Leo Baekeland Quotes

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

When I was a kid, I never wanted to be James Bond. I wanted to be Q, because he was the guy who made all the gadgets. I guess you could say that engineering came naturally.

The spinning wheel is itself an exquisite piece of machinery. My head daily bows in reverence to its unknown inventor.

Invention depends altogether upon execution or organization; as that is right or wrong so is the invention perfect or imperfect.

Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science.

The word entrepreneur is associated with success and adventure. From my life, the only thing I can tell you that's consistently associated with entrepreneurship is failure, and the only thing consistently associated with invention is frustration. There is a long road between the idea and the reality.

The greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison Edison's first major invention, in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented.

Neither had Watt of the Steam engine a heroic origin, any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this world were shooting their partridges... While this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret.

Without choice, you have no innovation. Without innovation, you have nothing.

[Mathematics] unceasingly calls forth the faculties of observation and comparison; one of its principal weapons is induction: it has frequent recourse to trial and verification; and it affords a boundless scope for the exercise of the highest efforts of imagination and invention.

Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.

When you have no money, you need invention.

There are no drive-thru breakthroughs. Breakthroughs take time.

One of the great events in my life was my first meeting with Edison. This wonderful man, who had received no scientific training, yet had accomplished so much, filled me with amazement. I felt that the time I had spent studying languages, literature and art was wasted; though later, of course, I learned this was not so.

James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.

One minute gives invention to destroy; What to rebuild, will a whole age employ.

If we look at the fact, we shall find that the great inventions of the age are not, with us at least, always produced in universities.

I was blown away when I figured out that none of the great integrative moves that I studied came as a result of starting with a blank sheet of paper - as many innovation coaches suggest. Integrative solutions came directly from mining the existing models for the best of their nuggets. So I never start with a blank sheet of paper anymore.

Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.

Imagination is ... the foundation of all invention and innovation.

One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations for every natural act.

An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.