Best Historical Innovation Quotes

"A place where writers, artists, and scientists met to debate and to pioneer thought."

"Modern engineers like Professor Al-Hassani are now studying ingenious machines like the tea-serving girl and are astonished by the masterly use of technologies that we still employ today."

"The need to control the sea produced a technological and tactical arms race that has created most of the breakthroughs in military technology."

"The Maya were the first civilization in the world to use the number zero in their counting system."

"By the turn of the 20th century, ocean liners had evolved into a mechanical marvel, the most comfortable and luxurious way to travel across the ocean."

"The Codex was a disruptive device that changed the way we communicated information as a species."

"Ancient technology: More complicated than a modern-day Swiss watch, yet over 2,000 years old."

"I've discovered how Victorian engineering brought the masses to the seaside."

"The Japanese did a very good job of using local knowledge to combine the best aspects of what they could find in the world and turn that into a very effective rifle that type 38 Arisaka right I think that's probably enough on that question."

"The Antikythera Mechanism: a 2000-year-old computer that predicted the position of planets and stars."

"He'd actually been working on designs for a large jet transport since 1944."

"Lovelace proved that a certain interesting problem can be solved using a computer program. The proof was just do it."

"Once a Marvel in the Pittsburgh Skies, the city's lost Sky Buus represented an era of innovation that met an unexpected fate."

"Roman technology transformed lime mortar into strong, durable concrete, revolutionizing architecture."

"Writing was invented in Uruk in the 32nd century BC."

"The very first steam engine in the world was created nearly 2,000 years before the Industrial Revolution started."

"Imagine loading up an animation in 1515 and just having this guy go, 'Yeah, my dudes, we're all in on this printing press.'"

"In 1939 with just $538 in capital, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded Hewlett-Packard in a small garage in Palo Alto, California."

"The Antikythera mechanism was so sophisticated that no other tool like it would be invented in the entire planet for another thousand years."

"The mechanical clock was probably the most impressive innovation of the middle ages, along with advances in lenses that led to the invention of spectacles."

"The invention of maps and charts is a fascinating chapter in human history."

"One of the earliest versions of wireless communication can be traced back to the work of Nikola Tesla."

"How could it be that our ancestors managed to create something so far ahead of their time?"

"The first vending machine dispensed holy water."

"Babbage couldn't pay for the construction of the entire device."

"He used the properties of known elements to form patterns there's that word again and as each element was discovered the scientific community realized Mendeleev's predictions were astonishingly close to reality."

"Philo Farnsworth was the Tony Stark of his time."

"The device was not a clock but more like a calculator that could show the position of the heavens past, present, and future."

"The STG 44 was a leap forwards in terms of technology since it combined the submachine gun's rate of fire with an intermediate cartridge."

"The first known use of concave lenses to address nearsightedness were created for Pope Leo the 10th."

"The discovery of sundials in Neolithic sites like Ireland and Scotland sheds light on ancient sun tracking techniques."

"It was a time of brilliant engineering, pioneering innovation, all of it driven by fearless men and women who dreamt big and shaped the country we live in today."

"The slightly more hands-on than I expected story of Johannes Gutenberg and his marvellous machine."

"Making mass production of books possible for the first time in history."

"Ancient humans had to be pretty inventive with their hunting techniques - they were up against way bigger animals with much more limited technology."

"Edison didn't invent the light bulb but he did make one that worked well."

"It was here that one engineer would harness the power of steam 1,700 years before the world ever imagined a locomotive."

"Tesla's Vision was always ahead of his contemporaries."

"The 12th century minaret was built with an unusual wave-like style that narrows towards the top, thus playing with the perspective of viewers on the ground and making it seem like it reaches higher into the sky than it really does."

"Carthage committed itself to the task and within a decade had formed its very own elephant Corps."

"Tesla's encounter came at a time when the concept of radio communication was still in its infancy."

"This groundbreaking air defence network allowed Britain's defenders to be in the air, at interception altitude, within 10 minutes of the first sign of invasion on the radar screens."

"Famed inventor Nikola Tesla made history with his experiments at Niagara Falls."

"Electricity was there all along but it was never able to be harnessed until more modern times."

"RCA also started manufacturing their own three-speed record players."

"He was interested in what can be done by mechanical means."

"The idea for this concept 1954 Firebird one came from the legendary Harley Earl."

"The wheel is by far the most important invention man has ever realized."

"But speaking of innovation, Dutch painter and inventor Jan Van der Heyden devised a long-burning wick."

"Pombal's greatest triumph. Lisbon soon has the first earthquake-resistant buildings of all Europe."

"The design of the Warren truss was based on equilateral triangles."

"What made it unique was being able to fire repeatedly without renaming the gun. That means an order of magnitude more shots in a minute."

"The Swing Bridge: driven by water, a marvel of hydraulic engineering."

"How did the Ancients create metals that still preserve their strength and sharpness? State-of-the-art analysis suggests chromium, mastered in China 2,000 years ago."

"Certainly a lot of people don't realise that the French were actually the first country to mass issue self-loading rifles to the military."

"A clock in order to meet the standards of the longitude act could not gain or lose more than three seconds in every 24 hour period."

"The possibility of using electricity for lighting was first suggested in 1810 by Humphrey Davy."

"If it can be proven that the ancient world was able to produce and utilize electricity, then it would revolutionize our understanding of history."

"The Emperor issued Incorruptible paper bills backed by silver which were accepted across the entire Mongol Empire. Something unheard of until then."

"The Bijapur Sultanate and its other Dakhani neighbors sought to learn from their mistakes and developed a series of technological solutions."

"Ford was producing one car every minute by the end of the 1920s."

"The Greeks were most likely the most creative, innovative civilization of all times."

"Sophisticated networks of retaining ponds, canals, and water wheels were built along the river's banks."

"In 1936 the Ford Motor Company had a revolutionary idea using a revolutionary material... they made a car entirely out of stainless steel."

"History is filled with inventions, reinventions, and outright theft of ideas."

"Celluloid made consumer items affordable to the masses."

"The invention of alphabetic literacy... massively increases the processing power."

"What if I told you the world’s 'first computer programmer' was born over two hundred years ago?"

"Congratulations to DWM, congratulations to Georg Luger for designing the piece, did a fantastic job."

"Inspired by a sketch made by Leonardo da Vinci, the Dynasphere was his futuristic take on the historical monocycle."

"The Phoenicians were the first to invent an alphabet, a factor that proved indispensable in establishing their great trading network."

"The RC 166 was a true Marvel of engineering and a testament to Honda's technical prowess."

"When Henry Ford made cars available to the ordinary man, he gave him the freedom to drive wherever he wanted."

"The solution came courtesy of legendary English engineer Barnes Wallace."

"...it's just amazing uh the Ingenuity of humans and kind of what happened in the Victorian era actually I I've learned that a lot of really cool stuff that we take for granted today got at start in that era of time..."

"It's incredible to think about all these things that they were doing 50 years ago and learning why now."

"The automobile obviously is another invention that changed the world."

"The Erie Canal goes from Albany to Buffalo and was a really important innovation."

"The submarine is named after Isaac Peril, a Spanish naval officer and engineer who designed the world's first all-electric submarine."

"Over a century ago, I discovered magic. I discovered a medical marvel. Magic."

"Life didn't imitate art until the nylon toothbrush was developed in the 1930s."

"The invention of the printing press... allowed information to be mass produced."

"Being a genius was much easier... there were loads of things to invent that you simply can't invent today because they already exist."

"This is so old and so pioneering, if it weren't for something like this, we probably wouldn't have the whole underground."

"If you've given Christopher Columbus an unlimited budget in 1493 and a nuclear submarine, and say Chris, this is your reward, here's this great nuclear submarine and an unlimited budget. I need two more of these. Could he have built one? Not a chance."

"Guess what? Egypt. In the middle of nowhere, they figured out how to put wheels on a horse."

"The prison was to become the world's first penitentiary, a new groundbreaking kind of detention center designed to inspire penitence or true regret in the hearts of prisoners."

"Painting all these towns in white was the air conditioning of that time."

"The lift actually moves at 9 feet a minute, and it's 50 feet and 4 inches between the Trent and Mersey canal and the River Weaver below."

"Paris was one of the first cities to use gas street lamps, and a century earlier, it was a hub for the age of enlightenment."

"The advent of the trolley car and the development of the Interurban railroad... made practical due to the fact that these cars were now propelled by electricity and not horses."

"The Antikythera mechanism stands as a testament to the brilliance of ancient civilizations."

"Johannes Gutenberg's printing press is one of those things from unit one you definitely want to know."

"It's great that that's tech over 100 years old."

"In the early days of filmmaking, it must have truly seemed like magic."

"It's insane to think they were doing that in like '94."

"The Great Western Railway was a creation of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great Victorian genius."

"The Mark 8 is where the U.S. Navy fire control system outpaces any other fire control system of the World War II era."

"It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of Al-Jarreau, our magnetic compass and tools of navigation, our mastery of pens and printing, our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed."

"A beautiful dinnerware collection, most of which is transfer ware, we can thank Josiah Spode for flawlessly transferring patterns onto ceramic under glaze."

"Imagine that, this existed before watches did."

"The design was such strength and integrity that to this day modern man has yet to improve upon it."

"We invented language as a way to communicate ideas and writing as a way to preserve them for future generations."