Quotes About Invention

An idea sparked in the 1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal and glass.

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.

All human societies contain inventive people. It's just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.

Anti-Tachyon displacement emitter AKA Flux Capacitor

William concluded that Germany had never lost faith in the security of the Enigma machine. They thought Enigma was unbreakable all the way to the end. He was proud to learn that Nazi codebreakers had never managed to defeat America's best cipher machine, the SIGABA, which he had invented with Frank Rowlett.

Track coach Bill Bowerman decided that his team needed better, lighter running shoes. So he went out to his workshop and poured rubber into the family waffle iron. That's how Nike's famous waffle sole was born.‡

If I'd listened to customers, I'd have given them a faster horse. —HENRY FORD

Henry Ford learned of a process for turning wood scraps from the production of Model T's into charcoal briquets. He built a charcoal plant and Ford Charcoal was created (later renamed Kingsford Charcoal). Today, Kingsford is still the leading manufacturer of charcoal in America.

Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true.

E é verdade que a mentira exige capacidade de fabulação e de improvisação, e inventiva, e memória férrea, e arquitecturas complexas, todos a praticam mas são poucos os diplomados.) Ou

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man's face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It's the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.

It seemed that the media pretty much controlled how the average person perceived the situation. We had little respect for journalists. Throughout my career, reporters always seemed to invent what they did not know and misinterpret what they saw.

Cuando llegamos a la Luna, ese fue el momento en que Dios debió haber venido y decir hola. Porque si inventas algunas criaturas, los pones en azul y llegan al gris, es el jodido momento de aparecer y decir bien hecho.

It is quite simple, being nothing more than a radium generator diffusing radio-activity in all directions to a distance of a hundred yards or so from the flier. Should

Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.

You've put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they've invented has more originality than I gave it credit for.

I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew; it tends to set the reader himself in the track of invention, and to direct him into those paths in which the author has made his own discoveries, if he should be so happy as to have made any that are valuable.

Edison averaged one patent for every ten to twelve days of his adult life.

Supongo que la gente no ha parado de alterar las normas desde que los griegos inventaron la democracia o, incluso, desde que el hombre inventó la rueda.

Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources

We scientists, whose tragic destiny it has been to make the methods of annihilation ever more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented.

He didn't know about Clara Rockmore and her Town Hall debut. He had no idea she was still performing—just recently before a crowd of 4,500 in Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium. And he didn't know the inventor was alive and living in Russia after fleeing New York as a Soviet spy a decade earlier. He just knew he had to build this thing.