Economists of the 1820s and 1830s welded their perceptions of the advance of technology to their concepts of economic development. But what they accomplished did not have implications for only the theoretical sphere of political economy. It reached beyond political economy to a far-reaching cultural sphere which took up the machinery question in political economy's terms and made a doctrine of technological progress. This cultural sphere was the scientific movement. The early nineteenth-century scientific movement was also to link the perception of technology to the promotion of economic improvement. The scientific movement formed the meeting point between the popular discipline of political economy and an extensive underworld of popular science. This movement became an important avenue for the dissemination of vulgarised forms of political economy to the middle and working classes, for in it was assumed an ideology of economic growth in the technological vision which characterised the scientific culture of the time. The study of the economy met the study of science.

This chapter will move on from the analysis of political economy's perception of the machine to the analysis of the images of technological advance conjured up in the scientific movement. It will do this by examining in detail the tracts and societies of the Mechanics Institute Movement, and by demonstrating complementary concerns in the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Furthermore, this chapter will establish the material basis of this social context by linking the rhetoric and purpose of the Mechanics Institute Movement directly to concerns about the structure of the labour market.