The vast multinational scientific monoliths of the late-1990s bear little resemblance to the modest laboratories of the early 19th-century. Yet early in that century - when heat and electricity were still counted among the elements - changes were already under way that would revolutionize chemistry and physics into the big science of the late 20th-century, expanding tiny, makeshift laboratories into bustling research institutes. It also replaced the scientific amateurs and generalist savants of the early Victorian era with the professional specialist of contemporary physical science.