Brian Christian Quotes
Inspired by the punched railway tickets of the time, an inventor by the name of Herman Hollerith devised a system of punched manila cards to store information, and a machine, which he called the Hollerith Machine, to count and sort them. Hollerith was awarded a patent in 1889, and the government adopted the Hollerith Machine for the 1890 census. No one had ever seen anything like it. Wrote one awestruck observer, “The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the Gods, but beats them hollow as to speed.” Another, however, reasoned that the invention was of limited use: “As no one will ever use it but governments, the inventor will not likely get very rich.” This prediction, which Hollerith clipped and saved, would not prove entirely correct. Hollerith’s firm merged with several others in 1911 to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. A few years later it was renamed—to International Business Machines, or IBM.
Brian Christian
Quotes to Explore
Avoid patent leather, pink, and crystals.
Edgardo Osorio
If you read Wall Street's reports, they don't talk of soya bean as originating in China. They don't talk of soya bean as soya bean. They talk of Monsanto soya. Monsanto soya is protected by a patent. It has a patent number. It is therefore treated as a creation of Monsanto, a product of Monsanto's intelligence and innovation.
Vandana Shiva
Many in India fought against some of the ideas of changing our patent system. And we have signed the World Trade Organisation Treaty but still we have to safeguard ourselves because, many of the developed countries are, though they have signed the same WTO, but they are not practising it; anti-dumping measures they are adopting very liberally, as also tariff, non-tariff barriers. So we have to carefully argue within the WTO system our case.
K. R. Narayanan
I am more of a sponge than an inventor. I absorb ideas from every source. I take half-matured schemes for mechanical development and make them practical. I am a sort of a middleman between the long-haired and impractical inventor and the hard-headed business man who measures all things in terms of dollars and cents. My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant but misdirected ideas of others.
Thomas A. Edison
The Patent and Trademark Office was correct in issuing the patent.
J. M. Roberts
Whatever may be the pros and cons of going to the public theatre, it is a patent fact that it has undermined the morals and ruined the character of many a youth in his country.
Mahatma Gandhi
I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
Vladimir Nabokov
Men in great place are thrice servants; servants of the sovereign state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.
John Locke
Nazareth
I don't feel like I'm slowing down.
Melvyn Bragg
Mankind progresses not smoothly, as by a sliding carpet ascent, but by rugged steps broken by gaps. He halts long on one stage before taking the next. Often he remains stationary, unable to form resolution to step forward - sometimes even has turned round and retrograded.
Sabine Baring-Gould
Inspired by the punched railway tickets of the time, an inventor by the name of Herman Hollerith devised a system of punched manila cards to store information, and a machine, which he called the Hollerith Machine, to count and sort them. Hollerith was awarded a patent in 1889, and the government adopted the Hollerith Machine for the 1890 census. No one had ever seen anything like it. Wrote one awestruck observer, “The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the Gods, but beats them hollow as to speed.” Another, however, reasoned that the invention was of limited use: “As no one will ever use it but governments, the inventor will not likely get very rich.” This prediction, which Hollerith clipped and saved, would not prove entirely correct. Hollerith’s firm merged with several others in 1911 to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. A few years later it was renamed—to International Business Machines, or IBM.
Brian Christian
