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Quotes About Invention

I have long thought, and still think, that radio is magic. Television is OK, but radio is magic. If television had been invented first and then radio had come along, people would think, "What a wonderful thing this radio is! It's like television except you don't have to look at it!"
~ Charles Osgood, 1989
If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.
~ Johnny Carson, unverified
I feel so grateful to the man who invented the "Traveller's" typewriter...
~ Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897
Today, Korea is one of the most 'inventive' nations in the world-it ranks among the top five nations in terms of the number of patents granted annually by the US Patent Office.
~ Ha-Joon Chang
Ideas are no one's monopoly - Dhirubhai Ambani
~ Hamish McDonald
A few days later, Dr. Ambler told De Long of a curious dream he'd had about Edison's lamps. In the dream, Sir John Franklin, the long-lost British explorer, had come aboard the Jeanette for a tour. Dr. Ambler led Franklin all over the ship and told him excitedly about Edison's electric lights, an invention that, of course, wasn't even dreamed about in Franklin's day. But Franklin bluntly interrupted him. "Your electric machine," he said, "is not worth a damn.
~ Hampton Sides
Latin texts and "tried on" various nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, inventing new ones along the way; in the process he would have acquired his vocabulary of some 25,000 words, more than twice the size of the one possessed by John Milton.
~ Hank Whittemore
Originality must compound with inheritance.
~ Harold Bloom
By all accounts, Kehoe displayed a marked mechanical bent in his earliest years. Like countless boys his age, he seemed particularly fascinated with electricity. One neighbor would recall the young Kehoe as an inveterate tinkerer who "devoted his talents to constructing electrical devices which he installed on his father's farm.
~ Harold Schechter
O yes! a machine for saving work, is it? He'd invent that, I'll be bound; let a nigger alone for that, any time. They are all labor-saving machines themselves, every one of 'em. No, he shall tramp!
~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
He invented mother's hearts--& he certainly has the pattern in his own.
~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
Camera and event. Since its invention, film has seemed destined to make history visible. It has been able to portray the past and stage the present. We have seen Napoleon on horseback and Lenin on the train. Film was possible because there was history. Almost imperceptibly, like moving forward on a Moebius strip, the side was flipped. We look on and have to think: if film is possible, then history too is possible.
~ Harun Farocki
On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.
~ Heather O'Neill
A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a public library...without cost to the reader.
~ Lawrence Clark Powell
On December 17, 1903, on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self-propelled vehicle could fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it.
~ Lawrence Lessig
Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.
~ Lawrence M. Krauss
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
~ le guin ursula k iv
Innovation," he wrote, "is rarely about a big idea; more usually it's about a series of small ideas brought together in a new and better way.
~ Leander Kahney
Both of them had this ability to—well, not invent products—but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed, it's just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed. It's a matter of discovery
~ Leander Kahney
everything he learned about products he learned from Heathkits as a kid. Heathkits were popular kits for building electronics like ham radios, amplifiers, and oscillators. The kits taught Jobs that products were manifestations of human ingenuity, not magical objects dropped from the sky.
~ Leander Kahney
Nobody ever understands what a pioneer is doing.
~ leary timothy ii
Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.
~ lee gerald stanley ii
I try not to do anything that's too close to what I've done before. And the nice thing is we have a big universe here. It's filled with new ideas. All you have to do is grab them.
~ lee stan
I've got a new invention. It's a revolving bowl for tired goldfish.
~ Lefty Gomez