Steam Engines Quotes - Page 2

• The Internet is global and seemingly omniscient, while iPods and phones are all microscopic workings encased in plastic blobjects. Compare that to a steam engine, where you can watch the pistons move and feel the heat of its boilers. I think we miss that visceral appeal of the machine.

  Scott Westerfeld

  Moving, Thinking, Ipods

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• Neither had Watt of the Steam engine a heroic origin, any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this world were shooting their partridges... While this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Fire, Secret

  Thomas Carlyle (2014). “The Selected Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.75, Lulu.com

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• Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids.

  Frank Chodorov

  Pyramids, States, Capitalism

  "Frank Chodorov: Champion of Liberty" by Aaron Steelman, fee.org. December 1, 1996.

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• Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety valve is to the steam engine.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Safety, Evil, States

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• [I predict] the electricity generated by water power is the only thing that is going to keep future generations from freezing. Now we use coal whenever we produce electric power by steam engine, but there will be a time when there'll be no more coal to use. That time is not in the very distant future. ... Oil is too insignificant in its available supply to come into much consideration.

  Charles Proteus Steinmetz

  Science, Electric Power, Oil

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• Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Technology, Innovation, Growth

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• Once the steam engine went away and we started moving into burning fossil fuels - not just burning them, but everything we do with oil - we've been experiencing [these problems] at an accelerated rate. The scary end-game scenario is getting closer and closer, about what we're going to be able to do to sustain life on this planet as we have come to know it. And I think this is a very real possibility, that we could be dealing with conditions we have no idea how to wrestle with.

  Don Cheadle

  Real, Moving, Thinking

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• The steam-engine in its manifold applications, the crime-decreasing gas-lamp, the lightning conductor, the electric telegraph, the law of storms and rules for the mariner's guidance in them, the power of rendering surgical operations painless, the measures for preserving public health, and for preventing or mitigating epidemics,-such are among the more important practical results of pure scientific research, with which mankind have been blessed and States enriched.

  Richard Owen

  Blessed, Science, Epidemics

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• Not since the steam engine has any invention disrupted business models like the Internet. Whole industries including music distribution, yellow-pages directories, landline telephones, and fax machines have been radically reordered by the digital revolution.

  John Sununu

  Yellow, Fax Machines, Digital Revolution

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• At some point, that risk-taking private capital can take over, and have patents and trade secrets and things that let them lead the way, which happened with the steam engine and some other things, although with energy, the time of adoption is a lot longer than it is with, say, IT products or even medical advances, like drugs and vaccines.

  Bill Gates

  Vaccines, Adoption, Drug

  "THE BILL GATES INTERVIEW: An energy miracle is coming, and it's going to change the world". Interview with Drake Baer, www.businessinsider.com. February 22, 2016.

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• The animal frame, though destined to fulfill so many other ends, is as a machine more perfect than the best contrived steam-engine-that is, is capable of more work with the same expenditure of fuel.

  James Prescott Joule

  Hard Work, Science, Animal

  James Prescott Joule (2011). “The Scientific Papers of James Prescott Joule”, p.271, Cambridge University Press

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• Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.

  Edward Teller

  Science, Technology, Discovery

  Edward Teller, Judith Schoolery (2009). “Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics”, p.42, Basic Books

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• True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Running, Science, Men

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1974). “Collected Papers”, p.32, Harvard University Press

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• This London City, with all of its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic an tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One-a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Thinking, Iron

  Thomas Carlyle (1840). “On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History”, p.195, CUP Archive

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• It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse.

  Winston Churchill

  Horse, War, Science

  Sir Winston Churchill, Jack Fishman (1974). “If I lived my life again”, W.H. Allen

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• It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing-and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite - that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

  Mark Twain

  Simple, Men, Ninety Nine

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.7082, Delphi Classics

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• How did Don Jackson influence the field of family therapy? How did Watts influence the steam engine? He made it. Others have refined the steam engine into a better, more efficient machine. I'd say that is what Don did for family therapy, he established the discipline. Others have gone on to refine it.

  Richard Fisch

  Discipline, Gone, Machines

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• The wind, as a direct motive power, is wholly inapplicable to a system of machine labour, for during a calm season the whole business of the country would be thrown out of gear. Before the era of steam-engines, windmills were tried for draining mines; but though they were powerful machines, they were very irregular, so that in a long tract of calm weather the mines were drowned, and all the workmen thrown idle.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Country, Powerful, Wind

  William Stanley Jevons (1866). “The coal question: an enquiry concerning the progress of the Nation, and the probable exhaustion of our coal-mines”, p.144

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• The Imaginative Child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization

  L. Frank Baum

  Children, Men, Civilization

  L. Frank Baum (2016). “THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ – Complete Collection: 16 Novels in One Premium Edition (Fantasy Classics Series): The most Beloved Children’s Books about the Adventures in the Magical Land of Oz”, p.1598, e-artnow

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• The production of motion in the steam engine always occurs in circumstances which it is necessary to recognize, namely when the equilibrium of caloric is restored, or (to express this differently) when caloric passes from the body at one temperature to another body at a lower temperature.

  Nicolas Leonard Sadi Carnot

  Temperature, Body, Heat

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• Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

  Steven Johnson

  Innovation, Batteries, Radio

  "Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From". www.wired.com. September 27, 2010.

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• Soon shall thy arm, unconquer'd steam! afar
  Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
  Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
  The flying chariot through the field of air.

  Erasmus Darwin

  Air, Wings, Car

  Erasmus Darwin (1807). “The Botanic Garden: A Poem, in Two Parts: Part I. Containing The Economy of Vegetation. Part II. The Loves of the Plants”, p.22

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• My steamboat voyage to Albany and back, has turned out rather more favorable than I had calculated. The distance from New York to Albany is one hundred and fifty miles; I ran it up in thirty-two hours, and down in thirty. I had a light breeze against me the whole way, both going and coming, and the voyage has been performed wholly by, the power of the steam engine. I overtook many sloops and schooners beating to windward and parted with them as if they had been at anchor. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved.

  Robert Fulton

  New York, Distance, Light

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• The mighty steam-engine has its germ in the simple boiler in which the peasant prepares his food. The huge ship is but the expansion of the floating leaf freighted with its cargo of atmospheric dust; and the flying balloon is but the infant's soap-bubble lightly laden and overgrown. But the Telescope, even in its most elementary form, embodies a novel and gigantic idea, without an analogue in nature, and without a prototype in experience

  John Timbs

  Nature, Science, Simple

  John Timbs (2012). “Stories of Inventors and Discoverers in Science and the Useful Arts”, p.212, BoD – Books on Demand

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• The North can make a steam engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth - right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  Determination, Powerful, War

  Said to David F. Boyd at the Louisiana State Seminary on December 24, 1860. "The Civil War: A Book of Quotations" by Robert Blaisdell, 2004.

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