Science, technology and education: England in 1870. The Wilkins Lecture, 1976

Abstract

Abstract My lecture is about the diffusion of science and technology, through education, into the culture and economy of a society. As the journal Nature wrote early in 1870, ‘Education and science so naturally associate themselves in the mind that it is hardly possible to discuss the latter as independent of the former’. Here historians of science find common territory with economic and social historians, political historians, historians of education and with some eminent scientists; Lord Ashby has been a notable pioneer in the subject. Why 1870? Because it is one of the dates which form natural breaks in history books. Momentous upheavals were occurring in the power structure of the world. The Franco-Prussian War in 1870, so short, yet so far-reaching in its consequences, was followed by the unification of Germany. Italy too was unified in 1870. Japan had thrown off feudalism. The United States had just emerged from the Civil War, its unity symbolized by the opening of the first railway line linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans

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