Ada Lovelace Quotes

Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.

Growing up, I was fascinated with Buck Rogers' airplanes. As I began to mature in World War II, it became jets and rocket planes. But it was always in the air.

Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.

What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.

The fact that the great scientist believed in flying machines was the one thing that encouraged us to begin our studies.

Men will sometimes fly, but it will not be in our lifetime.

The future is in the skies.

More than electric lights, more than steam engines, more than telephones, more than automobiles, more even than the printing press, the airplane separated past from future. It had freed mankind from the earth and opened the skies.

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

Can you imagine being Leonardo Da Vinci in the 1400s trying to describe his ideas for machines that would allow humans to fly to the average person of his time? This is hundreds of years before the invention of electricity, the internal combustion engine, and many other things we take for granted today.

Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which men will never have to cope.

If we did not have such a thing as an airplane today, we would probably create something the size of N.A.S.A. to make one.

Mode of providing steam power to locomotives.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by things large and small. I wanted to know what made my watch tick, my radio play, and my house stand. I wanted to know who invented the bottle cap and who designed the bridge. I guess from early on I wanted to be an engineer.

Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that.

I'd like to have the flying car, I think that'd be really cool.

In 1854 I took out a patent for puddling iron by means of steam.

To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.

Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.

I've always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

Men actually flew 1000 years ago…. An important thing about Eilmer's and Ibn Firnas's inventions of the glider is that both occurred in intellectual environments that fostered invention. Ibn Firnas lived during the Golden Age of Islamic art and science, and Eilmer belonged to the Benedictine order, which saw God Himself as a master craftsman.

I am well convinced that Aerial Navigation will form a most prominent feature in the progress of civilization

I have a fondness for technology. It's great to spend hours puttering around with mechanical things gotten from junkyards and visualizing what their use might be. Especially if you come across a gadget or tool and you don't know what it is and you try to figure it out. I'm fascinated by processes, whatever they might be.