Quotes About Innovation

What nobody could have foreseen in 1913 was that

but as John D. Rockefeller set about building his fortune, the absence of clear-cut rules probably aided, at first, the creative vigor of the new industrial economy.

1791, the U.S. government granted patents for Parkinson's flax mill, even though he had admitted that they were "improvements upon the mill or machinery . . . in Great Britain."32 Clearly, the U.S. government condoned something that, in modern phraseology, could be termed industrial espionage. Building upon this precedent, Hamilton put the full authority of the Treasury behind the piracy of British trade secrets.

that favored stability over innovation, predictability over experimentation

Hamilton's achievements were never matched because he was present at the government's inception, when he could draw freely on a blank slate. If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.

Science today owes as much to the rich men of generosity and discernment

From an engineering standpoint, Pierpont knew little about railroads.

When you're a theorist, the two most addictive states to be in are excited and confused

nature is more imaginative than we are.

For, after all, in science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.

The most remarkable leaps into the unknown are often not fully appreciated

Curiosity-driven research may seem self-indulgent and far from the immediate public good. However, essentially all of our current quality of life, for people living in the first world, has arisen from the fruits of such research, including all the electric power that drives almost every device we use. Two

escape the shackles of our prior experience to uncover profound and beautiful simplifications and predictions

children will be able to tell than the story we have told? Surely that is the greatest contribution of science to civilization: to ensure that the greatest books are not those of the past, but of the future.

Henry explained his experiment on the submarine, using the variolation procedure.

He believed that anything could be reverse-engineered. If one human or group of humans put something together, then another human or group of humans could take it apart again. It was a basic principle. All that was required was empathy and thought and imagination. And he liked pressure. He liked deadlines. He liked a short and finite time to crack a problem. He liked a quiet space to work in. And he liked a similar mind to work with.

The big guys like Google weren't always big. Once they were two kids in a garage. Or a dorm room. Some of them set out to be billionaires from the get-go, but some of them didn't. Some of them got just caught up in solving an interesting problem, which happened to be worth billions later.

You know where the word shrapnel comes from?" "Where?" "An eighteenth-century British guy named Henry Shrapnel." "Really?" "He was a captain in their artillery for eight years. Then he invented an exploding shell, and they promoted him to major. The Duke of Wellington used the shell in the Peninsular Wars, and at the Battle of Waterloo.

Why do what everyone else is doing?

I'm wide open to ideas, Agent

Helmsworth said, "Ma'am, nothing was impossible. It was the Cold War. It was a kind of madness. One time they sewed a microphone and a transmitter in a cat's neck, with a thin antenna threaded through inside its spine and up its tail. They were going to train it to wander into the Russian Embassy compound and pick up loose talk. Its first day on the job it was run over by a car. Nothing was impossible and everything went wrong sooner or later." Neagley

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Personas inteligentes que trabajen duro, presten atención y sean capaces de pensar de modo diferente.

Smart people, working hard, paying attention, thinking laterally.