Quotes About Innovation

It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences.

A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.

It could be said that without sticky tape there would be no such thing as biocontainment

Foodways like any other aspect of culture, are never static. Even without the influence of other cultures, we would be eating and cooking differently from the generations that came before us.

British experimenters used Bank of England sealing wax to make glass tubes airtight.

Science grew out of the craft tradition

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer It

what mankind must do to save itself is to launch an enterprise aimed at leaving the earth. On this task he thought the energies of mankind could be concentrated and the need for heroism could be satisfied.

Kapitza frequently opened discussions with deliberate howlers so that even the youngest would speak up to correct him, loosening the grip of tradition on their necks.

We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects—hundreds of power plants, thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of people massed in national establishments—can be traced back to a few people sitting at laboratory benches discussing the peculiar behavior of one type of atom. Spencer R. Weart

The technology that made possible long-distance pipeline construction was electric arc welding.

when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.

A Canadian physician and entrepreneur named Abraham Gesner pioneered the development of coal oil, initially as a source of coal gas for lighting.

If destructive technology amplifies violence, constructive technology amplifies compassion, and the lessons of technology are universal.

In a matter of months, the Canadian physician developed a distinctive process for making illuminating gas from bitumen with coal oil as an intermediary. When he applied for a Nova Scotia patent on his process in June 1849, he used the patent to protect his products' brand names as well, calling them kerosene and kerosene gas (from keros, Greek for "wax," and -ene to associate the new products with familiar camphene).

In the meantime, Gesner kept busy perfecting kerosene. The crude coal oil that emerged from his stills smoked badly when it burned and smelled worse. After treating the oil with acids and processing it with lime, he succeeded in creating a kerosene that burned, he reported, "with a brilliant white light [and] without smoke or the naphthalous odor so offensive in many hydrocarbons having some resemblance to this but possessing very different properties.

The railroad, when it came, would meet high expectations. It came quickly enough, but before the necessary technologies converged into a successful system, variety flourished. Passengers were first carried on 25 March 1807 on the Oystermouth Tramroad on the Gower Peninsula in Swansea, northwest of Cardiff in Wales. The cars were horse-drawn, and the operator paid tolls to the company that owned the road.

One of Szilard's sidelines, then and later, was invention. Between 1924 and 1934 he applied to the German patent office individually or jointly with his partner Albert Einstein for twenty-nine patents.

Distilling these mixtures in turn came to be called "cracking" them—breaking them open, as it were.

Wrought iron began to replace cast iron before 1820, when a Northumberland railway engineer named John Birkinshaw patented a method of rolling wrought iron rails in various shapes in fifteen-foot lengths that could withstand the weight of steam locomotives pounding and running over them.

His problem, his son believed, was "too many irons in the fire": a nice cliché for an industrialist and inventor who worked with kilns. "One by one, his inventions fell into other hands, some by fair sale, but most of them by piracy, when it became known that he had nothing left wherewith to maintain his rights. In short, with seven children to provide for, he found himself a ruined man."12

free of carrier material. . . .1606 This precipitate of 94, which was viewed under the microscope and which was also visible to the naked eye, did not differ visibly from the rare-earth fluorides. . . . It is the first time that element 94 . . . has been beheld by the eye of man.

The date of the trial, Tuesday, 21 February 1804, marked the first time a steam locomotive running on rails hauled a loaded train of freight cars—in this case, about twenty-five tons of engine, iron, wagons, and men.

The hard work of finding a proving ground sufficiently barren and remote and organizing it fell to a compact, close-cropped Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge.