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Science usually precedes the formal and systematic application of science. As craft develops in a parallel thread, commercial interests (or military interests?) and production lead to the joining of all these threads to produce true engineering."
I would actually take this a step further and argue that has only been *at all* true relatively recently, i.e. within the last few centuries, reaching its greatest apotheosis in the development of atomic weapons, where we went from some highly abstruse physics to strategic weapon systems within a few decades. Even today, it is only true some of the time. A linear model of technological progress (although popular with scientific advocacy organizations like, say, the American [Insert Discipline Here] Society), where fundamental research funding goes in one end and consumer electronics or clinical therapies pop out the other end, is only a partial picture at least, and discounts the existence of engineering research as anything other than some pale version of applied science. (One could write at length about the social implications of the hierarchy thus conjured, but let's put a pin in that for now.)
For example, we didn't develop thermodynamics, and then work out steam engines. That technology was already flourishing and maturing, and the Industrial Revolution well under way, before Carnot turned his attention to internal and external combustion engines. Telegraphy and telephony were vigorous, commercially vital, and world-spanning technologies long before Claude Shannon birthed Information Theory as we know it on Ma Bell's dime. In our current era, general anesthesia is another banner example. General anesthesia is a mature technology—you can go to a hospital and get safely put under for just however long is required. Yet we have no scientific idea how it works—rather, studies of the application of anesthesia is being used to fuel neuroscience.
This is not to say that thermodynamics and information theory were not vital to later development of combustion engines or telecom networks, or that neuroscience discoveries will not led to better anesthetics, but simply to say that science exists as one potential feedback loop among several in technological development, and the whole shebang need not be initiated or paralleled by scientific research to develop to a "true" engineering stage.
Stephen