INTRODUCTION

In his classic work, Modern Economic Growth: Rate Structure and Spread, Simon Kuznets wrote that the modern economic era was characterized by the sustained increase in total product per capita and per worker. The increase was based on a fundamental historical innovation, “the extended application of science to problems of economic production” (Kuznets 1966, 9). By the mid-nineteenth century scientific knowledge was clearly being applied in the fastest growing regions of the globe, but characterizing the role of science in the first decades of sustained economic growth in the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries is problematic. Only a few of the new technologies that were invented and applied in Britain, Belgium, France, and the United States employed contemporary scientific knowledge. In these early decades, if there was a link to science, most frequently it was in the use of a scientific experimental methodology when inventors and innovators tried new ideas and machines.

Yet, when many Western and Central European governments and manufacturing communities were confronted by the surging industrial economy of Great Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it was widely believed that an important means of fortifying their economies was to inaugurate and strengthen institutions that supported applied science.