Top 5 Quotes

This blog will be about quotes that are about scientific progress and skepticism of creating new inventions that were unthinkable.

1.“A rocket will never leave the earth’s atmosphere.”  - New York Times, 1936

I like this quote because it shows how little we knew before. It also shows the progress of humans as a species, how we are able to solve problems and find solutions to what we thought we could have never solved.

5. “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys” – Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer British post office, 1878

I think this quote just reflects the dominant factor prices at the time. In Britain wage labor was cheap and maybe in America labor was more expensive hence the need to use machines for communication. It’s also hard to imagine a world without telephones, and we just have to remember that what we take for granted today actually took years to build on.

8. “The idea that cavalry be replaced by these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short of treasonous” – comment of Aide de camp to Field Marshal Haig, at Tank demonstration

I think this quote is interesting because it captures the skepticism of military personnel in reacting to the tank. It seems so obvious today that a tank is like a moving fortress, and that its strong protective quality makes it naturally better suited to horses, which have emotions, limited stamina, and can die.

12. No, it will make war impossible – Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun, in response to the question “Will this gun not make war more terrible?” from Havelock Ellis, an English Scientist.

Today, the machine gun is used in almost all infantry situations. Good for direct combat. It is hard to see how the inventor thought it would make war impossible.

20. I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

I think this is a pretty funny quote if you read it today. We already know how effective the computer is and how important it is to our daily lives. It helps us at work, it helps us connect to different people, and it helps us communicate over long distances.

Overall, the lesson is that we should not limit our thinking to what we know, because there are a lot of future technologies that we can develop. Who knows, maybe we can live in space or travel at light speed. What seems impossible can actually become reality.