The Second Industrial Revolution of the latter nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries witnessed what has been described as the ‘marriage’ of science and technology. The natural sciences were enlisted in the creation of whole new industries including electric power, and light, communication, artificial dyestuffs, explosives, artificial fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, new materials, etc. These new industries demanded scientists and engineers and consequently the emergence of a complex web of interactions among industry, universities and government.

This session proposes a comparative look at three national scientific-technical enterprises. Jeffrey Allan Johnson examines the origins of a knowledge-based economy in Germany by focusing on the two crucial decades 1867-1887, which saw the emergence of an academic-industrial symbiosis in organic chemistry with unique features, including favorable government policies, that made possible the emergence of a hybrid class of industrial scientists within an institutional network that could sustain both exponential growth in scientific knowledge and systematic product innovation on an unprecedented scale. By 1900 organic chemistry in Germany thus presented the classic model of an industrializing science, but as such it is perhaps somewhat misleading. Though widely envied or imitated in other contexts, it was never duplicated, and indeed by 1914 it was no longer fully applicable even in the field that created it.

Robert Kargon looks at an emerging industrial power, the United States of America. After its Civil War of 1861-1865, the US’s rapid industrialization and urbanization similarly created a growth in the demand for trained experts in science and in technical fields. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an unprecedented burgeoning of institutions of higher learning devoted to applied knowledge, and the creation of whole new technical professions such as chemical and electrical engineering, fire safety engineering, and industrial researchers in chemistry and physics. New patterns of cooperation were established between academe, industry and state and federal governments.

Robert Fox investigates France’s response to the challenges of Germany and the USA. Abundant secondary literature expresses a long tradition of ‘declinist’ sentiment about late-nineteenth-century France. Blame has been directed at a supposed cultural gulf separating savants from industriels and at an indifference towards applied research that had both cause and consequences in an inadequate investment in industrial laboratories. The goal of Fox’s paper is to modify and add nuance to these views. French industry, he argues, labored under local circumstances that fostered a peculiarly ‘French way’ on the path to modernity, one whose successes and failures should not necessarily be judged by the criteria we might apply to the industrial big guns of Germany or the USA.