Comment by MathMonkeyMan

I like to imagine that thermodynamics happened because industrial metallurgy and boiler design advanced to the point where people started asking "what are the fundamental constraints?"

There's a chance that it didn't actually happen that way, though.

edit: I also heard that Louis Pasteur did work for breweries, answering the question "Why do some batches come out nasty while most are fine, given the same inputs?"