Quotes About Technology

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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.

The widespread adoption of crop cultivation was predicated on the invention of numerous farm tools. The domestication of horses for riding started with bits and bridles (stirrups and saddles came much later). Draft animals required many specific designs for their harnessing to plows, carts, or wagons—collars, reins, traces, bellybands for horses, yokes for oxen.

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.

industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.

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.

Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kilogram of grain by more than 98 percent—and we reduced the share of the country's population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin.50 This provides a useful guide to the profound economic transformations that would have to take place with any retreat of agricultural mechanization and reduction in the use of synthetic agrochemicals.

steel, ammonia, cement, and plastics.

The first commercial jetliner, the ill-fated British Comet (whose four deadly accidents were not caused by jet engines but by stress around square window frames that eventually led to catastrophic decompression), entered its brief service in 1952 at M 0.7, and the first successful and widely adopted jetliner, Boeing's 707, began its scheduled flights in October 1958 at M 0.83.

By 2020 there were some 1.8 billion air-conditioning units in operation, with more than half of them in just two countries, China and the US. But this is only a fraction of the potential total because among the nearly three billion people living in the world's warmest climates, fewer than 10 percent have air conditioning, compared to 90 percent in the US or Japan.

An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century.

The scientific definition of power is simply the rate of energy use: power equals energy per time, or ML2/T3

An abundance of useful energy underlies and explains all the gains—from better eating to mass-scale travel; from mechanization of production and transport to instant personal electronic communication—that have become norms rather than exceptions in all affluent countries.

four pillars of modern civilization: ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics.

For nearly a century, pig iron's high carbon content was lowered, and steel made by blasting the molten metal with cold air in open hearth furnaces; only after World War II were these replaced by basic oxygen and electric arc furnaces.