This chapter addresses the post–World War Two reshaping of models of applied science and technology coexisting in education, research policy, and the management of innovation. The shortage of skilled personnel highlighted the questions of training and secrecy and the boundary between applied science and technology. In the years after World War Two, the United States held a hegemonic scientific and cultural place, which meant that its language and issues came to be influential across the Atlantic. However, British authorities, steeped in domestic experience and tradition, reconstituted as they ingested, and Bush’s Science – The Endless Frontier was read differently in London than in Washington, DC. The case study of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) highlights institutional tensions between those identifying with technology and those identifying with applied science, but also highlights how sharply rising investment in research sustained a variety of models of the knowledge required for industrial development, and temporarily eased their coexistence.

"When the first underground and submarine telegraph cables were laid around 1850, engineers noticed that sharp signals sent in at one end emerged at the other badly blurred and appreciably delayed. This “retardation” grew worse on longer cables and threatened to make operation of the proposed 2000-mile Atlantic line unprofitably slow. Retardation presented British physicists and engineers with both an intriguing physical phenomenon and a serious practical problem, and they studied it closely from the 1850s on.

Latimer Clark, a prominent British cable engineer, brought retardation to Michael Faraday’s attention late in 1853, and Faraday’s published account of the phenomenon served to publicize both retardation and the ideas about the electromagnetic field that he invoked to explain it. Faraday’s paper led William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) to reprint two papers on field theory he had written in the 1840s, and later in 1854 a related cable question prompted Thomson to work out what became the accepted mathematical theory of signal transmission. Moreover, it was at just this time, and largely under Thomson’s guidance, that James Clerk Maxwell first took up the study of electricity, with results that were to transform electromagnetic theory."