“Absence diminishes minor passions and inflames great ones,
as the wind douses a candle and fans a fire. -La Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680”
“Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.” -Schopenhauer
“My father will go on conquering till there is nothing extraordinary left for me to do” -Alexander the Great
“God, ask me not to record thy wonders, I admit the stars and suns the countless worlds. But I have measured their distances, and weighed them and discovered their substances. I have devised wings for the air, and keels for the water and horses of iron for the earth. I have lengthened the vision you gave me a million times. I have leaped over space with speech, and taken fire for light out of the air. I have built great cities and bored through the hills and bridged majestic waters. I have written the Iliad and Hamlet. I have explored your mysteries, searched for you without ceasing, and found you again after losing you in hours of weariness-and I ask you: “How would you like to create a sun and the next day have the worms slipping in and out between your fingers?’ -Scholfield Hurley's epitaph
“Never mind his wafting body odor, or scruffy cheeks, or his aversion to eye contact, or his tendency to become unfocused by lengthy tangents; in an instant, Alexander Graham Bell could tell that Meyer was endlessly interested in learning. That alone made a man worth knowing.”
“We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine”
“Let a certain saving ambition invade our souls so that, impatient of mediocrity, we plant after the highest things and (since, if we will, we can) bend all efforts to their achievement”
“Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies”
“New Growth Theory argued, in abstruse mathematics, that wealth came from the human imagination. Wealth wasn’t chiefly having more of old things; it was having entirely new things.”
“It followed from the theory that any society that wanted to become richer would encourage the traits, however bizarre, that led people to create new recipes. “A certain tolerance for nonconformism is really critical to the process,”
“Clark thought that Silicon Graphics had to “cannibalize” itself. For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn’t, someone else would. “It’s the hardest thing in business to do,”
“My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.”
“it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it”
“Prediction in history, as in other historical sciences, is most feasible on large spatial scales and over long times, when the unique features of millions of small-scale brief events become averaged out.”
“We find more and more as the process becomes complex that the value of the human’s contribution depends upon how much freedom he is given to be disorderly in his course of action”
“He appears to have been one of the first patrons to recognise the new kind of artist being produced by the Renaissance, insisting “One must treat these people of extraordinary genius as if they were celestial spirits, not as if they are beasts of burden”
“He would send emissaries great distances to get hold of these scientific texts. Often, foreign rulers defeated in battle would be required to settle the terms of surrender to him with books from their libraries rather than in gold.”
“His true legacy to science, therefore, is that he was the first to fund ‘big science’. He commissioned careful astronomical observations to check many of the values obtained by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, commissioned the drawing of a new map of the world and, most ambitious of all, charged his best scientists to devise a new way of measuring the circumference of the earth.”
“Here are a few statistics that make the point. In a study in the late 1990s it was found that, on average, the Muslim world spent less than half of 1 per cent of their GDP on research and development compared with five times that percentage in the developed world. Even more emphatically, data from Unesco and the World Bank showed that a group of twenty representative OIC countries spent 0.34 per cent of their overall GDP on scientific research between 1996 and 2003 – just one-seventh of the global average of 2.36 per cent. These studies were backed up by a third report in 2005 by COMSTECH, an OIC ministerial committee established in 1981 to study possible means of strengthening cooperation among the OIC member states. Muslim countries have fewer than 10 scientists, engineers and technicians per 1,000 of the population compared to the world average of 40, and 140 for the developed world. Between them, they contribute only around 1 per cent of the world’s published scientific papers. Indeed, the Royal Society’s Atlas of Islamic-World Science and Innovation reveals that scientists in the Arab world (comprising 17 of the OIC countries) produced a total of 13,444 scientific publications in 2005 – some 2,000 fewer than the 15,455 achieved by Harvard University alone.”
“The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious).”
“Don’t we derive all our ideas from nature? And does not genius for us lie in the forceful manner in which our senses are reminded of nature?”
“I will add one last observation to those I have already made—one that seems to me of great importance. It is that nature never deviates in it’s forward march, and everything in nature is striving towards the goal of perfection.”
“To describe one’s pleasures is to cease living under their influence, to cease to enjoy them, to cease to exist”
“Collecting is not just a question of taking but often involves the art of relating—of interacting and exchanging”
“Not for nothing did Renaissance collectors refer to their museums as a theatrum mundi - a theatre of the world”
“I do hereby declare, that it is my desire and intention, that my said museum or collection be... visited and seen by all persons desirous of seeing and viewing the same... rendered as useful as possible, as well towards satisfying the desire of the curious, as for the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons”
“First it must be relieved of its peculiar pains, the fear of the gods and the fear of death: and then it may give itself up to its own particular pleasure, the study-not of rhetoric, for in the private life of the individual that has no place, not of mathematics, or literature, for they deal with mere words, not things but of nature: and so the highest pleasure of the mind is the acquisition of that knowledge which will incidentally free it from its pains.”
Nor does death so destroy things as to put an end to the bodies of matter, but only scatters their union.
This there is too that in the universe there is nothing single nothing born unique and growing unique alone, but it is always of some tribe, and there are many things in the same race.
Why is death so great a thing to thee, mortal, that thou dost give way overmuch to sickly lamentation? Why groan and weep at death? For if the life that is past and gone has been pleasant to thee, nor have all its blessings, as though heaped in a vessel full of holes, run through and perished unenjoyed, why dost thou not retire like a guest sated with the banquet of life, and with calm mind embrace, thou fool, a rest that knows no care?
Nay more, habit alone can win love; for that which is struck ever and again by a blow, however light, is yet mastered in long lapse of time, and gives way. Do you not see too how drops of water falling upon rocks in long lapse of time drill through the rocks?
“The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build. No other part of the conceptual work is so difficult as establishing the detailed technical requirements, including all the interfaces to people, to machines, and to other software systems. No other part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later.”
“Great designs come from great designers. Software construction is a creative process. Sound methodology can empower and liberate the creative mind; it cannot enflame or inspire the drudge.”
“I think the most important single effort we can mount is to develop ways to grow great designers.”
“it sprang from a conviction that the quality of the people on a project, and their organization and management, are much more important factors in success than are the tools they use or the technical approaches they take.”
“Over the next few weeks I was living a boyhood fantasy and traveling around the country pretending to be a secret agent, using my Skunk Works alias of “Ben Dover,” in the best traditions of trench-coated operatives. Kelly had warned me not to reveal that I worked at the Skunk Works to anyone I visited. I pretended to be a self-employed thermodynamicist trying to learn as much as I could about liquid hydrogen for an investment group studying the possibilities of a hydrogen airplane engine. I was consulting with hydrogen experts around the country to find out how we could make our own liquid hydrogen safely and cheaply in large batches to fuel Kelly’s latest dream.”
“Our supplier, Titanium Metals Corporation, had only limited reserves of the precious alloy, so the CIA conducted a worldwide search and, using third parties and dummy companies, managed to unobtrusively purchase the base metal from one of the world’s leading exporters—the Soviet Union. The Russians never had an inkling of how they were actually contributing to the creation of the airplane being rushed into construction to spy on their homeland.”
“This close partnership between the engine builder and the airplane manufacturer was unusual in an industry where the engine people and the airplane manufacturers often used each other as scapegoats if an airplane failed to live up to its potential.”
“In fact the entire Skunk Works design group for the Blackbird totaled seventy-five, which was amazing.”
“I recall one meeting in 1961, when Kelly told Norm that the agency had given us an additional $20 million to develop wing tanks on the Blackbird to extend its range. Norm did some quick calculations and figured out we would extend the airplane’s range only eighty miles. “Fooling around with wing tanks at this point will be more trouble than it’s worth,” Norm insisted. Kelly said, “You’re probably right.” Kelly Johnson sent back the $20 million that afternoon.”
“Kelly ran the Skunk Works as if it was his own aircraft company. He took no crap and did things his own way. None of this pyramid bullshit. He built up the best engineering organization in the world. Kelly’s rule was never put an engineer more than fifty feet from the assembly area.”
“I was home in time for dinner and my wife never knew where I’d been that day. She assumed it was just another day at the office. At dinner, I almost burst out laughing thinking of her reaction if she had known I’d spent the day flying up and back to the Arctic Circle!” - Butch Sheffield
“So were claims by SAC generals that the SR-71 cost $400 million annually to run. The actual cost was about $260 million.”
“Kelly loved to tell how a general named Frank Carroll was so enthusiastic hearing Kelly describe the speed and maneuverability of the new P-80, America’s first jet, which he had been pushing for, that Carroll decided to bypass all the red tape delays and do all the purchase order paperwork himself. “We came back from a quick lunch at two in the afternoon. He had an official letter of intent for me to start work on the P-80 drafted, approved, signed, and sealed in time for me to catch the 3:30 flight back to California,” Kelly said, chuckling delightedly every time he told that story.”
“The zealots who founded it decline in power and influence because zealots are usually poor administrators, since they are primarily concerned with substantive issues and are too biased towards their sacred policies to settle internal conflicts impartially.”
"It follows obversely that the more effectively competition is working, the less essential mergers are as a source of scale economies.
“The management of Toyota is said to believe that “mergers and acquisitions are the last resort of companies that no longer have full confidence in their core business”
Corporate alliances suffer from a 70 percent failure rate mainly because of poor communication, according to a consulting study by Vantage Partners. They appear to share the unreliability of human marriages and military alliances between states.
Insurance companies, for example, exist only to match up individuals with differing degrees of risk attitude (that is, the risk-neutral person sells an insurance policy to the risk-averse person). If such individuals could transact bilaterally at low cost with each other, insurance companies would not exist.
“These qualities are the ability to think quickly and relevantly, the crucial force of great self-confidence and iron firmness of will, and boundless personal energy. The man who had these inherent qualities, like the man with a rapier among those armed only with clubs, could in a short time stand alone over his fellows.”
“I began to see that without moral health, a community is as helpless and lost as it is without material supplies and services.”
“Pondering further on this point, I thought of the strange fact that in history, justice seems to ride on the back of self-interest rather than on that of virtue.”
“Society seems to disapprove with equal relish the genius and the criminal, the saint and the malingerer! In other words, more often than not, society approves and disapproves of precisely the wrong people.”
“Glancing back for a moment at those waving hands, the thought came to me that only when destiny gives us the great gift of an open future are we able fully to live, for intense life in the present is made up in large part of expectancy. Whenever we are alive and excited, it is the future and not the past that enlivens the present moment.”
“Like the gods of primitive religion, this ultimate concern is something which a man worships with his whole being because it is the source of all value to him, that is, of all security and significance to his life. So, like the god of any worshiper, it determines in turn the decisions a man makes and ultimately the way in which he behaves.”
“Before you seize the helm, first pull the oar, then stand afore and study weather lore.” Aristophanes The Knights
“Timagenes, said that he always cried at a street fire because the Romans would build back better.”
“The point of this kind of experimentation was to provide a free environment for “the operation of genius.” His point was that genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as ordinary engineering could. But genius was not predictable. You had to give it room to assert itself.”
“And so the Bell Labs managers set up an extraordinary supply chain so they could get the perfect quartz, so they could make the perfect quartz filters, so they could try to perfect the system that, by its very nature, could never be perfected.”
“A week later, he observed that “when he is good, he is very good indeed; and when he is bad he is horrid.” -Bill Shockley's dad
“In his view, innovation was not a simple action but “a total process” of interrelated parts. “It is not just the discovery of new phenomena, nor the development of a new product or manufacturing technique, nor the creation of a new market,” he later wrote. “Rather, the process is all these things acting together in an integrated way toward a common industrial goal.” Kelly Morton
“His mathematical proofs presented the few people cleared to read it with a number of useful insights and an essential observation that language, especially the English language, was filled with redundancy and predictability. Indeed, he later calculated that English was about 75 to 80 percent redundant. This had ramifications for cryptography: The less redundancy you have in a message, the harder it is to crack its code”
“In the midst of Shannon’s career, some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others. They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.”
“An instigator is different from a genius, but just as uncommon. An instigator is different, too, from the most skillful manager, someone able to wrest excellence out of people who might otherwise fall sho
“His mind goes off at too many different angles and sees too many different possibilities in everything. He is like a child in that, but a very mature child.” Pierce’s real talent, according to Friis and Pierce himself, was in getting people interested in something that hadn’t really occurred to them before.”
“Pierce’s closest friends recognized that his wry, skeptical, and crusty exterior concealed the warm inner core of a romantic. Sometimes a person visiting Pierce in his office would find him reading poetry; sometimes they would find him reading poetry in another language. A devotee of verse—in college he had organized a group of students and then convinced a professor to read all of Paradise Lost to them aloud—he often tried to write poems, usually with stilted and unsuccessful results.”
“We would meet,” he recalls, “the three of us, and we would grab a conference room and stand around a blackboard and draw hexagons.” Engel Frankiel
“Repeatedly during his career, Kelly had fended off job offers—offers from big companies that would pay him more money than AT&T could. In the end, he had always decided against leaving Ma Bell. “He wouldn’t have left that laboratory for anything, no matter what anybody offered him,” his wife recalled. “It was just his whole life.”
“It was Kelly’s habit to single out researchers whose work or manner impressed him. “His evaluation and identification of people had a profound effect on their careers,” Emmanuel Piore, IBM’s chief scientist, once remarked. Yet it seems likely these men and women never knew it. An unseen hand, Kelly’s own, had plucked them out as IBM’s future scientific leaders.”
“But Kelly believed the most valuable ideas arose when the large group of physicists bumped against other departments and disciplines, too. “It’s the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas,” explains Herwig Kogelnik”
“So if you hear something negative about how John Pierce managed people, I’d say, well, that’s not surprising. Pierce wasn’t about managing people. Pierce was about managing ideas. And you cannot manage ideas and manage people the same way. It just doesn’t work. So if somebody tells you Pierce wasn’t a great manager … you say, of what?”
“It’s hard to say something will never happen again. But with the monopoly gone, with the whole concept of monopoly essentially discredited, how could there ever be a place like that again?” Dick Frenkiel
“That however greatly it was to be lamented that these statues should have suffered so much from time and barbarism, yet it was undeniable that they had never been retouched; that they were the work of the ablest artists the world had ever seen; executed under the most enlightened patron of the arts, and at a period when genius enjoyed the most liberal encouragement, and that attained the highest degree of perfection: and that they had been found worthy of forming the decoration of the most admired edifice ever erected in Greece: That he should have had the greatest delight and derived the greatest benefit from the opportunity Lord Elgin offered him of having in his possession and contemplating these inestimable marbles. But (his expression was) it would be sacrilege in him or any man to presume to touch them with a chisel” - Antonio Canova
“We can all feel, or imagine, the regret with which the ruins of cities, once the capitals of empires, are beheld; the reflection suggested by such objects are too trite to require recapitulation. But never did the littleness of man, and the vanity of his best virtues, of patriotism exalt, and of valour to defend his country, appear more conspicuous than in the record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she now is.”
“And may the materials from which those sublime sculptures have been produced be preserved from accident, that men of taste and genius yet unborn may be gratified with a sight of them; and that the admiring world may revere the Author of all things, for having bestowed on man those peculiar powers of his mind and hand.” -Benjamin West
“In no other profession is the opinion of the man who has studied it for his amusement preferred to that of him who has devoted his soul to excel in it. No man will trust his limb to a connoisseur in surgery; no minister would ask a connoisseur in war how a campaign is to be conducted; no nobleman would be satisfied with the opinion of a connoisseur in law on disputed property; and why should a connoisseur of an art, more exclusively than any other without the reach of common acquirement be preferred to the professional man?”
“When I got to Bell Labs as a permanent employee in 1969, no one told me what I should work on. This was standard practice: people were introduced to other people, encouraged to wander around, and left to find their own”
“The management principles here are that you hire bright people and you introduce them to the environment, and you give them general directions as to what sort of thing is wanted, and you give them lots of freedom. Doesn’t mean that you always necessarily give them all the money that they want. And then you exercise selective enthusiasm over what they do. And if you mistakenly discourage or fail to respond to something that later on turns out to be good, if it is really a strong idea, it will come back.”
“That enlightened management and company policy encouraged people to write, and in the long run it paid off for the company as well as for the authors. Publications by Bell Labs authors were important for recruiting.”
“Hire the best. One resource was very carefully managed: hiring. In 1127, we typically could only hire one or two people a year, and almost always young ones, so hiring decisions were made very cautiously, perhaps too much so. This is of course a familiar problem in university departments as well. It is often unclear whether to go after a star in a particular field, or someone else who is broadly talented; as Steve Johnson once put it, should we be hiring athletes or first basemen? My preference has been for people who are really good at what they do, without worrying too much about specifically what it is.”
“The decompression program began poorly. Musk and Lee visited the headquarters of Aston Martin to see the company’s CEO and get a tour of his factory. The executive treated Musk like an amateur car builder, talking down to him and suggesting he knew more about electric vehicles than anyone else on the planet. “He was a complete douche,” as Lee put it, and the men did their best to make a hasty exit back to central London.”
“The efforts of understanding the past may fluctuate between the search for uniformities and the appreciation of the unique” - Myron Gilmore
“Yet it is not the practical aspects of volcanic eruptions that has led to our fascination with them, but rather that they represent the most awesome and powerful display of nature’s force.”
“In 1714 Tobias Swinden, a member of the Royal Society of London, published An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell, in which he showed by calculation, first, that during the span of humanity, the accumulation of souls would have long since overrun any subterranean space, and, second, that there was not sufficient oxygen available to keep the underground fires alive. But he was not about to abandon the idea of Hell. He merely moved itto a new location; instead of a volcanic or subterranean heat source, he presented a scientific and logical proof that the Sun, possessing an eternal and enormous fire and ample space for all the lost souls for eternity, was the site of Hell.”
Meticulous observations and beautiful pictorial representations in Hamilton’s works greatly helped to win credence among scientists that volcanoes were important and positive Earth forces, not freaks of Nature: “Volcanoes should be considered in a creative rather than a destructive light” Hamilton wrote in 1786.
Unlike the fear and terror of mountains and forests expressed by most medieval poets, Petrarch writes to a friend: “Would that you could know, with what joy I wander free and alone among the mountains, forests and streams.” It is often said that Petrarch was the first person to climb a mountain for its own sake, and to enjoy the view from the top.
One is reminded of the chilling words of Sir William Osler: “In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first came.” Is it more important in science to convince than to discover?
“Imagine the discomfiture of a hedge-fund boss bending over to sign off on a deal to buy credit default swaps on the equity tranche of a batch of collateralized debt obligations secured by the discounted present value of the estimated future flow of user fees from the privatization of aquifers in a drought-ravaged sector of sub-Sahara Africa.”
“After all, what other collector in history has had the advantage of the world’s greatest collection agencies, the British Army and Navy, to help with the selection process over several centuries?”
“Convinced that the legendary durability of diamonds could be passed on to people, the sixteenth-century Pope Clement VII, on his doctor’s orders, began to sprinkle diamond powder on his food. Two weeks later and 40,000 ducats poorer, he died.”
“When the market goes up, the taste of art thieves heads down.”
“While the museum official’s sentiments were likely intended to be general, he had particularly in mind an ivory pomegranate believed to have come from Solomon’s temple that the Israel Museum obtained in 1988 from the “free market” using the advanced archeological technique of paying $550,000 into a Swiss bank account.”
“In a interview with the publisher of Cigar Aficionado, Ron Perelman, US cosmetics billionaire and one-time owner of Consolidated Cigar, laid out his own notquite-pipe dreams of what he might do once the US embargo ended: “Isn’t it every cigar lover’s fantasy – like a wine lover’s to have a chateau and a vineyard in Bordeaux – to have a factory, a business in Cuba?”
“And fourth?” Byers said, raising his eyebrows. I couldn’t think of a final point. I glanced around and noticed a plate of sandwiches and cookies left over from their working lunch. “To never pay for a meal for four years.”
“Phil was the type of person who in previous ages would have volunteered for crusades. Tall, rugged, and steady, he lived an ascetic existence—drawn to the purity and hardship of struggling against impossible odds. He was immediately enchanted by the project, and soon signed on.”
“This incongruous assortment of engineers, reminiscent of the diverse characters of a Passion play, had one thing that bound them together: a deep, almost spiritual conviction that a good idea and some hard work can make a difference. They believed in the power of a concept to change people’s lives for the better, and felt a moral imperative to make it happen. GO was a vehicle for each of them to put this feeling into action, to prove to themselves that their faith was justified.
“Despite all this, I liked him. In most respects he seemed like a normal guy, albeit a bit awkward, with a knack for turning any discussion into a contest. I had mainly talked to him on social occasions, and found that it was a simple matter to put him at ease: defer to him on some point and he would open up. I respected his passion for work, his unmatched intelligence, and his genuine interest in mastering new ideas. When he wasn’t feeling threatened, he was capable of discussing a wide range of topics, from politics to music, but he was most comfortable when talking about computer technology and gossiping about industry executives.” - Talking about Bill Gates
“The formal techniques for decision analysis that business schools teach are fool’s gold, a vain and misguided attempt to systematize the chaotic. The mere existence of these methods betrays a darker truth: we harbor a desperate desire to believe that the world is ultimately predictable. But anyone who has managed a startup knows that predictability is an illusion.”
“I couldn’t believe it. For the past three years, I had been totally wrapped up in my work, so much so that the rest of my life—family, friends, recreation, reading, music, anything other than GO—had virtually ceased to exist. I had always justified this by believing that my life was merely on hold, slowed down like the body of a hibernating bear, to be revived on cue with the coming spring. I had ignored birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and the other events by which people mark the passage of time, figuring that I would apologetically hop back into the parade later. But now I was faced with the stark reality that life went on without me, ready or not, and once these landmarks were passed, there was no turning back to revisit them. Wrapped in a cocoon of meetings, memos, and milestones, I had let my family drift away like a neglected water lily in a gentle pond, only to find it withered and out of reach when I needed to retrieve it. It’s one thing to skip a birthday present; it’s another altogether to skip your father’s life.”
“It’s simple. We should go where they aren’t.” I was exasperated. “Like where? They’re everywhere! I check for Bill Gates under my bed in the morning.”
“The real question is not why the project died, but rather why it survived as long as it did with no meaningful sales. Without the unflagging efforts of a broad group of supporters, GO might have quietly closed its doors years earlier. The project’s longevity is a testament to the force of will and the compelling power of belief in an idea. It is comforting to know that the human impulse to make the world a better place is not today confined to the young or the foolish. It is alive and well among the people that live and work in Silicon Valley.”
“If you want to make a killing trading tech stocks, find a friend in the t-shirt business between San Francisco and San Jose and ask to be alerted any time a rush order gets placed. Conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley states, "If it's not on a t-shirt, it didn't really happen.”
“One business-development person warned me that Microsoft's MO as a company was to get close to startups, suck them dry, and then throw them away. Microsoft was methodical about it, giving generous terms to keep the startups alive, but essentially turning them into captive research-and-development centers. Microsoft would become the startups' biggest customer and thereby drive the direction of their development, perhaps offering to provide informal technical help, which necessitated a look at the startups' proprietary code.”
“Even after four years at Google, I found it astounding that one twenty-something guy was sitting alone at his desk, sipping tea and developing the main branding element for a product to be used by millions of people—the night before it was scheduled to launch.”
Jackson had made MIT the biggest and best department in the country largely by strengthening its ties with industry. He initiated cooperative education programs, strongly encouraged faculty consulting (his rule of thumb was that half a professor's income should be earned on the outside), and reshaped both the undergraduate and graduate curricula around the technical and managerial challenges of long-distance power networks.
Bell Labs sent engineers to teach advanced courses to the communications students, and the department in turn sent coop students to Bell Labs and AT&T's operating and manufacturing divisions.
Most of Lincoln's spinoffs got their start with defense contracts, often under subcontract to Lincoln itself, and continued to do most of their business with the DOD. By 1986, Lincoln's forty-eight spinoff companies accounted for $8.6 billion in annual sales and employed more than 100000 people.
Terman drew two important conclusions from his statistics-that connections with industry kept an electrical engineering program on the leading edge of research, and that even small investments in research could repay big dividends to academic departments.
A tireless promoter of western companies, Terman arranged field trips to local electronics companies (some, like Heintz and Kaufman, founded by Stanford graduates) and invited their engineers to give seminars about their research on campus.
Looking for stronger corporate ties as well, he kept in touch with William Shockley and, hearing rumors of Shockley's possible interest in setting up his own company, gave him a strong sales pitch for relocating near Stanford. "It is an exciting business to observe the University and the technical community grow cooperatively to the benefit of both," Terman told him. "We hope you will see your way clear to participate in it." Shockley did and established Shockley Semiconductor in the industrial park as a subsidiary of Beckman Instruments in 1955.
After all, Robert Sproull, head of Cornell's materials laboratory and later director ofARPA, was only half joking when he said that the lunchroom had been the key to success in materials research at Bell Laboratories
“The emperor offered cash rewards to spur innovation in ship design, and a variety of new boats, as well as naval gunpowder weapons, were created. Ten different oceangoing junks evolved and ten types of warships, as well as ferryboats, water tankers, floating restaurants, horse transport ships, manure boats, and a dozen other specialty craft. Along with creativity came open-mindedness. Abandoning their superior stance toward other cultures, Chinese scholars studied Arab and Hindu contributions in navigation and geography and in turn created their own star and sea charts and studies of the tides and currents of foreign countries. They also invented the floating mariner’s compass. And the birth of the explorer’s sense of wonder can be detected even among such strict Confucians as Mo Ji, director of the National Academy during the reign of Gao Zong. He took periodic leaves from his duties and sailed the seas for no other purpose, it seems, than to satisfy his own curiosity.”
“When Naghachu realized the deception and jumped onto his horse to flee, he was stopped by Nayira’u, who told him of Zhu Di’s plan. Seeing no way to escape, Naghachu surrendered. The prince graciously received the Mongol leader like an honored guest and that night prepared a banquet for the entire army and their families. The Mongols feasted, and on the following day many decided willingly to join Zhu Di’s army. His bloodless victory won the prince both admiration and apprehension in Nanjing.”