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History of science and technology

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Academic study of history of science

History of science is an academic discipline with an international community of specialists. Main professional organizations for this field include the History of Science Society, the British Society for the History of Science, and the European Society for the History of Science.

Much of the study of the history of science has been devoted to answering questions about what science is, how it functions, and whether it exhibits large-scale patterns and trends.

History of the academic study of history of science

Histories of science were originally written by practicing and retired scientists, starting primarily with William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), as a way to communicate the virtues of science to the public.

Auguste Comte proposed that there should be a specific discipline to deal with the history of science.

The development of the distinct academic discipline of the history of science and technology did not occur until the early 20th century. Historians have suggested that this was bound to the changing role of science during the same time period.

After World War I, extensive resources were put into teaching and researching the discipline, with the hopes that it would help the public better understand both Science and Technology as they came to play an exceedingly prominent role in the world.

In the decades since the end of World War II, history of science became an academic discipline, with graduate schools, research institutes, public and private patronage, peer-reviewed journals, and professional societies.

Formation of academic departments

In the United States, a more formal study of the history of science as an independent discipline was initiated by George Sarton's publications, Introduction to the History of Science (1927) and the journal Isis (founded in 1912). Sarton exemplified the early 20th-century view of the history of science as the history of great men and great ideas. He shared with many of his contemporaries a Whiggish belief in history as a record of the advances and delays in the march of progress.

The study of the history of science continued to be a small effort until the rise of Big Science after World War II. With the work of I. Bernard Cohen at Harvard University, the history of science began to become an established subdiscipline of history in the United States.

In the United States, the influential bureaucrat Vannevar Bush, and the president of Harvard, James Conant, both encouraged the study of the history of science as a way of improving general knowledge about how science worked, and why it was essential to maintain a large scientific workforce.

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