The extensive changes of the last century in (1) the nature of production technologies and inputs generally, and (2) the composition of industrial output have raised the payoff to investment in scientific knowledge. The growing proximity of science and industry was intimately bound up with these changes. This chapter attempts to account for the growing application of science to industry by identifying the forces at work in the industrial sector that generated an increasing demand for scientific knowledge.

The relevant forces were not confined to small sectors of the economy nor were they restricted to a few distinctive technologies, although individual technologies (e.g., electrification) were sometimes extremely important. These forces of change were pervasive and expressed themselves in the most basic and elemental of economic activities. They were based, first, on a metallurgical revolution beginning after the Civil War, a revolution flowing from remarkable reductions in the cost of steel that were made possible by the application of the “old” science, as the preceding chapter argued.

This cheapening of steel made possible an immense increase in its use as a substitute for wood and iron, for example, in machinery and rails. Cheaper iron and steel were fundamental to the emergence of national markets for branded, packaged products because such markets required a low-cost transportation system that became available with a dense network of railroads in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.