"To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance -- did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time." Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963, British writer

"Industrial man--a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement." Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963, British author, Bruno Rontini's notes, in Time Must Have a Stop (1944)

"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb." J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1904-1967, U.S. physicist, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, USAEC Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board (1954)

"Success. Four flights Thursday morning. All against twenty-one-mile wind. Started from level with engine power alone. Average speed through air thirty-one miles. Longest fifty-nine seconds. Inform press. Home Christmas." Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville Wright, 1871-1948, telegram to the Reverend Milton Wright from Kitty Hawk, N.C., 17 December 1903

"If I have seen further (than you and Descartes) it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1642-1727, English mathematician, physicist, Letter to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1675/1676 [Note: "Pigmies placed on the shoulders of giants see more than the giants themselves." Lucan 39-65 C.E.]

"Technology afforded the realization of new potentials within the area, and in its relationship with other areas - oil and gas developments, irrigation-grown cotton, automobile and air communications, the beginning of the atomic age, rare minerals, and new commercial exchange relations between the Pacific Coast and the interior east of the continental divide. Science and technology and many innovations induced by the mechanization of society during the mid-twentieth century require new explanations related to the new resources brought into the horizon of utilization." James C. Malin, "On the Nature of the History of Geographical Areas with Special Reference to the Western United States," in History and Ecology: Studies of the Grassland (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).

"Give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me . . . signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe." Charles Kingsley, 1819-1875, English author and clergy, Yeast (1848)

"rseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines." James Joyce, 1882-1941, Irish author, Molly Bloom's final soliloquy, in Ulysses (1922)

"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering." Freeman Dyson, b. 1923, British-born U.S. physicist and author, Disturbing the Universe (1979)

"For 'tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoisted with his own petard." William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English dramatist and poet, in Hamlet

"To define it rudely but not inaptly, engineering . . . is the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion, Arthur Mellen Wellington, 1847-1895, U.S. engineer, The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways (6th ed., 1900)

"If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency." Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1723-1792, English artist and critic, speech, 11 December 1769, to students of the Royal Academy, London

"The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable." John Kenneth Galbraith, b. 1908, U.S. economist, The New Industrial State (1967)

"I think history is moving in a very interesting way. Twenty years ago we worried about the pressures of government . . . about government censorship. Today the pressures are from business, which is just as dangerous, just as menacing-even more so in some ways" Daniel Schorr, broadcast journalist, The Oregonian, 1 April 1996

"However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible." Lewis Mumford, 1895-1990, U.S. social philosopher, Technics and Civilization (1934)

"The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw." Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900, German philosopher, The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880)

"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." Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, U.S. essayist, poet, and philosopher, English Traits, "Wealth" (1856)

"By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature." Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, U.S. essayist, poet, and philosopher, Letters and Social Aims, "Resources" (1876)

"Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery." Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970, British philosopher and mathematician, Sceptical Essays, "Machines and Emotions" (1928)

"There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America: . . . It was not until I had seen the water-works at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen." Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900, Anglo-Irish playwright and author, "Personal Impressions of America," Lecture 10, July 1883

"We who have lived before railways were made belong to another world. . . . It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth-all these belong to the old period. . . . But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one. . . . We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark." William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863, English author, The Roundabout Papers, "De Juventute" (1863)

"Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia." H. G. Wells. 1866-1946, British author, A Modern Utopia, (1905; repr. in The Works of H. G. Wells, 1925)