Machine Design Quotes

Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.

I like mechanical things; my first book was a mechanics guide - that was what my parents couldn't pry away from me; that was the blanket.

In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer's power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design.

The Book of the science of Mechanics must precede the Book of useful inventions.

It isn't obvious and it took us a while to demonstrate that we could actually design a machine that bends.

With twelve horse power at our command, we considered that we could permit the weight of the machine with operator to rise to 750 or 800 pounds, and still have as much surplus power as we had originally allowed for in the first estimate of 550 pounds.

When man wanted to make a machine that would walk he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same.

You can't do a machine without knowing something about how it's going to work. As for the romantics, the costumes bored me and I don't enjoy doing period clothes.

When Da Vinci wanted an effect, he willed, he planned the means to make it happen: that was the purpose of his machines. But the machines of Newton ... are means not for doing but for observing. He saw an effect, and he looked for its cause.

The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex.

I have problems with machines which aren't gestural.

Since, however, it is immaterial whether the work is done by assistants or a machine, I decided to build a machine equivalent to an array of about 200 separating funnels.

My argument is that there is already an automated machine to make pads. What I did - I reverse-engineered it to 'simple.' Anyone who wants to compete will have to come out with a simpler machine.

If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.

It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.