This chapter explores the impact of science and technology research capacity and educational change on industrial performance in the century and a half since 1850. Analysis covers four countries remarkable for their industrial achievement, England, France, Germany, and the United States. It is important to note that for each of these countries, economic growth has often been organized around contrasting systems of education and research.

Today, most scholars agree that education, as a general phenomenon, does not constitute a linear, direct determinant of industrial growth. For example, Fritz Ringer has shown that although German and French education had numerous parallels in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as per capita size of cohorts, the economic development of the two nations was extremely different. Peter Lundgreen, who has compared the size of France’s and Germany’s engineering communities and the character of training, has come to much the same conclusion. Robert Fox and Anna Guanine, in a comparative study of education and industry in six European countries and the United States for the pre-World War I decades, demonstrate that although nations had contrasting rates of industrial growth, their educational policies and practices nevertheless frequently converged.

The existence of a direct and linear connection between research and industry is also viewed as doubtful today. For example, during the decades immediately preceding and following World War I, very few French firms possessed any research capacity, and with scant exception, neither was applied research present inside the educational system. Still, France’s industry advanced at a steady albeit slow pace, thanks largely to alternative innovation-acquisition practices, such as patent procurement, licensing, and concentration on low-technology sectors.