This "practice-first, theory-later" pattern has been the norm rather than the exception. The steam engine predated thermodynamics. People bred plants and animals for thousands of years before Darwin or Mendel.
The few "top-down" examples where theory preceded application (like nuclear energy or certain modern pharmaceuticals) are relatively recent historical anomalies.
I see your point, but something still seems different. Yes we bred plants and animals, but we did not create them. Yes we did build steam engines before understanding thermodynamics but we still understood what they did (heat, pressure, movement, etc.)
Fun fact: we have no clue how most drugs works. Or, more precisely, we know a few aspects, but are only scratching the surface. We're even still discovering news things about Aspirin, one of the oldest drugs: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08626-7
> Yes we did build steam engines before understanding thermodynamics but we still understood what it did (heat, pressure, movement, etc.)
We only understood in the broadest sense. It took a long process of iteration before we could create steam engines that were efficient enough to start an Industrial Revolution. At the beginning they were so inefficient that they could only pump water from the same coal mine they got their fuel from, and subject to frequent boiler explosions besides.
There was a lot of physics already known, importance of insulation and cross-section, signal attenuation was also known.
The future Lord Kelvin conducted experiments. The two scientific advisors had a conflict. And the "CEO" went with the cheaper option.
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Thomson believed that Whitehouse's measurements were flawed and that underground and underwater cables were not fully comparable. Thomson believed that a larger cable was needed to mitigate the retardation problem. In mid-1857, on his own initiative, he examined samples of copper core of allegedly identical specification and found variations in resistance up to a factor of two. But cable manufacture was already underway, and Whitehouse supported use of a thinner cable, so Field went with the cheaper option.
"""
"Initially messages were sent by an operator using Morse code. The reception was very bad on the 1858 cable, and it took two minutes to transmit just one character (a single letter or a single number), a rate of about 0.1 words per minute."
Most of what we refer to as "engineering" involves using principles that flow down from science to do stuff. The return to the historic norm is sort of a return to the "useful arts" or some other idea.
This isn't quite true, although it's commonly said.
For steam engines, the first commercial ones came after and were based on scientific advancements that made them possible. One built in 1679 was made by an associate of Boyle, who discovered Boyle's law. These early steam engines co-evolved with thermodynamics. The engines improved and hit a barrier, at which point Carnot did his famous work.
This is putting aside steam engines that are mostly curiosities like ones built in the ancient world.
It's been there in programming from essentially the first day too. People skip the theory and just get hacking.
Otherwise we'd all be writing Haskell now. Or rather we'd not be writing anything since a real compiler would still have been to hacky and not theoretically correct.
I'm writing this with both a deep admiration as well as practical repulsion of C.S. theory.
The few "top-down" examples where theory preceded application (like nuclear energy or certain modern pharmaceuticals) are relatively recent historical anomalies.