Remarkably, the classification of science is only now being studied historically. The introduction specifies this book’s question: What made applied science seem such a potent economic, cultural, and political elixir in the United Kingdom for many decades and then saw it superseded? The book explores the meaning of the term that gave it such potency using five tools: institutions, narratives, sociotechnical imaginaries, concepts, and ideologies. The term has epistemic connotations; it has been promoted and blamed for its science policy implications, and cultural reality once weighed heavily. The book explores the relationship between ‘applied science’ and ‘technology’ with their different emphases to describe the space between pure science and the market. The argument has three parts: the nineteenth-century concern with pedagogy, the early twentieth century as attention shifted to research, and the period after World War Two in which the visibility of applied science first rose and then collapsed.

This chapter discusses the critical role of discourse in politics, highlighting the benefits to development advocates that accrue when the voices of concerned citizens are silenced. Seeking consent for industrial development has always been a game of claimsmaking, involving what Sheila Jasanoff refers to as “sociotechnical imaginaries” designed to solicit endorsement for particular development pathways. But behind the curtain of overt claimsmaking lay efforts to keep certain claims out of the limelight, when those claims may be perceived as particularly threatening to development. Davidson explores the manifold strategies employed by development advocates to silence concerned rural residents in southern Alberta, where natural gas reserves are being extracted through hydraulic fracturing, a technique associated with a host of environmental, climate, and health risks.