Electrical technoscience and physics in transition, 1880–1920

This paper examines the shifting relationship between the academic disciplines of physics and electrical engineering in Britain c.1900, focusing on their shared engagement with new electrical technologies of lighting, power, and telecommunications. It examines these disciplines’ common cultures of patenting before the Great War, showing how “electricians” in these intersecting domains used patents to secure financial support and protection for their innovations. However, this common culture was put under strain by the attempts of physicists such as Oliver Lodge, to decouple their electrical researches from technological matters in order to pursue an agenda of so-called “pure science.” This campaign was made especially difficult by the strategic focus on “applied science” that emerged during the Great War. We show how a newly legitimized programme of state funding for electrical research both during and after the war led to academic physics and electrical engineering dropping their reliance on patenting by the 1920s, and in the process becoming autonomous sciences—each erasing stories of their former collaboration from disciplinary memories.

► Relations between British academic physics and electrical engineering changed c.1900.
► Patenting was common practice in both disciplines before the First World War.
► WWI boosted physicists’ campaign for a ’pure science’ independent of application.
► State funding for “applied” research was welcomed mostly by electrical engineers.
► After the war the two disciplines proceeded as two independent sciences.