History, Modern -- 19th century; Nineteenth century
One of the first great men to take a different view was Francis Bacon.
Macaulay, in his famous essay, quotes him as saying: “Philosophy is the
relief of man’s estate, and the endowment of the human race with new
powers; increasing their pleasures and mitigating their sufferings.”
These noble words seem to anticipate the famous definition of civil
engineering, embodied by Telford in the charter of the British
Institution of Civil Engineers: “Engineering is the art of controlling
the great powers of nature for the use and convenience of man.”
The seed sown by Bacon was long in producing fruit. Until the laws of
nature were better known, there could be no practical application of
them. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a great intellectual
revival took place. In literature appeared Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant,
Hume, and Goethe. In pure science there came Laplace, Cavendish,
Lavoisier, Linnæus, Berzelius, Priestley, Count Rumford, James Watt,
and Dr. Franklin. The last three were among the earliest to bring
about a union of pure and applied science. Franklin immediately applied
his discovery that frictional electricity and lightning were the same
to the protection of buildings by lightning-rods. Count Rumford (whose
experiments on the conversion of power into heat led to the discovery
of the conservatism of energy) spent a long life in contriving useful
inventions.
James Watt, one of the few men who have united in themselves knowledge
of abstract science, great inventive faculties, and rare mechanical
skill, changed the steam-engine from a worthless rattletrap into
the most useful machine ever invented by man. To do this he first
discovered the science of thermodynamics, then invented the necessary
appliances, and finally constructed them with his own hands. He was a
very exceptional man. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there
were few engineers who had received any scientific education. Most of
them worked by their constructive instincts, like beavers, or from
experience only. It took a lifetime to educate such an engineer, and
few became eminent until they were old men.
Now there is in the profession a great army of young men, most of them
graduates of technical schools, good mathematicians, and well versed
in the art of experimenting. The experiments of undergraduates on
cements, concrete, the flow of water, the impact of metals, and the
steam-engine, have added much to the general stock of knowledge.
One of the present causes of progress is that all discoveries are
published at once in technical journals and in the daily press. The
publication of descriptive indexes of all scientific and engineering
articles as fast as they appear is another modern contrivance.
Formerly scientific discoveries were concealed by cryptograms, printed
in a dead language, and hidden in the archives of learned societies.
Even so late as 1821 Oersted published his discovery of the uniformity
of electricity and magnetism in Latin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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