By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, what Landes called “the exhaustion of the technological possibilities of the Industrial Revolution” had set in.  The new scientific-technical revolution which replenished the stock of technological possibilities had a conscious and purposive character largely absent from the old.  In place of spontaneous innovation indirectly evoked by the social processes of production came the planned progress of technology and product design.  This was accomplished by means of the transformation of science itself into a commodity bought and sold like the other implements and labors of production.  From an “external economy,” scientific knowledge has become a balance-sheet item.  Like all commodities, its supply is called forth by demand, with the result that the development of materials, power sources, and processes has become less fortuitous and more responsive to the immediate needs of capital.  The scientific-technical revolution, for this reason, cannot be understood in terms of specific innovations--as in the case of the Industrial Revolution, which may be adequately characterized by a handful of key inventions--but must be understood rather in its totality as a mode of production into which science and exhaustive engineering investigations have been integrated as part of ordinary functioning,  The key innovation is not to be found in chemistry, electronics, automatic machinery, aeronautics, atomic physics, or nay of the products of these science-technologies, but rather in the transformation of science itself into capital (114-115).