Martin Cooper Quotes

F1's ability to problem-solve is second to none and our ability to make rapid prototype parts is again second to none.

I liked to work in a shop down in the basement and invent things and build gadgets.

Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

If you are truly innovating, you don't have a prototype you can refer to.

Science is about knowing; engineering is about doing.

For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.

Most of the work performed by a development engineer results in failure.

There's nothing efficient about innovation.

Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

Engineering or Technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed.

Electronics are getting more and more accessible now - you don't have to be an engineer to start building things.

If there's something you want to build, but the tech isn't there yet, just find the closest possible way to make it happen.

To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.

At MakerBot, we joke that if we were engineers we would still be on our first prototype. There's something about just 'Doing it”iteration is a way of engineering.

Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.

I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

I love working with technology because it allows me to follow my imagination and to invent new things.

[...] My wild words slip into fusion and risk losing the solid ground. So stranger, get wilder still. Probe the highlands.

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

When there's no experimenting there's no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward. If anything goes wrong, experiment until you get to the very bottom of the trouble.

You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.