Quotes from Richard Rhodes

The internal combustion engine evolved from the steam engine. Both use hot gases expanding within an enclosed cylinder to supply power. The gas in a steam engine is steam, generated externally by heating water in a boiler and introduced through a valve into the cylinder, where it expands and pushes on a piston connected to a rod that transfers the motion outside the engine to turn a pair of wheels.

Such a choice—to tolerate the brutalization of children as we continue to do—is equally violent and equally evil, and we reap what we sow.

Alternating current won the War of the Currents. Even Edison grudgingly took up manufacturing the equipment to produce it. Motors large and small, all the way down to motors for individual sewing machines, began replacing the shafts and belts that transferred power inefficiently from steam engines. Country people still read and cooked with kerosene, but electric lights went on in the cities of the world.

I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.

Once violence is understood to be a behavior, not a pathology, the fact that it was responsive to social pressures no longer seems mysterious.

Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution.

He wore sunglasses and held a stopwatch in one hand and a piece of welder's glass in the other. The welder's glass was stockroom issue: Lincoln Super-visibility Lens, Shade #10.

Teller prepared himself further at Compañia Hill: "I put on a pair of dark glasses. I pulled on a pair of heavy gloves. With both hands I pressed the welder's glass to my face, making sure no stray light could penetrate around it. I then looked straight at the aim point.

Bohr had searched the forbidding territory of the atom when he was young and discovered multiple structures of paradox; now he searched it again by the dark light of the energy it released and discovered profound political change.

Less obviously, the resurgence of capital punishment in modern America exposes the insecurity of U.S. authorities with the increase in violent crime, which challenges government monopoly of violence.

And most generally and profoundly: "The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.

Mechanical proficiency and practical gadgets in America counterbalanced to an extent the beauty of Italy.

Rose Bethe, who was then twenty-four, understood instantly. "My wife knew vaguely what we were talking about," says Bethe, "and on a walk in the mountains in Yosemite National Park she asked me to consider carefully whether I really wanted to continue to work on this.

For at least one steam carmaker, the Stanley Motor Carriage Company of Newton, Massachusetts, that advantage was lost in 1914, when an epidemic of deadly hoof-and-mouth disease among New England farm animals led veterinary officials to shut down the many public watering troughs along eastern roads where steamers had rewatered.

By 1914, the internal combustion engine had swept the field. The Stanley and other steamer companies built a total of only about 1,000 of their cars that year, compared with a total of 569,000 by conventional US automobile manufacturers.16 There were 1.7 million registered motor vehicles in the United States by 1914, up from 8,000 in 1900. Automobiles outnumbered horses in New York City for the first time in 1912, and the difference widened across the decade.

The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.

Bertrand Goldschmidt, the French chemist who worked with Glenn Seaborg, puts the Manhattan Engineer District at the height of its wartime development in perspective with a startling comparison. It was, he writes in a memoir, "the astonishing American creation in three years, at a cost of two billion dollars, of a formidable array of factories and laboratories—as large as the entire automobile industry of the United States at that date.

Chamberlain moved again to concession. "Appeasement" was at that time a popular and not a pejorative word.

The substitution of the automobile for the horse left farmers poorer. "By using the power produced by gasoline instead of by corn- and hay-burning horses," a rural economist wrote in 1938, "we have deprived the farmer of a market for the crops from many million acres.

Henry Ford designed his first production car, the Model T, with a flex-fuel system: it could run on either gasoline or alcohol, a feature that Ford continued to offer until 1931.

But totally unexpected at the high altitude at which the bombers flew was a 140-mile-per-hour wind. They were blown with it over the target and their ground speed was therefore nearly 450 mph, impossible for the bombardiers.

Setting omnibuses on rails increased the number of passengers that horses could haul and improved the ride. In 1856, when New York City's Common Council judged street-level steam locomotives to be dangerous and barred them below Forty-Second Street, horse-drawn street railways replaced them.

Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the probability that our 'demonstration' of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the production of these devices between the United States and Russia.

Engineers today design efficient machines scaled to meet most human needs, from microchips to passenger jets. In earlier eras, animals were bred to such purposes: sheep for mutton and sheep for wool; cattle for meat, cattle for milk, and oxen for hauling; dogs to a thousand purposes