James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.
— Jeremy Rifkin
Devotion Steam Engines quotations
When steam first began to pump and wheels go round at so many revolutions per minute, what are called business habits were intended to make the life of man run in harmony with the steam engine, and his movement rival the train in punctuality.
I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer - born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.
I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.
I am certain that people never forgive because they believe they have an obligation to do it or because someone told them to do it. Forgiveness has to come from inside as a desire of the heart. Wanting to is the steam that pushes the forgiving engine.
History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind.
Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.
Reading is a mighty engine, beside which steam and electricity sink into insignificance.
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.
Fear is like the steam that fires the combustion engine. You need fear to get a performance going.
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.
Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids.
The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines from one city to another, almost as fast as birds can fly, 15 or 20 miles an hour….
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.
The smoke and the fire and the speed, the action and the sound, and everything that goes together, [the steam engine] is the most beautiful machine that we ever made, there's just nothing like it.
Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power - the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments-what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.
The Imaginative Child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization
The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world.
Better a poor steam engine that runs, than a good one never finished.
It is sunlight in modified form which turns all the windmills and water wheels and the machinery which they drive. It is the energy derived from coal and petroleum (fossil sunlight) which propels our steam and gas engines, our locomotives and automobiles. ... Food is simply sunlight in cold storage.
It's hot rain and humid days and broken thermostats.
It's screaming and raging steam engines and wanting to take your clothes off just to feel a breeze. It's the kind of kiss that makes you realize oxygen is overrated.
Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.
Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science.
Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.
Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.
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.
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.
Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.
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.
Every small boy wanted to be a steam engine driver when they grew up in the old days, including me. There's something very special about them - the noise, the smell, the steam coming out everywhere.
Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live.
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.
Before water generates steam, it must register 212 of heat;
200 will not do it. The water must boil to generate enough steam to move an engine. Lukewarm water will not run anything. Lukewarmness will not generate life's work.
I shed many a tear when the steam engines went out of style on the railroads.
I'd like to seem them come back, but I realize the diesels are more efficient.
Everything great in science and art is simple.
What can be less complicated than the greatest discoveries of humanity - gravitation, the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph?
You all know how powerful and varied are the effects of which steam engines are capable; with them has really begun the great development of industry which has characterised our century before all others.