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From the early 18 th century, at the centre of the historical growth of knowledge and of industrial capitalism, there opened up a great divide between public and private knowledge. From its early beginnings new institutional forms of public knowledge were developed (encyclopaedias, public experimental demonstrations, development of shared mathematical languages across Europe)(Golinski, 1989, 1992; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985; Schaffer, 1982; Stewart, 1992). It could be argued that these were only tentative beginnings of the creation of a new „commons‟(David, 2001a). Seminal accounts that have highlighted the significance of scientific knowledge for the major historical transformation of industrial capitalism, however, have seriously underplayed the significance of the great divide (Mokyr, 2002; Landes, 2003). 1 During the 19 th, and even more the 20 th centuries, state investment in the production and …