Quotes About Technology

His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology. He took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication.

Sony inaugurated research into the first consumer videocassette recorder in 1969, but didn't ship its first Betamax for another seven years, and VCRs didn't become a household necessity until the mid-eighties.

The Web has explored the adjacent possible of its medium far faster than any other communications technology in history.

today. By the end of 1882, Edison's company is powering electric light for the entire Pearl Street district in Lower Manhattan.

Had Hurley, Chen, and Karim tried to execute the exact same idea for YouTube ten years earlier, in 1995, it would have been a spectacular flop, because a site for sharing video was not within the adjacent possible of the early Web.

Radios, vacuum tubes, transistors, televisions, solar cells, coaxial cables, laser beams, microprocessors, computers, cell phones, fiber optics—all these essential tools of modern life descend from ideas originally generated at Bell Labs.

The first electrical battery was invented separately by Dean Von Kleist and Cuneus of Leyden in 1745 and 1746. Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele independently isolated oxygen between 1772 and 1774.

Thatcher's study suggests a counterintuitive notion: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are. It's counterintuitive in part because we tend to attribute the growing intelligence of the technology world with increasingly precise electromechanical choreography

What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.

FLINTLOCK (1610)

LOGARITHMS (1614)

Bone flutes are among the oldest known artifacts of human technological ingenuity . . . Many archeologists believe that our ancestors have been building drums for at least a hundred thousand years, making music technology almost as old as technology designed for hunting or temperature regulation . . . It seems to be jumping more than a few levels in the hierarchy of need to go directly from spearheads and clothing to the invention of wind instruments.

Greatbatch's pacemaker is an instance where a great idea came—literally—from a novel combination of spare parts. Sometimes those novel combinations arrive courtesy of the random collisions of city streets or the dreaming brain. But sometimes they come from simple mistakes. You reach into the bag of resistors and pull out the wrong one, and four years later, you're saving someone's life.

SLIDE RULE (1632)

MECHANICAL CALCULATOR (1645)

VACUUM PUMP (1654)

PENDULUM CLOCK (1656)

BALANCE SPRING WATCHES (1660)

Part of that magic is economic: emergent platforms can dramatically reduce the costs of creation.

The Web is not simply an ecosystem; it is a specific type of ecosystem. It started as a desert, and it has been steadily transforming into a coral reef.

When Guier, Weiffenbach, and McClure were designing their system to help American submarines launch Polaris missiles against the Soviet Union, it never occurred to them that someday someone would use their platform to rave about a bowl of potato and leek soup to nearby strangers. Stacked platforms are like that: you think you're fighting the Cold War, and it turns out you're actually helping people figure out where to have lunch.

In the contemporary rendition, it's not that the slave technology grows stronger than us and learns to disobey our commands—it's that we deteriorate to the level of the machines. Smart technology makes us dumber.

Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn't the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace.

You can't scrub everything," says Lorenzo. "Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.