The Invisible Industrialist: Manufactures and the Production of Scientific Knowledge

This book discusses the role of industry in the construction of fundamental scientific knowledge. Industrial models of division of labor and industrially-produced instruments and reagents are now central to experimental practices, but they are often perceived as self-evident and this remain invisible. The book examines the effect of the longstanding association between industry and fundamental scientific research through an analysis of case studies taken from the history of physics, chemistry and biomedical sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These case-studies highlight the role of industrial methods in the production of standardized instruments and reagents which made possible the stabilization and the diffusion of locally-produced knowledge, and its influence as a provider of new organizational patterns and new division of labor within science.