passage, his
usage of the term, comported with the contemporary English- language
meaning, as the scientifi c study of the useful arts, which dates to the early
seventeenth century. The earliest meaning of “technology,” as the “sys-
tematic treatment of the arts” (primarily grammar and rhetoric), which
dates to Aristotle’s introduction of the term technologia in Greek philoso-
phy, had become obsolete in English by the late seventeenth century.^8
During the course of the nineteenth century in the United States,
“technology,” which initially referred to the study of all the practical arts,
increasingly took on a masculine gender identity and an abstraction that
lifted it above the messy complexities of craft culture. The word came to
denote the abstract science of the useful arts built mainly by men, such
as bridges, factories, and railroads, rather than those arts attributed to the
realm of women, such as cooking, sewing, and cleaning.^9 A separate but
related meaning, the practical arts collectively, began to appear at the
turn of the twentieth century, primarily in the writings of the iconoclastic
economist Thorstein Veblen. Infl uenced by a broad German discourse on
Technik (the “rules, procedures, and skills” related to material culture),
Veblen combined this meaning with the older one of knowledge to speak
of “technology” as the “state of the industrial arts.” Although social sci-
entists in the United States adopted Veblen’s usage in the early twentieth
century, it was not common in American popular culture, nor among sci-
entists and engineers, until the Great Depression of the 1930s.^10 Thus, to
understand the debates from 1880 to 1930 about the relationship between
what was later called “science and technology,” we need to come to grips
with the various meanings of the ubiquitous phrase “pure and applied
science” in this period.