Quotes About Technology

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.

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.

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.

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

The IBM equipment arrived early in April 1944 and the Theoretical Division immediately put it to good use running brute-force implosion numbers.

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.

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

Alternating current had a massive advantage over direct current: it could be transformed easily into a higher or lower voltage. Voltage, like water pressure, moves electric charge. Amperage, like water volume, delivers more charge. The two qualities interact inversely. Stepping up voltage reduces amperage. Stepping up voltage allows alternating current to flow on wires of smaller diameter without encountering as much energy-sapping resistance.

Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbor.

streams, and rivers foully polluted them. Gaslight had too many advantages to resist, however. Pollution is seldom the first concern when new technologies are introduced.

Whatever scientists of one warring nation could conceive, the scientists of another warring nation might also conceive—and keep secret. That early in 1939 and early 1940, the nuclear arms race began.

They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons.

Stanley decided in 1892 to find out if there were limitations on the level of high-voltage power that could be transmitted.

hydropower is an obvious first choice for generating electricity. The Willamette Falls Electric Company installed the first AC hydroelectric power station in the United States in 1889 to send power from Oregon City to Portland, Oregon, thirteen miles away.

By 27 April, Dammam No. 7 had produced more than 100,000 barrels.30 Across the decades, until it was shut down in 1982, No. 7 alone produced more than 32 million barrels of oil.

The history of liquid energy is a history of pipelines.

The Stanley Steamer was the best-selling car in America in 1898. Two years later, notes the historian Rudi Volti, "of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States in 1900, 1,681 were steamers, 1,575 were electrics, and only 936 used internal combustion engines.

Alternating current won the War of the Currents. Even Edison grudgingly took up manufacturing the equipment to produce it. Motors large and small, all the way down to motors for individual sewing machines, began replacing the shafts and belts that transferred power inefficiently from steam engines. Country people still read and cooked with kerosene, but electric lights went on in the cities of the world.

By 1914, the internal combustion engine had swept the field. The Stanley and other steamer companies built a total of only about 1,000 of their cars that year, compared with a total of 569,000 by conventional US automobile manufacturers.16 There were 1.7 million registered motor vehicles in the United States by 1914, up from 8,000 in 1900. Automobiles outnumbered horses in New York City for the first time in 1912, and the difference widened across the decade.

The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.

Bertrand Goldschmidt, the French chemist who worked with Glenn Seaborg, puts the Manhattan Engineer District at the height of its wartime development in perspective with a startling comparison. It was, he writes in a memoir, "the astonishing American creation in three years, at a cost of two billion dollars, of a formidable array of factories and laboratories—as large as the entire automobile industry of the United States at that date.

The substitution of the automobile for the horse left farmers poorer. "By using the power produced by gasoline instead of by corn- and hay-burning horses," a rural economist wrote in 1938, "we have deprived the farmer of a market for the crops from many million acres.

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.