|
‘It’s very ingenious.’
‘How does it work, then?’ ‘Oh, I didn’t understand what he said. It was all about ... numbers. But it certainly sounded very clever.’ (MR)
0 Comments
'I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.' (LH)
Being inventive was all very well, but not when it stuck thorns into you. (DCC)
... men who can invent things anyone could have thought of are very rare men. (LH)
Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection. (SG)
Need exerted a necessary pressure on humanity: you had to be hungry to innovate, and you needed to be surrounded by competitors to be driven to achieve. (LW)
It’s just like I’ve always said – women have always had a greater stake in technology than have men. We’d still be living in trees, otherwise. Piped water, electric lighting, stoves that you don’t need to shove wood into – I reckon that behind half the great inventors in history were their wives, nagging them into fiding a cleaner way of doing the chores. (BOS)
'… we did invent the deep-fried stoat. That must count for something.'
'How is that a good point?' said Arthur. 'Weel, it saves some other poor devil having tae do it. It's what ye might call a taste explosion; ye take a mouthful, taste it, and then there is an explosion.' (ISWM) As one man, they turned in their seats to look at the Experimental Privy Mk 2. Mk 1 had worked – Leonard’s devices tended to– but since the key to its operation was that it tumbled very fast on a central axis while in use it had been abandoned after a report by its test pilot (Rincewind) that, whatever you had in mind when you went in, the only thing you wanted to do once inside was get out.
Mk 2 was as yet untried. It creaked ominously under their gaze, an open invitation to constipation and kidney stones. (LH) 'I was rather thinking of problems associated with the thin air and low gravity,’ said Leonard. ‘That’s what the survivor of the Maria Pesto reported. But this afternoon I feel I can come up with a privy that, happily, utilises the thinner air of altitude to achieve the effect normally associated with gravity. Gentle suction is involved.’
Ponder nodded. He had a quick mind when it came to mechanical detail, and he’d already formed a mental picture. Now a mental eraser would be useful. (LH) 'That’s why it’s always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it’s all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There’s No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they’re going to start dribbling one of ‘em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy’s ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles…' (SG)
... fifty years ago, a dwarf tinkering in Ankh-Morpork had found that if you put a simple fine mesh over your lantern flame it’d burn blue in the presence of the gas but wouldn’t explode. It was a discovery of immense value to the good of dwarfkind and, as so often happens with such discoveries, almost immediately led to a war. (FE)
The late (or at least severely delayed) Bergholt Stuttley Johnson was generally recognized as the worst inventor in the
world, yet in a very specialized sense. Merely bad inventors made things that failed to operate. He wasn’t among these small fry. Any fool could make something that did absolutely nothing when you pressed the button. He scorned such fumble-fingered amateurs. Everything he built worked. It just didn’t do what it said on the box. If you wanted a small ground-to-air missile, you asked Johnson to design an ornamental fountain. (H) |
Author
The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
All
Archives
March 2023
|
RSS Feed
