Stacey D'Erasmo Quotes

In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It's just 3:23. It's almost this absolute duration that doesn't have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is.

Although prefabrication has a long history - the ancient Romans shipped pre-cut stone columns, pediments, and other architectural elements to their colonies in North Africa, where the numbered parts were reassembled into temples - the idea took on a new impetus with the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution.

It was only through the Government's help that anything this gargantuan in size could be accomplished, much as landing on the Moon. It was not rugged individualists who built the railroad, it was rugged corporations who formed and financed themselves as entities. It was the rugged federal government that came up with the federal loans, and the land grants, that enabled it to be built. Amid all the romance of building the railroad we tend to forget that it was one of the major industrial enterprises of its age.

Historians usually record events based on the time and date of when they occurred.

It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker, eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's an epitomizing idea, getting called 'Nothing' for your whole high school experience.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

During the nineteenth century, the rapid emergence and proliferation of new manufacturing methods and building technologies led to the establishment of polytechnic schools that concentrated on the practicalities of engineering and construction rather than the niceties of stylistic correctness or adherence to established precedent.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

It was exactly an assembly line. You could look into infinity down these rows of drawing tables.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it.

The railroads needed standardized time; as a result, the technology of train travel shaped the way everyone gets up, eats, goes to sleep, calculates age, and, perhaps of no small importance, imagine the world as a whole, ticking reliably, with reliable deviations, according to the beat of one central clock in a physical location.

Our civilisation has lost this bond between times, and tends to measure time with a yardstick, bit by bit, from one point to another.

Whatever happened to the good ole days, when children worked in factories?

The railroads once were a dominant power in American life, for good and for ill. There's something inevitably nostalgic about a train book today. Trains attract us, but part of that attraction is cultural memory.

We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get to this point, a lot of people had to suffer in really terrible ways.

When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.

Prior to the institutionalization of standard time, clocks were set using local meridians or local mean time, and they varied widely.

I'm trying to understand how time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it.

The genius idea of industrialism was the concept of the Model T: In exchange for something cheap and well-made, we'd forgo unique, lovely design.

Let us complete the grand design of Columbus, by putting Europe and Asia into communication, and that to our advantage, through the heart of our country. Let us give to his ships, converted into cars, a continuous course, unknown to all former times. Let us make the iron road, and make it from sea to sea.

The locomotive is coming into contact with the framework of our institutions. In this country of simple government, the most powerful civilizing force which civilization has yet produced must … assume its relation to that political machinery which is to control and regulate it.

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

The Russian Communists faced a problem older than themselves, a problem that had pervaded their country throughout much of the nineteenth century: modernization. The consciousness of Russia's backwardness obsessed and united the elites.

Without a consumer society there was no need for an industrial revolution.