The revolutions that never happened: Second Industrial Revolutions, the Scientific Revolution and the Scientific-Technical-Revolution, 1900–1970

Speaker: David Edgerton (King's College London)
Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science

While historians might debate the usefulness of the concept of the Scientific, Industrial, Chemical and other revolutions, some have simply been wiped out, both by historical processes and by historians. Inspired by a remark by Eric Hobsbawm I will show how science-based Second Industrial Revolutions tend to be found in the present, obliterating previous ones. But I also show, following Ernst Homburg, that the post-war Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Scientific Revolution, or the Scientific-Technical-Revolution, disappeared by being pushed into the past, the first to the late 19th century, the second to the 17th, with only the last remaining part of the canon.