Quotes About Progress

The widespread adoption of crop cultivation was predicated on the invention of numerous farm tools. The domestication of horses for riding started with bits and bridles (stirrups and saddles came much later). Draft animals required many specific designs for their harnessing to plows, carts, or wagons—collars, reins, traces, bellybands for horses, yokes for oxen.

As might be expected with modern media reporting, every news report of some notable research advance has been commonly seen as moving us "closer" to the holy grail of nitrogen fixation in cereals—but "closer" remains elusive. "Substantial progress" reported in one year has no consequences five years later.

it is undeniable that the decadal aggregates of applications granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), including grants to foreign residents, increased from just 911 during the first decade of the nineteenth century to nearly 250,000 during the 1890s, and then went from about 340,000 during the first decade of the twentieth century to about 1,653,000 during the 1990s, a nearly 2,000-fold increase in two hundred years.

We have already reduced the number of malnourished people to less than a tenth of the global population

In 1901 the Maybach-designed Mercedes 35 was the first essentially modern motor vehicle: still without any roof but including four cylinders, two carburetors, mechanical inlet valves, an aluminum engine block, a gear stick in a gate, a honeycomb radiator, and rubber tires.

DDT now belongs to the category of inventions that were not just welcome but seen as truly transformative, only to be relegated to the class of undesirable advances.

Every modern refrigeration system has the same four parts: compressor, condenser, expansion valve, and evaporator, and the Perkins cycle became the foundation of new industrial refrigeration projects. In 1855 came the first ice-making plant, in Cleveland; in 1861 the first meat-freezing plant, in Sydney.

While Wilbur watched, Orville Wright made the first powered flight, or rather a short hop of 36 meters lasting twelve seconds, above the sandy beach at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina on December 17, 1903. Then they switched places and completed three more short flights: the last, and the longest one, lasted fifty-nine seconds. Remarkably, almost four years went by before anybody else could fly a heavier-than-air machine for more than a minute.

The first commercial jetliner, the ill-fated British Comet (whose four deadly accidents were not caused by jet engines but by stress around square window frames that eventually led to catastrophic decompression), entered its brief service in 1952 at M 0.7, and the first successful and widely adopted jetliner, Boeing's 707, began its scheduled flights in October 1958 at M 0.83.

Some measurable effects appeared soon: as the lead phase-out proceeded, the median lead concentration in American children decreased by nearly 80 percent between 1976 and 1994, and by 2015 it was only about 5 percent of the mid-1970s level.

An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century.

An abundance of useful energy underlies and explains all the gains—from better eating to mass-scale travel; from mechanization of production and transport to instant personal electronic communication—that have become norms rather than exceptions in all affluent countries.

four pillars of modern civilization: ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics.

For nearly a century, pig iron's high carbon content was lowered, and steel made by blasting the molten metal with cold air in open hearth furnaces; only after World War II were these replaced by basic oxygen and electric arc furnaces.

Without science, there would be no you; without you, the future would offer a much narrower prospect.

It wasn't enough but it was a start. It might keep him going...

She didn't intend her career to hit the buffers just because she'd made the mistake of opting for a force run by Neanderthals.

Strivers are driven to test themselves over and over again. They don't rest on their accomplishments. Success urges them to reach higher, take bigger risks. If they fail, they pull themselves back up. Ambition is the essence of human evolution. Strivers adapt to their changing environment.

La historia de la humanidad es la historia de su libertad [...] El progreso es, en esencia, progreso de la libertad humana.

The country had seen mighty tractors and skyscrapers...There was only one thing Russia had not seen during this thousand years: freedom.

Yes, everything flows, everything changes, it's impossible to step twice into the same transport.

Fue así, con una cadena milenaria, como el progreso ruso y la esclavitud rusa estaban ligados el uno al otro. Cada escalada hacia la luz ahondaba aún más el negro foso de la esclavitud.

I'm always amazed how overnight successes take a helluva long time.

establish an effective daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meeting Rhythm to keep everyone in the loop. Those who pulse faster, grow faster.