George Stephenson Quotes

The Swedish engineer who invented the zip fastener made a greater intellectual leap than many scientists do in a lifetime.

Engineering or Technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed.

Everything that wasn't invented by God is invented by an engineer.

By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size.

I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.

It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.

If I could do anything, I'd be an engineer of some sort. I used to build robots.

Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind, they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives to the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.

I spend my money on my props and my creations. I'm an inventor.

I liked to work in a shop down in the basement and invent things and build gadgets.

My training and my inclination is to invent.

If you make something, it's an artifact. It's something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything.

Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by things large and small. I wanted to know what made my watch tick, my radio play, and my house stand. I wanted to know who invented the bottle cap and who designed the bridge. I guess from early on I wanted to be an engineer.

Science is about knowing; engineering is about doing.

As well might it be said that, because we are ignorant of the laws by which metals are produced and trees developed, we cannot know anything of the origin of steamships and railways.

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Tech, in the sense of... putting things together, that goes back beyond memory for me.

I've always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they're made. So, for example, scientists didn't go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we're still finding things for a laser to do.

I got no thrill from solving an integral equation, but I did get a thrill from building an exotic piece of equipment that worked.

I came up with the Enveloper when I was 20 and it took my dad and me several months to develop the initial concept into a working model.

For me, cooking is practical. That's the core of an engineer. Engineers are very practical designers and creative people. Every single thing I create has to have a purpose.