Elon Musk Quotes

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

We're living through the second Industrial Revolution.

Some countries were able to turn their manufacturing operations into advanced technology areas. South Korea is a great example of this, and manufacturing there is done using advanced technological methods.

Man makes machines to man the machines that make the machines.

The industrial revolution in the new century is, in essence, a scientific and technological revolution, and breaking through the cutting edge is a shortcut to the building of an economic giant.

Factories not what they used to be - they're all extremely high-tech.

In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.

Compared to industry in Europe or Japan, where industry was based on a craft tradition, we are sadly behind.

As the train rounded the curve, the great smoking stacks of the Edgar Thomson works, the flaming converters belching forth, made such a vivid impression upon my youthful mind that it will never fade. I thought I had seen the very acme of what might be accomplished in an industrial way.

During the nineteenth century, the rapid emergence and proliferation of new manufacturing methods and building technologies led to the establishment of polytechnic schools that concentrated on the practicalities of engineering and construction rather than the niceties of stylistic correctness or adherence to established precedent.

All the technology of our production was still pre-War. They were sort of '38, '39 and the War had been stable and so we were infinitely behind whatever had been going on in the United States for instance.

It was exactly an assembly line. You could look into infinity down these rows of drawing tables.

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.

Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease.

I am inclined to attach some importance to the new system of manufacturing; and venture to throw it out with the hope of its receiving a full discussion among those who are most interestedin the subject.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

The house is a factory.

I was running an assembly line designed to build memory chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance.

Steam and the telegraph and other machinery have required capital greater than any individual can furnish.

A new era of production has begun. It's principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs .... As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated [to their work] governmental measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments.

Instruments, machines, looms will increasingly supplement the strength and skill of men; will augment at the same time the perfection and the precision of manufactures by lessening both the time and the labor needed to produce them

The thing which has made Labor great & powerful is labor-saving machinery--& nothing else in the world could have done it. It has been labor's savior, benefactor; but Labor doesn't know it, & would ignorantly crucify it. But that is human & natural.

The man who places a part does not fasten it. The man who puts in the bold does not out on the nut. The man who puts on the nut does not tighten it. Every piece of work in the shop moves. It may move on hooks, on overhead chains …. It may travel on a moving platform or go by gravity.

The Machine is the new Messiah. Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word.