19th-century inventor Quotes

Nikola Tesla

Guglielmo Marconi

Samuel Morse

Werner von Siemens

Orville Wright

Lee De Forest

James Naismith

We have to evolve means for obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever. I now feel sure that the realization of that idea is not far off....the possibilities of the development I refer to, namely, that of the operation of engines on any point of the earth by the energy of the medium.

I am sure that no man can derive more pleasure from money or power than I do from seeing a pair of basketball goals in some out of the way place.

Life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents.

Charles Goodyear

Solid, lasting missionary work is done on our knees.

James O. Fraser

Contrology is not a fatiguing system of dull, boring, abhorred exercises repeated daily "ad-nausem".

Only those who do not expect anything are never disappointed. Only those who never try, never fail. Anyone who is currently achieving anything in life is simultaneously risking failure. It is always better to fail in doing something than to excel in doing nothing. A flawed diamond is more valuable than a perfect brick. People who have no failures also have few victories.

John Landis Mason

The children of the white families in town were not permitted to associate with me, because my father was committing the then unpardonable crime, in Southern eyes, of educating negroes.

Physical research by experimental methods is both a broadening and a narrowing field. There are many gaps yet to be filled, data to be accumulated, measurements to be made with great precision, but the limits within which we must work are becoming, at the same time, more and more defined.

I decline all noisy, wordy, confused, and personal controversies.

It would not be long ere the whole surface of this country would be channelled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land, making, in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country.

Isn't it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them!

Necessity is the cause of many inventions but the best ones are born of desire.

Guglielmo Marconi

The doctors take the bodily evidence as the disease.... disease is itself an impudent opinion. He throws off the feelings of the sick and imparts to them his own which are perfect health, and his explanation destroys their feelings or disease.... He is like a captain who knows his business and feels confident in a storm, and his confidence sustains the crew and ship when both would be lost if the captain should give way to his fears.

It seems to me that no one science can so well serve to co-ordinate and, as it were, bind together all of the sciences as the queen of them all, mathematics.

Edward Wilson Davis

On electric light:

Like the light of the sun, it beautifies all things on which it shines, and is no less welcome in the palace than in the humblest home.

Lewis Howard Latimer

The deeper the insight we obtain into the mysterious workings of nature's forces... the more we are convinced that we are still standing in the vestibule of science; that an unexplored world still lies before us; and however much we may discover, we know not whether mankind will ever arrive at a full knowledge of nature.

Werner von Siemens