Quotes About Industry

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks!

Everything's changed. The technology is the big thing changing now, the way movies like 'Alice' or 'Avatar' are made. And technology on the other side, the audience side. Word spreads so fast now on a movie, with the Internet, and piracy is something coming down the line like in the music industry.

Machinery only cared about what a man knew and what he could do with his hands

Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.

A country watches dumbstruck as New England's priceless chestnuts melt away. The tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food—the most harvested tree in the country—is vanishing.

We're living in the age of mass hypnotism. As long as we keep clapping our hands and believing, the captains of industry will take care of us.

For decades to come, the English would burn coal primarily for home heating. The new fuel had still to be adapted to perform useful work. Burning it at home was straightforward; adapting it to industrial production, challenging and complex. Homes needed only a hearth with a chimney. Industry needed changes in coal's very chemistry. In the meantime, increasing demand soon exhausted the superficial outcroppings of sea coal.

The value of turpentine production in the United States approached $7.5 million in 1860 ($210 million today), of which North Carolina accounted for more than $5 million.

By 1870, investment in the US oil industry had reached $200 million, the equivalent of almost $4 billion today. Annual production in Pennsylvania alone totaled more than 4.8 million barrels. Only cotton accounted for more US export dollars.

Shipments of coal from Newcastle upon Tyne, an expanding coal port on the Tyne River in the northeast of England, increased accordingly from about thirty-five thousand tons in the midsixteenth century to about four hundred thousand tons by 1625. In two generations, the historian J. U. Nef concludes, "the coal trade from the Tyne had multiplied twelvefold."22

The Scots had deforested their lands a century before the English. They were used to burning coal, and luckily for them, hard Scottish coal burned cleaner and brighter than soft Newcastle bituminous.

The whaling era that opened after the War of 1812, from about 1817 to the mid-1850s, has come to be called whaling's golden age. Its primary anchorage shifted from Nantucket Island to New Bedford, below Cape Cod at the mouth of the Acushnet River.

As coal replaced wood, its denser and more toxic smoke became a pestilence. Between 1591 and 1667, coal shipments into London increased from 35,000 tons to 264,000 tons; by 1700, that tonnage had almost doubled to 467,000 tons.27 An adequate supply of fossil fuel kept people warm and sustained the growth of English industry, but it also fouled the London air.

Evelyn did more than complain. He also looked for ways to clear the air. He accepted appointment as one of London's commissioners of sewers. And since he was interested in gardening and in trees, his inventive mind turned to moving industry out of London and perfuming the city's precincts with flowering plants—reversing, as it were, at least locally, the transition from wood to coal. King Charles II had been restored to the throne on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660

A cheaper alternative was burning coal—sea coal or pit coal, the Elizabethans called it to distinguish it from charcoal.

By 27 April, Dammam No. 7 had produced more than 100,000 barrels.30 Across the decades, until it was shut down in 1982, No. 7 alone produced more than 32 million barrels of oil.

Despite their drawbacks, Newcomens revitalized the mining industry in north-central England.26 Between 1710 and 1733, when the patent expired, no fewer than 104 Newcomen engines were built in Britain and abroad.27 Many more would follow—550 or more by 1800—but coal's industrial uses were still limited.28 No one had yet devised a process for smelting good iron with coal; its primary market was still for home heating. As that market glutted, coal prices plummeted.

The British population that used coal for heating and cooking was increasing, from 5.2 million in 1700 to 7.8 million in 1800, and on up to 12 million by 1831. Industry used coal for Newcomen engines pumping out coal mines and pumping water, although much of that coal was essentially mine waste. But iron smelting with coked coal began a major expansion after 1750, radiating outward from the Darby enterprise at Coalbrookdale and rapidly replacing smelting with charcoal made from wood.

The Stanley Steamer was the best-selling car in America in 1898. Two years later, notes the historian Rudi Volti, "of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States in 1900, 1,681 were steamers, 1,575 were electrics, and only 936 used internal combustion engines.

Alternating current won the War of the Currents. Even Edison grudgingly took up manufacturing the equipment to produce it. Motors large and small, all the way down to motors for individual sewing machines, began replacing the shafts and belts that transferred power inefficiently from steam engines. Country people still read and cooked with kerosene, but electric lights went on in the cities of the world.

Bertrand Goldschmidt, the French chemist who worked with Glenn Seaborg, puts the Manhattan Engineer District at the height of its wartime development in perspective with a startling comparison. It was, he writes in a memoir, "the astonishing American creation in three years, at a cost of two billion dollars, of a formidable array of factories and laboratories—as large as the entire automobile industry of the United States at that date.

old textile mill, which was in the process of being

I could shave my head and wear a sackcloth and still get a whole lot of ghostly wrong numbers. Makes me wonder if there's some kind of ghost-necro porn industry down there. ~Jaime Vegas

If clothes are good, or even if they're bad in an interesting way, The Garment District is where they go when they die.