When the Faculty of Technology was established at the University of Tartu at the beginning of the 19th century, expectations were primarily directed toward offering new ideas and invigorating agriculture. Carl Schmidt, Professor of Chemistry at the university, announced by virtue of the experience he had obtained on a work trip to England that his laboratory would be open to the industry. At the same time he started to explore the feasibility of using obolus phosphorite in the production of fertilisers and was accordingly interested in the oil shale resources located in Northern Estonia. The chemical composition of oil shale was for the first time analysed by Georg Petzholdt and Alexander Schamarin in Tartu. The pioneering institution to commence the investigation of the combustible properties of oil shale was the State Central Laboratory in Tallinn. This line of work was continued by the National Testing Centre. Distilling furnaces developed in Estonia received international recognition. Australia was the first country to commence production of shale oil by adoption of the Estonian technology. After World War II, all branches of technological research were assembled into the Academy of Sciences and Tallinn University of Technology. Studies were continued in the field of oil shale, power engineering, and civil engineering. By the reform of the university system in 1992 the research laboratories were restructured and brought under the jurisdiction of institutes. The variety of research topics has been mostly implicated by the powerful emergence and spread of information technology.