Quotes About Innovation

As late as 1930, America had 181,000 refrigerated railway cars, all cooled with ice.

Jane Jacobs cites it in her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities)

Bacon's dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim 'there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied'.

Electric jugs for all.

Most of the best technology that exists on Earth is right here inside us. And everybody takes it almost completely for granted.

Edison was good at making things the world didn't yet have but terrible at seeing how it would choose to make use of them.

The first pacemaker was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Today's are no bigger than one American quarter and can last up to ten years.

was just very compact, not much larger than a standard wardrobe. But it was a marvel of ergonomics. It included

Bathroom is first noted in 1836, though toilet paper, intriguingly, isn't found before 1880.

These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the pliant inner fiber, or bast, from its woodier stem. It is striking to think that when we heckle a speaker today we use a term that recalls the preparation of flax from the early Middle Ages.

successfully. 'Japanese researchers have successfully developed a semiconductor chip made of gallium arsenide' (Associated Press). It was thoughtful of the writer to tell us that the researchers had not unsuccessfully developed a gallium arsenide chip, but also unnecessary. Delete successfully.

Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe

can never understand these people who rush to buy new gadgets; surely they must see that they are going to look like idiots in about a year when the manufacturers come up with tiny lightweight versions of the same thing at half the price. Like the people who paid $200 for the first pocket calculators and then a few months later they were being given away at gas stations. Or the people who bought the first color televisions.

at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.

Donkin's invention preserved foods beautifully, though the early cans, made of wrought iron, were heavy and practically impossible to get into. One brand bore instructions to open them with a hammer and chisel. Soldiers usually attacked them with bayonets or fired bullets into them.

Brian Aldiss

We need to understand why in a society so dependent on technology, a society that benefits so richly from the results of engineering, a society that rewards engineers so well, engineering isn't perceived as a desirable profession.

Science is about making stuff, just as much as it is about understanding stuff.

He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would come sliding down a chute to them. The system never worked. It never came close to working.

It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people.

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle—a good candle—provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100-watt lightbulb.* Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century.

He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un- prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had thought of before – unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil and no fewer than 309 others in a similar vein. Consider how helplessly prolix the alternatives to any of these terms are and you appreciate how much punch Shakespeare gave English.

canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure that they didn't lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to

The very brightest gas streetlamps provided less light than a modern 25-watt bulb.