Charles Babbage Quotes

When water power then steam power were harnessed to spin and weave cloth, a cottage craft turned into an industry overnight.

The two great agents of the physical world have become subject to the will of man and have been made subservient to his wants and enjoyments; I allude to steam and electricity, under whatever name the latter may be called.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Time passed by. I had furnished steam hammers to the principal foundries in England. I had sent them abroad, even to Russia. At length it became known to the Lords of the Admiralty that a new power in forging had been introduced.

I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.

I like doing things where I can get dirty, work with my hands, and use power tools. Last weekend, I did some grouting.

You all know how powerful and varied are the effects of which steam engines are capable; with them has really begun the great development of industry which has characterised our century before all others.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

My sense is that we're ready for another industrial revolution in this country. The great minds and innovators of Silicon Valley would come through China and say, The pipeline is full of ideas - there's personalized medicine, biotechnology, new forms to power ourselves, clean energy, etc., etc.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we've learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago.

In turning from the smaller instruments in frequent use to the larger and more important machines, the economy arising from the increase of velocity becomes more striking.

The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.

There was a time when you could make a living by the sweat of your brow. Those days are over!

Industrial forces set in motion by steam and electricity have materially changed the structure of our civilization.

Steam and the telegraph and other machinery have required capital greater than any individual can furnish.

The introduction of so powerful an agent as steam will make a great change in the situation of man.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

The capitalist system did not produce the machine age; the machine age produced the capitalist system. The material prosperity that the world has enjoyed for the last seventy-five years or one hundred years has been due to the introduction of power; steam power, then electric power and the internal combustion engine. The capitalist system or the free enterprise system - the terms are synonymous and interchangeable - was the product of the power age. The capitalist system did not produce the power age.

The United States is like a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it may generate.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production.

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book 'The Most Powerful Idea in the World.'

Central African farmers don't have any animal power because sleeping sickness kills all the animals - cattle, the horses, the burros and the mules. So draft animals don't exist, and farming is all by hand, and the hand tools are hoes and machetes.

To wash dishes is not the same as a guy running a numerically-controlled machine. That guy running a numerically-controlled machine is going to get a higher level of pay because his training is higher, and he should get a higher level of pay.

Tolstoy didn't know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half-human status of the Russian peasant classes. In 'Anna Karenina,' nineteenth-century life itself is a relentless, relentlessly modern machine, flattening those who oppose it.