Quotes About Invention

If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don't need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it.

FLINTLOCK (1610)

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)

HOOKE'S LAW (1676)

PRESSURE COOKER (1679)

CALCULUS (1684, 1693)

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.

In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires.

As far as I'm concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

The inventor of the highway guard rail did not get a Nobel Prize, nor are humanitarian awards given to designers of clearer prescription drug labels.

War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention. —Henry Maine

For returning "washday" to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.

The invention of farming around ten thousand years ago multiplied the availability of calories from cultivated plants and domesticated animals, freed a portion of the population from the demands of hunting and gathering, and eventually gave them the luxury of writing, thinking, and accumulating their ideas.

government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for "society," or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul. It is a human invention, tacitly agreed to in a social contract, designed to enhance the welfare of citizens by coordinating their behavior and discouraging selfish acts that may be tempting to every individual but leave everyone worse off.

In 1909 Carl Bosch perfected a process invented by Fritz Haber which used methane and steam to pull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into fertilizer on an industrial scale, replacing the massive quantities of bird poop that had previously been needed to return nitrogen to depleted soils. Those two chemists top the list of the 20th-century scientists who saved the greatest number of lives in history, with 2.7 billion.

century, the amount of life that people lost to housework—which, not surprisingly, people say is their least favorite way to spend their time—fell almost fourfold, from 58 hours a week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011.13 Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.14 For returning "washday" to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.

We invent what we love and what we fear.

I'm in love with the person in the sandwich centre. If she didn't exist I'd have to invent her.