Quotes About History

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.

Einstein preferred to review a letter to the President in person. Teller therefore delivered Szilard to Peconic, probably on Sunday, July 30, in his sturdy 1935 Plymouth.1183 "I entered history as Szilard's chauffeur," Teller aphorizes the experience.1184 They found the Princeton laureate in old clothes and slippers. Elsa Einstein served tea.

The value of turpentine production in the United States approached $7.5 million in 1860 ($210 million today), of which North Carolina accounted for more than $5 million.

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

Adding to the smoke of burning coal, from about the middle of the eighteenth century, the "dark Satanic mills" of William Blake's 1808 poem "Jerusalem" began strewing their blight across England's green and pleasant land.

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).

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.

Coal-oil production in early 1860 totaled some 20,000 to 30,000 gallons per day, or about 7 million to 9 million gallons per year.22 By comparison, the whale-oil harvest had peaked in 1854 at about 10.3 million gallons and begun a sharp decline.

Trinity would be the largest physics experiment ever attempted up to that time.

About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.727

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.

By 1870, investment in the US oil industry had reached $200 million, the equivalent of almost $4 billion today. Annual production in Pennsylvania alone totaled more than 4.8 million barrels. Only cotton accounted for more US export dollars.

Within three years, a Russian diplomat in Saint Petersburg who was an amateur experimenter, Baron Pavel L'vovitch Schilling, had begun designing a telegraph system based on Oersted's discoveries. Schilling demonstrated the system to Czar Alexander I sometime before the Czar's death in 1825.

Dr. Clara Immerwahr Haber committed suicide the same night.

Falling water is the oldest source of industrial power other than muscle.

Britain, despite its roads, began shifting to wheeled transport early in the seventeenth century.

Shipments of coal from Newcastle upon Tyne, an expanding coal port on the Tyne River in the northeast of England, increased accordingly from about thirty-five thousand tons in the midsixteenth century to about four hundred thousand tons by 1625. In two generations, the historian J. U. Nef concludes, "the coal trade from the Tyne had multiplied twelvefold."22

Larger mines with direct access to the surface had long been laid with wooden rails to make coal and ore carts easier to move; moving a cart on rails required about one-sixth the effort needed to haul a sled or a cart on a dirt path.38 Moving coal to water on such rails—wagonways, they were called—would save money, time, and wear and tear. The earliest known English wagonway dates from 1604.

The Scots had deforested their lands a century before the English. They were used to burning coal, and luckily for them, hard Scottish coal burned cleaner and brighter than soft Newcastle bituminous.

In the next hundred years, wooden wagonways diffused across England.

The whaling era that opened after the War of 1812, from about 1817 to the mid-1850s, has come to be called whaling's golden age. Its primary anchorage shifted from Nantucket Island to New Bedford, below Cape Cod at the mouth of the Acushnet River.

As coal replaced wood, its denser and more toxic smoke became a pestilence. Between 1591 and 1667, coal shipments into London increased from 35,000 tons to 264,000 tons; by 1700, that tonnage had almost doubled to 467,000 tons.27 An adequate supply of fossil fuel kept people warm and sustained the growth of English industry, but it also fouled the London air.

Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.2154 He cherished the complementary compensation of knowing that the hard riddle the bomb would pose had two answers, two outcomes, one of them transcendent.

A cheaper alternative was burning coal—sea coal or pit coal, the Elizabethans called it to distinguish it from charcoal.