Quotes About Invention

Butlin had invented the prisoner-of-war camp as holiday, and, this being Britain, people loved it.

Extraordinarily, Heaviside didn't bother to patent his invention. The patent was filed instead by AT&T, which had nothing to do with the discovery but nonetheless went on to become one of the largest corporations in the world thanks in large part to its unrivaled lead in long-distance telephony.

Edison was good at making things the world didn't yet have but terrible at seeing how it would choose to make use of them.

Bathroom is first noted in 1836, though toilet paper, intriguingly, isn't found before 1880.

Donkin's invention preserved foods beautifully, though the early cans, made of wrought iron, were heavy and practically impossible to get into. One brand bore instructions to open them with a hammer and chisel. Soldiers usually attacked them with bayonets or fired bullets into them.

Science is about making stuff, just as much as it is about understanding stuff.

He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would come sliding down a chute to them. The system never worked. It never came close to working.

In Central America, the Maya also independently invented the wheel but couldn't think of any practical applications for it and so reserved it exclusively for children's toys.

He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un- prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had thought of before – unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil and no fewer than 309 others in a similar vein. Consider how helplessly prolix the alternatives to any of these terms are and you appreciate how much punch Shakespeare gave English.

So Whitney's gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin. That is quite a lot of consequence for a simple rotating drum.

Farming was independently invented at least seven times—in China, the Middle East, New Guinea, the Andes, the Amazon basin, Mexico, and West Africa.

I was disappointed. I had got used to the idea that Bobby Boss didn't exist, that he had been invented by the supporters, an elaborate laundering operation that allowed them to buy tickets, book hotels, even hire guides like Jackie so that they could then go about the business of doing what they had been banned from doing.

It's mind-blowing how cheap and effective masks are. This is a little hard to admit, because the power of inventing things is so central to my worldview, but it's true: We may never devise a cheaper, more effective way to block the transmission of certain respiratory viruses than a piece of inexpensive material with a couple of elastic straps sewn onto it.

Another, more theoretical approach involves making cement out of seawater and the carbon dioxide captured from power plants. The inventors behind this idea think it could ultimately cut emissions by more than 70 percent.

I'm also a technophile. Show me a problem, and I'll look for technology to fix it.

If it weren't for acid, you might not have an IPod, and you definitely would not have some of the best music in your IPod.

Prop 87 out here in California is about lessening our dependence on oil by using alternative fuels, and Bill Clinton comes on at the end of the ad and says, "If Brazil can do it, America can, too!" Since when did America have to buck itself up by saying we could catch up to Brazil? We invented the airplane and the lightbulb, they invented the bikini wax, and now they're ahead?

Mothers are the necessity of invention.

Wooden 1: How many kinds of guns have you meatheads created? Gun Shop Clerk: Thousands. Hundreds of thousands? Wooden 2: That's extravagance beyond credulity. Wooden 3: Are there really that many different kinds of people you need to kill?

Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new.

He was just making it up.

La historia es enteramente verdadera, ya que me la he inventado yo de cabo a rabo.

When digital watches were invented years later they reminded me of five-minute checks. They murdered time in the same way -slowly- chopping off pieces of it and lobbing them into the dustbin with a little click to let you know time was gone. Click, swish, Checks, swish, click: another five minutes of life down the drain. And spent in this place.

When digital watches were invented years later they reminded me of five-minute checks. They murdered time in the same way—slowly—chopping off pieces of it and lobbing them into the dustbin with a little click to let you know time was gone. Click, swish, "Checks," swish, click: another five minutes of life down the drain. And spent in this place.