Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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18 paul lawrence
Maria Quine, Population Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 1996). A
consideration of fears of demographic decline and proposed remedies in Italy, France, and
Germany.
Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City (London: Reaktion, 1998). An innovative exploration
of changes in the perception of night in Paris, London, and Berlin.
William H. Schnieder, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-
Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). An investigation of the
development of the eugenics movements in France.
Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar
Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002). A consideration of the British eugen-
ics movements.
Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis 1890–1940 (London: Mansell, 1984). A useful guide to the
rise of the metropolis, with essays on a range of cities.
Pat Thane, The Foundations of the Welfare State (Harlow: Longman, 1982). An informative
consideration of the subject in Britain, with a section of international comparisons.
Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism,
1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Locates eugenics and social
Darwinism in Germany in its wider social and political context.
Chapter Two
The Revolution in Science
Cathryn Carson
The age in which we live menaces with its unrest and its misfortune the values that for-
merly seemed to us secure; and if we take the political disorder as a measure for move-
ments in the foundations of thought, then the catastrophes of these decades suggest
that the weights of human thought are shifting and displacing the foundations. (Werner
Heisenberg, manuscript of 1942)
1
When Werner Heisenberg wrote these lines, he was looking back over one of modern
science’s most turbulent periods. In the space of a few decades beginning around
1900, the landscape of European science was transformed. Scientists and laymen alike
remarked on the change. In fact, many were inclined to call it a revolution. When
contemporary observers spoke of revolution, however, they knew what that meant
from experience outside of science. “After the catastrophe of the First World War,”
Heisenberg observed, “we recognized outside of science, too, that there were no
firm foundations for our existence, secure for all time.”
2
Like other revolutions, the revolution in early twentieth-century science was pre-
pared by a longer period of change. Its consequences carried forward past its nominal
end. Still, in exactly its flux, it had a coherence stretching from the turn of the century
to the end of World War II. This chapter takes up three aspects of the upheaval. First
is the content of science. These decades saw one revolutionary development after
another: in physics, Heisenberg’s own discipline; in the sciences of life; and in many
other scientific fields. This intellectual effervescence was fostered, secondly, by
changed social circumstances. The scientific enterprise had taken on its modern form
only in the half-century preceding; now it found itself expanded, intensified, and
unsettled. Thirdly, its consequences ramified – in industry, medicine, and warfare; in
popular consciousness; and in the ideological realm. As Heisenberg implied, the
changes in science were often tied into larger changes in the world around it. True,
scientific training was growing ever more specialized, and much research ever more
incomprehensible to outsiders. Yet manifold connections between science and society
were increasingly on display. No longer a small, esoteric venture, but a professional,
20 cathryn carson
institutionalized, and powerful force, science depended on its surroundings for intel-
lectual and material stimulation. It simultaneously drove change in a world ever more
dependent on it.
Ideas
When contemporaries spoke of revolutions in science, physics was often first in their
mind. In the space of two or three decades, an entirely new physics was erected,
superseding “classical” physics in a host of domains. First, just before the turn of the
century, wholly new forms of radiation were discovered. X-rays and radioactivity were
mysterious. Where did these rays come from, and what was their energy source? At
practically the same time, the electron, the first subatomic particle, was identified. If
the atom was previously assumed to be literally “uncuttable,” that could no longer
be true. Along with opening up new realms for experiment – the atom’s interior, and
within it the nucleus – these discoveries revealed that there were many more things
in the physical world than scientists had thought. They also raised an important pos-
sibility: would the familiar theories of nineteenth-century physics fail to describe the
new domains of experience?
While experimenters were preoccupied with these discoveries, their theoretical
colleagues were confronting equally radical change. In 1905 the young Albert Einstein
proposed his theory of relativity, reconstructing basic intuitions about space and
time. Ordinary experience suggested that space and time were separate, and all physics
to date was built on that assumption. However, using some fairly simple reasoning,
Einstein hypothesized that bodies moving at great velocity (near light speed) encoun-
tered the two woven together. Four-dimensional spacetime had counterintuitive
consequences: moving clocks should run slow, moving objects get shorter and
heavier, and the temporal order of events could change depending on how they were
observed. Yet these strange effects were seen to hold true in sensitive experiments.
The theory also showed that mass and energy were not stable quantities, but, just
like space and time, could be converted into one another according to the famous
equation E = mc
2
. This was not the end of the road, either. In 1915 Einstein pushed
the theory further by adding gravity. His general theory of relativity (building on
the “special” theory of 1905) suggested that the gravitational pull of heavy bodies
deformed the structure of spacetime itself. Compared with special relativity, the new
theory was mathematically much more complex. Testing its consequences was even
more subtle and difficult, involving tiny effects (such as the minute bending of a light
beam) due to extremely massive bodies like stars.
Other scientists were going beyond the old physics in a different way. Beginning
in 1900, physicists analyzing the light emitted by ordinary bodies revealed it to have
a characteristic particle-like chunkiness. Such a “quantum” aspect of light, as its dis-
coverer Max Planck called it, caught scientists by surprise. It conflicted directly with
the extraordinarily successful theory of electromagnetism, which described it as a
continuous wave. As explored by other scientists, led by Niels Bohr, the matter also
had deep ramifications for the physics of the atom. It was from atoms, after all, that
light was emitted as electrons jumped between energy levels. If only certain particle-
like packets of light could be emitted, then only certain electron energy levels were
allowed. As reasonable as this might seem, it went against the grain of previous physics
the revolution in science 21
– supposing one imagined an atom as a miniature solar system, with a nucleus at the
center and electrons orbiting around. But perhaps extending the quantum hypothesis
to the atom could explain some of its mysterious features. For example, Bohr sug-
gested, it might eventually account for chemical regularities in the periodic table of
elements, observationally secure but completely unexplained.
The argument also ran in the other direction: if light had particle-like aspects,
particles might have wave-like features as well. So an electron, rather than being best
described as a particle, might be most appropriately captured by a “wave function”
instead. By the mid-1920s an entirely new mechanics had been developed out of
these ideas. In fact, two different versions were proposed within a few months, by
Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Once the confusion was sorted out, the
result was properly named quantum mechanics. As construed by the “Copenhagen
Interpretation” (named after its Danish architect, Bohr), the wave function of
quantum mechanics never gave deterministic predictions for the future, but only
probabilistic ones. The theory was also fundamentally characterized by Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle. That is, in quantum mechanics it proved impossible to pin
down certain things (say, where a particle was located) without interfering with
knowledge of others (how fast it was moving). In a well-defined way, what an ex-
perimenter went looking for determined what he would find: if his apparatus was
suited to measure certain characteristics of a system, he would get definite values
for those features, but wash out other “complementary” aspects ordinarily presumed
to exist.
Not all physicists agreed with this interpretation, which made the quantum world
seem a very strange place. In fact, some of the theory’s own creators – Planck,
Einstein, and Schrödinger – rejected the view. However, the bulk of their colleagues
went along with the “Copenhagen” stance. Viewed together, relativity and quantum
mechanics then came to be seen as making up “modern physics,” in contrast to
the previous “classical” theories. Although those previous theories were not dis-
carded, just constrained in their validity, the changes certainly looked revolutionary.
Philosophically, they went to the core of what counted as science. Could science
legitimately give up determinism, the basis of causality, and with it the assumption
that known causes lead to certain effects? Could it restrict objectivity, the deep prin-
ciple that observations are independent of who is making the measurement? Many
physicists felt that they had to say yes.
Scientists might take or leave philosophy; they could not take or leave success.
Whatever the debate over its foundations, quantum mechanics proved marvelously
applicable in use. It was put to work in studies of the atom and ordinary matter (the
solid state). Then it was naturally applied to that exciting domain, nuclear physics,
as new experimental techniques blew it wide open in the 1930s. Understanding how
nuclei were held together, however, proved harder than understanding how they fell
apart. At least, this was the case after the discovery and explanation of nuclear fission
in 1939. That remarkable and unexpected finding was the ultimate result of a long-
term partnership between the nuclear chemist Otto Hahn and the nuclear physicist
Lise Meitner.
In the burgeoning life sciences, too, stunning developments also gave the impres-
sion of a domain on the march – even if, unlike in physics, there was no coherent
group of leaders or single, unifying story of revolutionary change. To start, an
22 cathryn carson
invisible world, too fine for human vision, was opened to scrutiny on several different
fronts. While a dizzying array of details remained to be explicated, it seemed that
microscopic explanations of the very processes of life were coming into view. By 1900,
bacteriology and microbiology (the study of microorganisms) had already moved
into high gear. Cell biology had picked out many constituents and substructures of
the basic unit of the organism, looking to connect them with cell function and with
organismal development. Cell biologists were now matched by a new breed of bio-
chemists, who used methods from organic chemistry to investigate the substances
and processes that kept organisms alive. In the post-1900 biochemical ferment, a
string of enzymes (biological catalysts) were isolated. Metabolic pathways were
described, culminating in the Krebs (citric acid) cycle, the final step of the processes
by which organisms break down their foodstuffs. The structure of proteins was clari-
fied, too, revealing that these all-important molecules were not special colloidal
agglomerations, but simply very large molecules with definite compositions.
Over and against advances in the microworld, and initially quite separate, was
the wide domain of macroscopic biological change. After Charles Darwin published
The Origin of Species in 1859, broadly evolutionary accounts of species change found
nearly universal acceptance in science. In that sense, Darwin’s work became the
foundation for practically everything that followed in a wide range of natural history
fields. Paleontologists used descent through modification to make sense of the fossil
record, while field naturalists studied the adaptation and geographical distribution
of species. Far more contentious, however, than the general notion of evolution
was Darwin’s specific explanation in terms of natural selection operating differentially
upon chance variations. In fact, around 1900, Darwinism in this strict sense was
rejected by the bulk of expert opinion. Doubting its adequacy to explain the observed
phenomena, many biologists hypothesized other mechanisms of evolutionary change.
Exactly because evolutionary explanations operated over a long time scale and were
founded on observation as much as experiment, the field was open for all sorts of
ideas. This made the study of heredity, adaptation, and species change exciting but
highly contentious.
Beginning in 1900, the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s long-forgotten experi-
ments on inheritance in pea plants gave a new impulse to these debates. By the 1910s,
breeding experiments paired with cell biology to establish a material basis for heredity.
When the American biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan identified chromosomes as the
genetic material, fully responsible for an organism’s palette of traits, a materialistic
explanation of variation and inheritance was enthroned, even if the path to the expres-
sion of visible traits was unknown. For some European scientists, this was a great
triumph; for others, a reductionistic diversion from the real questions of biological
interest (e.g., organismal development). Still, as interest in evolution revived and
strictly Darwinian explanations gained ground, the results suggested at just what level
any evolutionary process would ultimately have to operate. Over the next decades,
though not without controversy, that picture was filled out. The 1930s saw the rise
of mathematical population genetics, which analyzed gene frequencies in a variable
environment. This work gave tantalizing suggestions how macro and micro approaches
might ultimately be fused. By the early 1940s the grandly and appropriately named
“modern synthesis” was on offer. That theory finally linked large-scale evolution to
molecular genetics through a revitalized Darwinian natural selection.
the revolution in science 23
These developments touched some of science’s deepest questions. How do we
make sense of organic life’s striking regularities – or its remarkable diversity at all of
its scales? Indeed, how do we explain what it means to be living? A final frontier in
the life sciences pushed these questions one step further: how can we understand
human beings themselves as biological beings? As early twentieth-century biochem-
istry, endocrinology, and neurophysiology moved ahead, they took on deeply human
matters as topics of naturalistic research. Accounts of sensation, mind, or emotion
on a biological basis captured the imagination of many contemporaries. They claimed
territory over which humanistic disciplines had once held sway. As in anthropology
or experimental psychology (two fields outside the scope of this chapter), the life
sciences brought human beings under the microscope. They gave yet another occa-
sion for commentators to hymn science’s transformative results.
Science’s reach extended well beyond the most familiar examples. In these decades,
for instance, chemistry gained its hoped-for quantum foundation, and with it a new
account of bonds and valence. Why were certain combinations of atoms stable and
others not? The answer came nearly painlessly from their electrons’ behavior under
quantum mechanics. Reaction mechanisms were subjected to systematization, and
novel materials – the soon-to-be omnipresent plastics, artificial polymers like nylon
– were synthesized. On the grand scale, astronomy and cosmology took up the chal-
lenge posed by mathematical physics in Einstein’s field equations of 1915. Could the
origin and large-scale structure of the universe be described? The decades between
the two world wars found it newly possible to take on this issue, pairing Einstein’s
challenge with Edwin Hubble’s telescopic observations of a universe that was not
remotely static, but expanding at a rapid clip. With advances in nuclear physics in the
1930s, the life processes of stars also became fair game. The source of stellar energy
was identified in nuclear fusion, finally bringing an answer to an age-old question:
what makes the stars shine?
A scientist or a layman, surveying these fields and others, would have been
impressed by the depth and breadth of contemporary research. New fields found
their footing, as in ethology (the study of patterns in animal behavior in its natural
setting) or ecology (the science of the relationships between organisms and their
environment). At the interfaces between disciplines, hybrid fields sprang up, with
new coinages like oceanography and biophysics leading the way. And in the bread-
and-butter of scientific practice, in specialized research, enormous quantities of details
were filled in. For some observers, the rapid growth of knowledge and wild prolifera-
tion of specialties generated a feeling of crisis. How could a single person grasp it
all? How could a scientist stay abreast of developments outside a narrow subfield?
Even as interdisciplinarity was celebrated, fears of fragmentation were floated – though
not always, it bears remembering, by science’s yeoman practitioners who did the bulk
of the day-to-day research.
The Scientific Enterprise
If we want to understand why these decades were so phenomenally fruitful, we need
to look beyond individual advances. By the start of the twentieth century, no scientist
worked in isolation. Every intellectual accomplishment was enabled by a much larger
enterprise, whose structures and functioning have attracted increasing attention from
24 cathryn carson
historians. This enterprise of science – the people, institutions, and relationships
supporting it – was no more static than the ideas it sustained. Of course, something
we could timelessly call “science” was evident as far back as the Renaissance – but at
that time “scientists” (a term coined in the nineteenth century) were scarce on the
ground. Indeed, the foundations of the professional scientific enterprise, as we know
it today, were laid only in the half-century before 1900. The twentieth century’s first
decades took off from those beginnings – and built on them, strengthened them,
sometimes turned them upside down. We can trace these changes in the community
of scientific researchers, that community’s support system, and the national settings
that conditioned them both.
For the scientific community, to start, this was an era of consolidation and growth.
Good statistics are hard to come by, as no one thought to count scientists back then.
However, in 1900 a discipline like physics probably had a few thousand practitioners
worldwide.
3
Other fields’ figures are probably comparable, and the numbers would
increase substantially over the next decades. The larger proportion of these scientists
were located in Europe. Here, however, the pattern was changing. The major scien-
tific powers of 1900 – Germany and Britain, to a lesser degree France – were joined
by up-and-coming nations on the periphery – by Russia, the United States, and Japan.
In the early decades of the century, most of the latter countries’ scientists still got
their training in one of the big three. By the 1930s, they were giving their erstwhile
teachers a run for their money.
Already by this period, the career path to becoming a scientist was well-
institutionalized and formalized. It required graduate education in a university or
higher technical school, leading to an academic degree roughly comparable to the
German PhD (doctorate). A budding researcher would necessarily choose a specialty
and an established scientist to train with, completing a thesis on a project of inde-
pendent research. Thereafter three main options were open: employment in an
industrial laboratory, in government service, or back in higher education. The age of
the amateur, the self-trained, or the polymath was nearly over; science was now a
credentialed profession. That is not to say that it was as socially established as, say,
medicine or the law. However, if scientists as everyday figures were still somewhat
exotic, they became increasingly less so as their numbers grew.
One thing was constant: the scientific community of the early twentieth century
remained overwhelmingly male. Until sometime around the turn of the century,
women were officially barred from studying in many European universities; they
could only audit courses with male professors’ forbearance. Then when women did
gain scientific education and employment, they were often subjected to discrimina-
tion or relegated to a technician’s rank. There were exceptions, however. Women
found more acceptance in some fields, though often less established and prestigious
ones. The career of Marie Curie (née Sklodowska), Polish-born and Paris-trained,
told of both the hardships and achievements of women in science.
4
For her work on
radioactivity Marie Curie was celebrated as the world’s first double Nobel laureate,
recognized in 1903 and 1911. Curie’s daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, split a Nobel
Prize with her husband in 1935. Ironically, nuclear physics was exactly the kind of
marginal field where women could prosper.
The scientific community did not flourish in a vacuum, of course. It drew its
strength from a support system reaching outside its bounds. This support system,
the revolution in science 25
too, deserves our attention, as it displays the fine mesh of threads tying science to
the society surrounding it. In its practical existence, for instance, science could now
count on a nascent commercial network specialized to its needs. That network
extended from publishers of specialist journals (the main venue of scientific publica-
tion) to suppliers of test tubes and laboratory rats. There was money to be made in
stocking research laboratories. In the same way, science’s reward system was publicly
crowned by titles, peerages, and prizes. Along with the internal forms of recognition,
scientific fame was partially enacted in the modern mass media.
Most important among ways in which science drew upon external resources, of
course, were investments by outside parties who expected returns. The institutions
of science were scarcely built by scientists alone; and in institutional terms, especially,
this period was a watershed for European science. The later nineteenth century
had nurtured three main sites: research universities, government bureaux, and indus-
trial labs. The twentieth century’s first decades not only intensified those trends, but
experimented with alternative institutions as well. The model of the day was the
extra-university research institute, typically established at some distance from state
and private interests, usually informally serving both. Europe’s prime examples were
the Pasteur Institutes in microbiology, established in 1888 and by now spreading
throughout France (and its colonies); and the network of Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes,
created beginning in 1911, the incarnation of late imperial Germany’s scientific ambi-
tions, passed on to the Weimar republic and then to the Third Reich.
5
Still more
radical experiments were tried in the Soviet Union. By the 1930s, the old tsarist
Academy of Sciences had been Bolshevized and reconstructed in the service of social-
ist science. Eventually built into a vast network of institutes in a wide spectrum of
fields, the Academy was made over as the crucial institution of research. Its structure
mirrored the Communist Party’s centralizing ambitions and facilitated its centralized
control.
6
As the examples suggest, the role of the state here was central. Except for industrial
research, most science was carried out in the public sector – for across Europe, with
the historic exception of Britain, universities, too, were largely state-run. However,
outside of the science-enthused Soviet Union, governmental attitudes toward finan-
cially supporting science remained mixed. For reasons of national prestige, competi-
tion, and power, Europe’s scientific powers tried out new ways to invest in research:
for instance, funding bodies were erected with budgets provided mainly by the central
government, as in Germany or in France, or research councils and even a Department
of Scientific and Industrial Research, as in Britain.
7
In practice, state support for
science rarely satisfied their researchers, who publicly deplored the small fraction of
government expenditures devoted to science. The cause of the situation was not so
much disrespect for science, however, as other, more pressing obligations. Also
involved was a more limited construal of the state’s responsibility to underwrite
technical innovation. The era of huge R&D budgets had not yet arrived.
These considerations have finally led historians to ask how science was shaped by
its national context. This may seem odd, as science is conventionally understood to
be international. However, a highly nationalistic era of European history highlighted
science’s rootedness in its national settings. The Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901,
provided a perfect occasion.
8
From the start, the prizes were treated as tokens in an
international contest. (Indeed, some countries’ nominators caucused privately to
26 cathryn carson
coordinate the suggestions they were sending to Stockholm.) The naming of a new
laureate was cause for national self-congratulation, and the press kept running tallies
of their countries of origin. To no one’s surprise (and the dismay of the French),
Germany and Britain took top honors. In this way the prizes became a ready metric
for a nation’s scientific standing. They could also cause international furor. When the
Nobel Foundation saw fit immediately after World War I to recognize the German
chemist Fritz Haber, it honored a man who stood on the Allies’ list for war crimes
prosecution. The inverse problem arose in the late 1930s: after the Peace Prize was
bestowed on the concentration camp inmate Carl von Ossietzky, several German
scientists were compelled by Hitler to reject their prizes in science.
Clearly, science could not escape international tensions, nor could it avoid the
effects of the continent’s political convulsions. As in Europe as a whole, World War
I deeply divided its scientists, as the atmosphere for international cooperation was
poisoned by manifestos and charges of partisanship. A few pacifists, like Einstein,
deplored the developments, but they were isolated from their peers. Again, after the
armistice and the peace settlement, new international scientific organizations were
founded, paralleling political bodies like the League of Nations. However, scientists
from the former Central Powers were excluded until 1926. Tensions escalated again
after 1933. The Nazis’ rise to power had enormous consequences for German science.
Some scientists emphatically supported the new regime, a small number opposed it,
and many simply went ahead with their business. The latter option was unavailable
to Germany’s Jewish scientists, however. Because so many research institutions were
subject to civil service rules, huge numbers of Jewish researchers were fired or fled.
The resultant emigration drew away many of the country’s leading minds – including
such luminaries as Lise Meitner, Fritz Haber, and Hans Krebs; Albert Einstein had
already left early in 1933 in disgust. The transfer of scientific talent gave a great boost
to other countries, feeding in the greatest numbers into an American scientific com-
munity already on the rise. Through the Third Reich, some fields of research in
Germany suffered greatly, while others flourished, depending on how adeptly their
representatives wangled support. Giving the political repression an ideological edge,
a few Nazi scientists – two Nobel laureates among them – even advocated an “Aryan”
science in opposition to “Jewish” (abstract, theoretical) thinking.
9
On the whole, the
German case made plain just how tightly science’s fate could be tied to the national
political setting. Other examples made the same point. From exuberant celebration
in the Soviet Union’s first years to blunt-minded demands for a dialectical materialist
physics, even to arrests and murders in the Great Terror, science could not be much
of a refuge from the era’s political storms.
Even in far more peaceful domains, the national conditioning of science sometimes
made itself felt. As any scientist might notice, and as historians have investigated
with much curiosity, particular research traditions flourished in some countries, but
found few advocates elsewhere. Before World War II, population genetics had only
a scattered European audience outside of Britain; the philosophical excursions of
quantum physicists, by contrast, carried much further in German-speaking central
Europe than elsewhere. These differences, historians typically argue, are best under-
stood not as national bias, but as a side-effect, at least in part, of how the scientific
enterprise works. Recruitment and training of young scientists, mechanisms of profes-
sional advancement, fora in which conjectures were stamped as promising or bizarre
the revolution in science 27
– each of these played out within national contexts, leaving their mark on the ideas
of science.
Impact and Implications
The history of science is also the history of its ramifications in society. Those ramifi-
cations can take many forms. For the twentieth century, they have been conceived
first of all as practical applications: in technology and industry, public health and
medicine, and a multiplicity of regulatory and governmental tasks. Ideas from and
about science also radiated into popular consciousness, educated discourse, cultural
commentary, and ideological debate. Indeed, interwar Europe produced some of
the century’s most influential intellectual interpretations of science. While the
venues varied, these different forms of impact were not disconnected. That is, scien-
tists’ technical usefulness provoked contemporary comment; so did their intellectual
daring. Responsible for both was the manner in which they upset familiar ways of
thinking and acting, presenting themselves as the heralds of the new. Science’s boost-
ers claimed to represent the up-to-date, modern, and (sometimes) solely legitimate
way of doing things; their calls for transformation were frequently strident and shrill.
That aggressive stance certainly mirrored their views of their venture. Along with
admirers, however, it earned them critics as well.
In the visibility of its effects, the second industrial revolution of the later nineteenth
century was the starting point for the wider impact of science. Around the 1870s,
industrial research laboratories began to appear in large corporations. After the turn
of the century, systematically scientized innovation spread to smaller firms, while the
interwar economic boom swelled the ranks of scientists in huge enterprises like
Siemens, Phillips, ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), and I. G. Farben (formed from
the merger of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and three other companies) into the thou-
sands.
10
The main motive for the expensive commitment to research was the patent
system, and the extent of investment in science-based innovation tracked different
countries’ patent protections. Key fields where scientists made a difference were
electrotechnology, including telephony and wireless (radio) as well as lighting and
power; and fine chemicals, starting from dyestuffs and moving into pharmaceuticals,
photochemicals, and pesticides. Fortunes and industries were built on these dis-
coveries. So was science’s reputation as a revolutionary force. Yet incremental scien-
tific changes may have been just as significant, in less spectacular fields from textile
manufacture to brewing. Behind the advertising triumphalism stood also the ideal-
izing hope that scientific inventiveness would make human life easier, happier, and
more rewarding. Whether the link understood to exist between science and technol-
ogy always worked in science’s favor can be doubted, however. Anti-industrial screeds
of the early twentieth century took aim at science as part of the package; and the
world economic crisis of the late 1920s and 1930s called into question the dream of
leisure and prosperity founded on capitalist production.
Similar tendencies were evident in medicine and public health – both in percep-
tions of science’s efficacy, and in many cases its actual results. Building on the bacte-
riological revolution of the later nineteenth century, the germ theory of disease traced
illnesses to specific microorganisms rather than general health or environmental con-
ditions. The discoveries of the bacilli responsible for tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid