Quotes About Innovation

This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

Our kitchens are filled with ghosts. You may not see them, but you could not cook as you do without their ingenuity: the potters who first enabled us to boil and stew; the knife forgers; the resourceful engineers who designed the first refrigerators; the pioneers of gas and electric ovens; the scale makers; the inventors of eggbeaters and peelers.

Technology is the art of the possible.

For thousands of years, servants and slaves--or in lesser households, wives and daughters--were stuck with the same pestles and sieves, with few innovations. This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

Here's a quick translation: spork = a spoon with added tines; splayd = a knife, fork, and spoon in one, consisting of a tined spoon with a sharpened edge; knork = a fork with the cutting power of a knife; spife = a spoon with a knife on the end (an example would be the plastic green kiwi spoons sold in kitchenware shops); sporf = an all-purpose term for any hybrid of spoon, fork, and knife.

The fact that the juice does not pucker my mouth with bitterness is thanks to a female inventor, Linda C. Brewster, who in the 1970s was granted four patents for "debittering" orange juice by reducing the presence of acrid limonin.

The concept of "delicious" was born in Japan in 1908 when a chemist called Ikeda discovered a "fifth taste" called umami that was neither bitter nor salty nor sweet nor sour but something more wonderful and compelling than any of these.

It is what happens whenever a machine replaces the labor of an artisan: the artisan's skills become devalued.

We often overattribute efficiency to the technologies we are accustomed to.

what we are prepared to accept in the way of the technology of eating is often determined more by cultural forces than function.

We need new eating methods to take account of the new ways we are being supplied with food.

The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.

Nothing in this world requires such long seasoning and ripening as new thoughts.

Too much looking backward ... is bad for progress.

I cannot bring myself to write for the flute, as this instrument is too limited and imperfect.

Embrasser c'est inventer. À deux.

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it's to imagine what is possible.

The young adults of the time and their parents and pundits all wrung their hands. But they needn't have. "Those who did best tended to accept change, not to berate themselves for breaking with tradition."41

Some people use their imagination

If I want to do the same old thing, it's easy. If I want to do something altogether new, it becomes harder. I could go on writing the stories I've been writing during the last few years. They have a certain charm and they're true as far as they go. They're just not enough.

Revolution, and this is—

Whoever had converted the warehouse into offices and flats had obviously done it back in the carefree sixties, when lifts were for wimps and people with disabilities hadn't been invented.

You can say what you like about late-sixties architecture, but when they baked in the ugly they baked it in good.

We used to wait for our electronics to warm up, now it's our software.