The Second Industrial Revolution, 1870

The first Industrial Revolution and most technological developments preceding it had little or no scientific base. It created a chemical industry with no chemistry, an iron industry without metallurgy, power machinery without thermodynamics. Engineering, medical technology, and agriculture until 1850 were pragmatic bodies of applied knowledge in which things were know to work, but rarely was it understood why they worked. This meant that often people did not know which things did not work: enormous amounts of energy and ingenuity were wasted on alchemy, perpetuum mobiles, the stones of the wise and fountains of youth. Only when science demonstrated that such pipedreams were impossible, research moved into a different direction. Moreover, even when things were known to work, they tended to be inflexible and slow to improve. It was often difficult to remove bugs, improve quality, and make products and processes more user friendly without a more profound understanding of the natural processes involved.