Steven Sinofsky Quotes

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

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.

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

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

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

Instruments, machines, looms will increasingly supplement the strength and skill of men; will augment at the same time the perfection and the precision of manufactures by lessening both the time and the labor needed to produce them

The essence of the Industrial Revolution was the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth.

The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines.

When steam first began to pump and wheels go round at so many revolutions per minute, what are called business habits were intended to make the life of man run in harmony with the steam engine, and his movement rival the train in punctuality.

In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.

In short, industrialism is over.

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

The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

Industrial Revolution

Who is not rich to-day when compared with his ancestors of a century ago? The steamboat and the railroad bring to his breakfast table the coffees of Java and Brazil, the fruits from Florida and California, and the steaks from the plains. The loom arrays him in garments and the factories furnish him with a dwelling that the richest contemporaries of his grandfather would have envied. With health and industry he is a prince

More steel has been produced since 1910 than in all the preceding history of the world.

The Machine is the new Messiah. Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, hand-production methods were abundant. Craft defined everything. The craftsman had an almost phenomenological knowledge of materials and intuited how to vary their properties according to their structural and environmental characteristics.

The Industrial Revolution was about making physical things. Many of the manufactured goods that were once tangible objects have now been reduced to bits and bytes of data.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

A great factory with the machinery all working and revolving with absolute and rhythmic regularity and with the men all driven by one impulse, and moving in unison as though a constituent part of the mighty machine, is one of the most inspiring examples of directed force that the world knows. I have rarely seen the face of a mechanic in the action of creation which was not fine, never one which was not earnest and impressive.

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

If England became a world power, it was because of the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution in the new century is, in essence, a scientific and technological revolution, and breaking through the cutting edge is a shortcut to the building of an economic giant.