The relationship between science and commerce plays a crucial but little understood role in modern society. For much of its life as a nation, the US entrepreneurs "imported" scientific work from European nations to develop American industry. Currently, Japanese entrepreneurs are said to be taking advantage of scientific and technological knowledge produced in the US and Europe. But how do entrepreneurs take advantage of scientific developments in order to establish commercially profitable technological enterprises? One way to get at this issue is to examine the historical record and this is what Professor Margaret Jacob is proposing to do. Professor Jacob is exploring the feasibility of undertaking a major research effort to rediscover the mental universe of the first generation of European industrial entrepreneurs during the first industrial revolution, that is from about 1770 to 1820. She is seeking to discover their education in applied as well as theoretical science, to examine the role played in their thinking by mechanical imagery and analogy, by the ideology of science in relation to discipline and work, order and design, progress and the control of humankind and nature. While examining the differences, she is seeking by means of a comparative approach that will focus upon archives in English, French, Dutch, Flemish and German, to understand the common assumptions of European entrepreneurs, that is the knowledge and values they shared, as well as what was distinctively national, regional and individual. Under this exploratory grant, Professor Jacob and a graduate student will be determining whether they can in fact achieve this understanding with the archival data available in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Germany.
