The Selling of Newton: Science and Technology in Early Eighteenth-Century England

In the past decade the role of science in the early eighteenth century has come in for close scrutiny and increasing debate. There is specifically one rather large and problematic issue, that is, the relationship between science and technology in England in the first half of the eighteenth century when, it is generally agreed, the Industrial Revolution had not yet made any discernible impact. There are those historians who have insisted that the Newtonian natural philosophy had nothing whatever to do with the mechanical creations and innovations of artisans and craftsmen. This may be understandable because Newtonian science has come to be regarded as fundamentally mathematical and experimental—and not even comprehensible, except in the broadest terms, to the Augustan virtuosos. This has often created the version of science as a purely rational and cerebral activity distanced from and above technology, a science unsullied perhaps by the grime of mechanics' hands. One might speculate on the ideological origins of such a universe, but it seems that one can at least see that such a version of events is determined in part by the question that proposes a direct causal relation between cerebral science and rank technology. The argument evidently is that, if one cannot find the historical evidence that establishes a precise link between Newton's interparticulate forces and the partial vacuum of the Savery engine, then one must conclude that no relationship existed.But historical associations are never quite so simple. One could easily demonstrate that the Newtonian natural philosophy was deliberately propagated among men whose interests tended to be more practical than philosophical.