Scientific Theory and Technological Testability: Science, Dynamometers, and Water Turbines in the 19th Century

An increasingly central concern among historians of technology is the nature of technological knowledge as distinct both from science and from the design of specific artifacts. This concern is reflected in diverse scholarship addressing such issues as the relationships among scientific investigation, technological research, and the process of innovation;1 the creation of technological knowledge in engineering science through such specifically technological methodologies as parameter variation and through the application of technologically relevant concepts such as control-volume theory;2 and the sociological and epistemological relationship between scientific and technological knowledge.3 At the same time, recent research by Edwin T. Layton, Norman Smith, Louis Hunter, and Terry Reynolds has provided basic