dreadnought and super-dreadnought battleships, combining heavy guns and armour plate with analogue computers, elaborate range-finders, radio, oil-burning boilers, steam turbines, and much else, were the creation of the Royal Navy and private arms industry, which was clearly investing in research before the Great War. In industry more generally, there were many examples of laboratories being established for the development of new products and processes. Sheffield steel provides a clear example of the development of research before 1914 in a field usually condemned for technical backwardness. In political discussions, technical experts were heard at the highest levels, and some political-intellectual movements, for example the Fabian Society, embraced a notably scientistic form of politics. Party leaders with an interest in science included R. B. Haldane, the noted liberal lawyer (and brother of the physiologist J. S. Haldane), who was a leading figure in university reform, army reform, and the law; and on the conservative side was Arthur Balfour, who was closely connected to Cambridge science. Moreover, a strongly nationalistic/imperialistic, technocratic, and anti-democratic scientific lobby existed in the Edwardian years: national efficiency was the watchword for many reform campaigns, including the eugenics movement which sought to limit the reproduction of the lowest classes, attributing their plight to biological, transmissible inferiority. Unlike the United States, British eugenics was mostly about class rather than race though Jewish immigration was an issue. Many public health doctors regarded – talk of national degeneration as mythical, and British eugenicists preferred to segregate
dreadnought and super-dreadnought battleships, combining heavy guns and armour plate with analogue computers, elaborate range-finders, radio, oil-burning boilers, steam turbines, and much else, were the creation of the Royal Navy and private arms industry, which was clearly investing in research before the Great War. In industry more generally, there were many examples of laboratories being established for the development of new products and processes. Sheffield steel provides a clear example of the development of research before 1914 in a field usually condemned for technical backwardness. In political discussions, technical experts were heard at the highest levels, and some political-intellectual movements, for example the Fabian Society, embraced a notably scientistic form of politics. Party leaders with an interest in science included R. B. Haldane, the noted liberal lawyer (and brother of the physiologist J. S. Haldane), who was a leading figure in university reform, army reform, and the law; and on the conservative side was Arthur Balfour, who was closely connected to Cambridge science. Moreover, a strongly nationalistic/imperialistic, technocratic, and anti-democratic scientific lobby existed in the Edwardian years: national efficiency was the watchword for many reform campaigns, including the eugenics movement which sought to limit the reproduction of the lowest classes, attributing their plight to biological, transmissible inferiority. Unlike the United States, British eugenics was mostly about class rather than race – though Jewish immigration was an issue. Many public health doctors regarded talk of national degeneration as mythical, and British eugenicists preferred to segregate
Edgerton_Pickstone_Cambridge_History_of_Science_2017_FINAL.docx