The Impact of Technical and Scientific Advance

When we seek to pinpoint the structural changes which lie at the roots of contemporary society, we are carried back to the last decade of the nineteenth century; and there we come to a halt. Even the most resolute upholder of the theory of historical continuity cannot fail to be struck by the extent of the differences between the world in 1870 and the world in 1900. In England, where the industrial revolution had begun early and advanced in a steady progression, the fundamental nature of the changes after 1870 is less apparent than elsewhere; but once we extend our vision to cover the whole world, their revolutionary character is beyond dispute. Even in continental Europe, with perhaps the sole exception of Belgium, industrialisation was a product of the last quarter rather than of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century; it was a consequence, rather than a concomitant, of the 'railway age', which by 1870 had provided the continent with anew system of communications. Across the Atlantic the civil war had proved a major stimulus to industrialisation; but it was after the ending of - the civil war in 1865 and the uneasy post-war interlude spanned by the presidencies of General Grant (1868-76) that the great industrial expansion began which transformed beyond recognition the society de Tocqueville had known and described. When in 1869 the first railroad to span the American continent was completed at a remote spot in Utah, the United States 'ceased to be an Atlantic country in order to become a continental nation' of a new, highly industrialised pattern.

What happened in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was not, however, simply an expansion of the process of industrialisation which had begun in England a century earlier until it became world-wide. I have already referred to the distinction between the first industrial revolution and the second, or (as it is sometimes called) between the 'industrial' and the 'scientific' revolutions. It is, of course, a clumsy distinction, which does less than justice to the intricacy of the historical facts; but it is a real one. The industrial revolution in the narrower sense – the revolution of coal and iron - implied the gradual extension of the use of machines, the employment of men, and children in factories, a fairly steady change from a population mainly of agricultural workers to a population mainly engaged in making things in factories and distributing them when they were made. It was a change that 'crept on', as it were, 'unawares', and its immediate impact, as Sir John Clapham made clear, can easily be exaggerated. The second industrial revolution was different. For one thing, it was far more deeply scientific, far less dependent on the 'inventions' of 'practical' men with little if any basic scientific training. It was concerned not so much to improve and increase the existing as to introduce new commodities. It was also far quicker in its impact, far more prodigious in its results, far more revolutionary in its effects on people's lives and outlook. And finally, though coal and iron were still the foundation, it could no longer be called the revolution of coal and iron. The age of coal and iron was succeeded, after 1870, by the age of steel and electricity, of oil and chemicals.

The technical aspects of this revolution do not concern us here, except in so far as it is necessary in order to understand its effects outside the spheres of industry, science, and technology. It would nevertheless be difficult to deny that the primary differentiating factor, marking off the new age from the old, was the impact of scientific and technological advance on society, both national and international. Even on the lowest level of practical everyday living it is surely significant that so many of the common-place objects which we regard as normal concomitants of civilised existence today - the internal combustion engine, the telephone, the microphone, the gramophone, wireless, telegraphy, the electric lamp, mechanised public transport, pneumatic lyres, the bicycle, the typewriter, cheap mass-circulation newsprint, the first of the synthetic fibres, artificial silk, and the first of the synthetic plastics, Bakelite - all made their appearance in this period, and many of them in the fifteen years between 1867 and 1881; and although it was only after 1914, in response to military requirements, that intensive aircraft development began, the possibility of adapting the petrol-driven internal combustion engine to the aeroplane was successfully demonstrated by the brothers Wright in 1903. Here, as elsewhere, there was necessarily a time-lag before the problems of large-scale production were solved, and some of the things we have come to regard as normal - radio and television among them - obviously belong to a later phase. Nevertheless, it can fairly be said that, on the purely practical level of daily life, a person living today who was suddenly put back into the world of 1900 would find himself on familiar ground, whereas if he returned to 1870, even in industrialised Britain, the differences would probably be more striking than the similarities. In short, it was around 1900 that industrialisation began to exert its influence on the living conditions of the masses in the west of such an extent that is hardly possible today to realise the degree to which even the well-to-do in the previous generation had been compelled to make shift.

The basic reason for this difference is that few of the practical inventions listed above were the consequence of a steady piecemeal development or improvement of existing processes; the overwhelming majority resulted from new materials, new sources of power, and above all else from the application of scientific knowledge to industry. Down to 1850, for example, steel 'was almost a semi-precious material' with a world production of eighty thousand tons, of which Great Britain made half. The discoveries of Bessemer, of Siemens, and of Gilchrist and Thomas, completely transformed the situation, and by 1900 production had reached 28 million tons. At the same time the quality, or rather the toughness, of the metal was vastly improved by the addition of nickel - a result only possible as a consequence of a process of extracting nickel discovered by Ludwig Mond in 1890. Thus, for all practical purposes, nickel may be accounted anew addition to the range of industrial metals, though it had, of course, been in small demand before. The same applies even more directly to aluminium, which had hitherto been too expensive to be put to common use. With the introduction of the electrolytic process, developed in 1886, its production became a commercial proposition and anew constructional material which was soon to be of first-rate importance - for example, in the nascent aircraft industry – became readily available for the first time.

These advances, and others of a similar character, which were themselves the foundation for further progress, were the result of more fundamental changes still: namely, the introduction of electricity as anew source of light, heat, and power, and the transformation of the chemical industry. Electrolysis, so important in the extraction of caustic soda, only became a practical proposition when electric power became generally available; and the same was true of other electrochemical developments. The electrical and chemical industries of the late nineteenth century were therefore not only the first industries to originate specifically in scientific discovery, but in addition they had an unprecedented impact, both in the speed with which their effects were felt and in the range of other industries they affected. A third new industry with the same revolutionary qualities was petroleum. Here was a source of power equivalent to coal and electricity, and later the raw material of the vast and extending range of petrochemicals.

From this point of view the foundation of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company in 1810 may be regarded in many ways as the symbol of the opening of a new age. By 1897, according to the celebrated American character, Mr. Dooley, Standard Oil had a branch in every hamlet in America from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, and by this date - although the internal combustion engine was still in its infancy - the United States was already exporting oil to the annual value of $60 million. The impact of electricity was even more spectacular, its stages being marked by Siemen's invention of the dynamo in 1867, Edison's invention of the incandescent bulb in 1879, the opening of the world's first electric power plant in New York in 1882, the establishment of AEG in Germany in 1883, and the construction of the first hydro-electric plant in Colorado in 1890. Even as late as 1850 no one would have foretold the exploitation of electricity as a large-scale source of power; but when it passed into common use, the face of the world was changed. 'Communism', Lenin was shortly to say, 'equals Soviet power plus electrification.'

(G. Barraclough: An Introduction to Contemporary History. Pitman)