Quotes About Innovation

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.

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.

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

The Air Force had discovered the jet stream.

Horses increased in number after the commercialization of the steam engine because horsepower filled the niche below steam power. A horse stood ready to pull a cart or plow a field on command, without the delay of building up a head of steam. Energy transitions are seldom so complete that they drive out every competitor. Much of the world still relies on animals for farm work and transportation: horses, oxen, camels, llamas, water buffalo, elephants, even fellow humans.

In the early 1740s, Coalbrookdale replaced its own horse-driven pumps with a Newcomen engine, the first time a steam engine was used to make iron, and a major reduction in expense.54 From this point forward, mining advanced rapidly, as an increasing number of steam engines restored old mines previously drowned and kept new mines dry.55

On the cold winter afternoon of 2 December 1942, in a disused doubles squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago football stadium, the Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Fascist Italy, calmly initiated the world's first controlled nuclear-fission chain reaction.

few of the fathers of physicists were businessmen.

The real change away from horse-drawn transportation came with the advent in the late 1880s of the electric streetcar. Frank Julian Sprague, a West Point–trained electrical engineer, installed the first commercial electric streetcar system in Richmond, Virginia, in 1887.

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

As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name

working hypothesis, can move forward with theory, while

Francis of Assisi was a master of making room for the new and letting go of that which was tired or empty.

As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, " Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name."1

imagination without energy remains inert...

Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five...

Newton said, 'If I have seen further than others, it is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.' These days we stand on each other's feet!

By seeing and improving the system, we create leverage.

System changes come directly from thinking changes.

Portugal é o país onde as regras são meras sugestões.

Experts tell us that the global economy will worsen while household appliances will get smarter. By the time your child is twenty-one years old and ready to enter the workforce, all of her job interviews will be conducted by Roombas.

Where's the glory in repeating what others have done?

Young people don't always do what they're told, but if they can pull it off and do something wonderful, sometimes they escape punishment.

There is always a way out for those clever enough to find it.