Quotes About Innovation

once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some outliers in the population more innovative. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today. Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity.

modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. No AI, no apps, and no electronic messages will change that.

during the past 30 years the maximum energy density of batteries has roughly tripled, and even if we were to triple that again densities would still be well below 3,000 Wh/kg in 2050—falling far short of taking a wide-body plane from New York to Tokyo or from Paris to Singapore, something we have been doing daily for decades with kerosene-fueled Boeings and Airbuses.

Claims about the dematerialization of modern economies and about a postindustrial world in which manufacturing does not matter are costly misinterpretations of fundamental realities.

In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds.

I wrote this book because I wanted to narrate the great, and a truly nation-building, story of US manufacturing—and because I believe that without the preservation and reinvigoration of manufacturing, the United States has little chance to extricate itself from its current economic problems, meet the challenges posed by other large and globally more competitive nations, and remain a dynamic and innovative society for generations to come.

In 1800 New England farmers (seeding by hand, with ox-drawn wooden plows and brush harrows, sickles, and flails) needed 150–170 hours of labor to produce their wheat harvest. By 1900 in California, horse-drawn gang-plowing, spring-tooth harrowing, and combine harvesting could produce the same amount of wheat in less than nine hours

extrasomatic

material for the records. The rubber was soon replaced by shellac, and that material was used

And long-distance electricity-powered commercial flight (equivalent to a kerosene-powered Boeing 787 from New York to Tokyo) is the outstanding example of the last category: as we will see, this is an energy conversion that will remain unrealistic for a long time to come.

electronics and software now represent up to 40% of the cost of premium vehicles:

The oldest crude stone tools came more than three million years ago, larger, well-crafted (bifacial) hand axes and cleavers followed only about 1.5 million years ago, wooden stone-tipped spears appear to be about half a million years old, and only about 25,000 years ago did the Upper Paleolithic hunters master the artisanal production of an array of composite tools, including adzes, axes, harpoons, needles, and saws, and accompanying pottery.

Actualmente, un habitante medio del planeta tiene a su disposición casi setecientas veces más energía útil que sus antepasados de principios del siglo XIX. Es más, durante la vida de las personas nacidas después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el índice se ha más que triplicado, de unos 10 a los 34 GJ/cápita entre 1950 y 2020.

Machines belong to the second category of inventions, that of new and more or less complex devices or mechanisms deployed for both stationary use and transportation.

I contrast the now common belief in an ever-faster pace of innovation with the many unmistakable signs of technical stagnation and slowing advances: there are limits to everything, and invention and innovation cannot be exceptions.

As commonly used, the meanings of the terms invention and innovation have a large overlap, but innovation is perhaps best understood as the process of introducing, adopting, and mastering new materials, products, processes, and ideas. Accordingly, there could be plenty of invention without commensurate innovation

In contrast to Soviet innovation failures, the post-1990 economic development of China is the best recent, and historically unequaled, example of mass-scale innovation based on rapid appropriation of a wide array of foreign inventions.

The Chinese Communist Party learned the lesson from the USSR's disintegration well: no loosening of control similar to Gorbachev's attempt to reform an unreformable political regime but, in its scale, a truly unprecedented innovation-led economic expansion that resulted in rapid quality-of-life gains and left the party even more firmly in control.

it is undeniable that the decadal aggregates of applications granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), including grants to foreign residents, increased from just 911 during the first decade of the nineteenth century to nearly 250,000 during the 1890s, and then went from about 340,000 during the first decade of the twentieth century to about 1,653,000 during the 1990s, a nearly 2,000-fold increase in two hundred years.

In 1901 the Maybach-designed Mercedes 35 was the first essentially modern motor vehicle: still without any roof but including four cylinders, two carburetors, mechanical inlet valves, an aluminum engine block, a gear stick in a gate, a honeycomb radiator, and rubber tires.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century there was considerable interest in ethanol (ethyl alcohol, C2H6O or CH3CH2OH), both as a car fuel and as a gasoline additive.

More efficient photovoltaic cells would be most welcome because of their relatively high power densities: efficiencies close to twenty percent would translate to electricity generation rates between 20–40 W/m2, two orders of magnitude better than biomass conversion, and one better than most hydro and wind projects.

Every modern refrigeration system has the same four parts: compressor, condenser, expansion valve, and evaporator, and the Perkins cycle became the foundation of new industrial refrigeration projects. In 1855 came the first ice-making plant, in Cleveland; in 1861 the first meat-freezing plant, in Sydney.

Among the great twentieth-century advances I cannot think of a better example than the first patent for a solid-state electronic device, granted to the German physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld first in Canada in 1925 and then in the US in 1926.