Quotes About Progress

Coal-oil production in early 1860 totaled some 20,000 to 30,000 gallons per day, or about 7 million to 9 million gallons per year.22 By comparison, the whale-oil harvest had peaked in 1854 at about 10.3 million gallons and begun a sharp decline.

Wrought iron began to replace cast iron before 1820, when a Northumberland railway engineer named John Birkinshaw patented a method of rolling wrought iron rails in various shapes in fifteen-foot lengths that could withstand the weight of steam locomotives pounding and running over them.

The date of the trial, Tuesday, 21 February 1804, marked the first time a steam locomotive running on rails hauled a loaded train of freight cars—in this case, about twenty-five tons of engine, iron, wagons, and men.

Like his competitors, Faraday was looking for a steady electric current from magnetism. He held back reporting his results.

Falling water is the oldest source of industrial power other than muscle.

The IBM equipment arrived early in April 1944 and the Theoretical Division immediately put it to good use running brute-force implosion numbers.

Larger mines with direct access to the surface had long been laid with wooden rails to make coal and ore carts easier to move; moving a cart on rails required about one-sixth the effort needed to haul a sled or a cart on a dirt path.38 Moving coal to water on such rails—wagonways, they were called—would save money, time, and wear and tear. The earliest known English wagonway dates from 1604.

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.

In the next hundred years, wooden wagonways diffused across England.

the American population was increasing rapidly, from 5.3 million in 1800 to 12.9 million in 1830, and from sixteen states in 1800 to twenty-four in 1830, most of the increase across the mountains in the trans-Appalachian west. The river steamboat from 1807, the Erie Canal between Albany, New York, and the Great Lakes from 1825, railroads from 1829, penetrated the American wilderness and fostered its settlement. These new places and people needed lighting.

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.

A page a day is a book a year. Listen to that again: a page a day is a book a year.

Emancipations as they progressed within less revolutionary states included Holland-Belgium, 1795; Sweden, 1848; Denmark and Greece, 1849; England by a gradual unmuddling completely in 1866; Austria, 1867; Spain by the withdrawal of its 1492 order of expulsion in 1868; the new German Empire, 1871. Though they were influential out of all proportion to their numbers, the emancipated Jews of Western Europe, many of whom moved directly to assimilate, were only a minute fraction of the Diaspora.

Stanley decided in 1892 to find out if there were limitations on the level of high-voltage power that could be transmitted.

This time," he told Weil, "take the control rod out twelve inches." Weil withdrew the cadmium rod. Fermi nodded and ZIP was winched out as well. "This is going to do it," Fermi told Compton. The director of the plutonium project had found a place for himself at Fermi's side. "Now it will become self-sustaining. The trace [on the recorder] will climb and continue to climb; it will not level off.

Fermi allowed himself a grin. He would tell the technical council the next day that the pile achieved a k of 1.0006.1700 Its neutron intensity was then doubling every two minutes. Left uncontrolled for an hour and a half, that rate of increase would have carried it to a million kilowatts.

Across the next two years, they drilled one disappointing hole after another.

The history of liquid energy is a history of pipelines.

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.

And most generally and profoundly: "The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.

By 1914, the internal combustion engine had swept the field. The Stanley and other steamer companies built a total of only about 1,000 of their cars that year, compared with a total of 569,000 by conventional US automobile manufacturers.16 There were 1.7 million registered motor vehicles in the United States by 1914, up from 8,000 in 1900. Automobiles outnumbered horses in New York City for the first time in 1912, and the difference widened across the decade.

The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.

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.