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Construction Construction has already received frequent mention in the discussion of metallurgy because steel had become a major construction material in the late nineteenth century. Construction nevertheless warrants further consideration because, at a time when its materials were far from standardized, it became an important focal point for the introduction of trained scientists into industry quite independently of the increasing reliance on structural members made of metal. Concrete has an unusually long history going back to the ancient Romans, who had even discovered how to prepare a cement that would harden under water.

Sometimes the reasons were simple. Mendel's writings, for example, were ignored for three decades, until his findings were independently rediscovered. 6 In the case of Faraday and electromagnetic induction, there were no major technological innovations for several decades after his announcement of the discovery of the phenomenon in 1831, with the exception of the telegraph. There were numerous reasons for this, both scientific and technological. Faraday's discovery did not profoundly advance scientific understanding of a complex phenomenon, nor did it unambiguously point to specific directions for exploitation.

Discovering or synthesizing a new material under laboratory conditions was usually the first of many steps toward the possession of a marketable final product. The discipline of chemical engineering arose during the period as a systematic way of designing and manufacturing industrial process techniques, without which many chemical discoveries would have remained no more than laboratory curiosities. Even when important technological breakthroughs were based on recent scientific developments, subsequent improvements in that field were not necessarily science based.