19th-century Engineer Quotes

Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.

Robert Henry Thurston

There is an engineering approach to (our) problems. The engineer has an objective. He studies and analyzes the materials with which he has to deal. He acquaints himself with the natural forces which he cannot change, which are more powerful than he is, but to which he must adapt himself so that he may make use of them.

The world, I think, will wait a long time for Nikola Tesla's equal in achievement and imagination.

Edwin Howard Armstrong

If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some error with it.

The scientist merely explores that which exists, while the engineer creates what has never existed before.

Theodore von Kármán

The manufacturer of chemicals has all the griefs of a maker of shoes, or bolts and nuts, or ready-to-wear clothes, and has just one more grief in addition — i.e., troubles occurring in chemical transformations.

To define it rudely but not inaptly, [engineering] is the art of doing that well with one dollar which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.

Arthur M. Wellington

The operating management, providing as it does for the care of near thirty thousand miles of railway, is far more important than that for construction in which there is comparatively little doing.

A party of astronomers went measuring of the earth, And forty million meters they took to be its girth; Five hundred million inches, though, go through from pole to pole; So lets stick to inches, feet, and yards, and the good old three-foot rule.

William John Macquorn Rankine

Let us hope that the advent of a successful flying machine, now only dimly foreseen and nevertheless thought to be possible, will bring nothing but good into the world; that it shall abridge distance, make all parts of the globe accessible, bring men into closer relation with each other, advance civilization, and hasten the promised era in which there shall be nothing but peace and goodwill among all men.

It is not given to our weak intellects to understand the steps of Providence as they occur: we comprehend them only as we look back upon them in the far-distant past.

George B. McClellan

Not lip service, nor obsequious homage to superiors, nor servile observance of forms and customs, nor a suppression of individuality,... the Australian army is proof that individualism is the best and not the worst foundation upon which to build up collective discipline.

Mathematics higher than the calculus is of small value to the engineer, except possibly as a training for the mind...

John Alexander Low Waddell

It is quite possible that the truest and most eloquent art is a successful fusion of both the visible and visionary worlds, each enhancing and reinforcing the other.

If I had my way... there wouldn't be a single lion or tiger in captivity anywhere in the world. They never take to it. They're never happy. They never settle down... You can see it in their eyes...

On owning a commercial TV franchise in Britain:

Like having a licence to print your own money.

He made a million pounds in the first year

Christopher Thomson, 1st Baron Thomson

To pursue science is not to disparage the things of the spirit. In fact, to pursue science rightly is to furnish a framework on which the spirit may rise.

Sermons are not always preached from pulpits. They are written in the rocks and on the flowers of the field and the trees of the forest.

There are men of a certain type of mind who are never wearied with gibing at mathematics, at mathematicians, and at mathematical methods of inquiry. It goes almost without saying that these men have themselves little mathematical bent.

Oliver Heaviside

Mathematics is merely a shorthand method of recording physical intuition and physical reasoning, but it should not be a formalism leading from nowhere to nowhere, as it is likely to be made by one who does not realize its purpose as a tool.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz

Our knowledge must always be limited, but the knowable is limitless. The greater the sphere of our knowledge the greater the surface of contact with our infinite ignorance.

Each new discovery leaves in the brains of men seeds which make it possible for an ever-increasing number of minds of new generations to embrace even greater scientific concepts.

Some differences of opinion exist in the Board of Directors, in regard to the discipline that has been pursued in the superintendence of the operations of the road. [It was his understanding that] a respectable number of them entertain views... somewhat at variance with my own.

Daniel McCallum

The increase of this efficiency is essentially the problem of the manager, and the amount to which it can be increased by proper study is, in most cases, so great as to be almost incredible.

Staff standards are not theological abstractions, but scientific approximations, and are evolved for the use of the line, the sole justification of the standards being that they will make line work more efficient. Staff standards being for the benefit of the line and often entrusted to line officials, must be put in the form of permanent instructions so that all may understand what is being aimed at, and deviations by the line be noted and reprimanded.

Harrington Emerson