Bill Hammack > Quotes

“By considering his forebears and contemporaries, Wedgwood was posting the guardrails on his path. In this way, a skilled engineer can be called a kind of “conservative,” not in a political sense but in the broader definition of looking to preserve the functional solutions of the present and past while making cautiously incremental adjustments—just enough to solve their particular problem at hand—that make sure attempted solutions don’t veer into uncharted territory where oversights can have real consequences in the real world. They know that the best results come from making small changes to the state of the art, while a radical engineer risks building a bridge that will collapse. An intuition constructed from records, experience, and institutional knowledge, like rules of thumb, never guarantees success, but it does point the engineer toward the trials and errors that are most likely to produce useful results and deepen the collective well of knowledge.”
― Bill Hammack, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans

“Melvin Kranzberg, a historian, once observed “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
― Bill Hammack, Eight Amazing Engineering Stories: Using the Elements to Create Extraordinary Technologies

“Georges Claude made a fortune from his neon signs, but lost most of it in the 1930s with hair brained schemes to make electricity using the temperature difference between the top of the ocean and its icy depths. He almost ended his career imprisoned for life.”
― Bill Hammack, How Engineers Create the World: The Public Radio Commentaries of Bill Hammack

“...the line between successful and unsuccessful inventions is manufacturability.”
― Bill Hammack, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans

“And Moore’s Law gave us bad software: Instead of writing efficient code, programmers just waited until the computers got faster. I’m reminded of Blaise Pascal’s comment three centuries ago. Apologizing for a verbose letters he wrote “I have only made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
― Bill Hammack, How Engineers Create the World: The Public Radio Commentaries of Bill Hammack

“A wonderful feature of engineering by evolution," [Frances] Arnold said when accepting the Nobel Prize, "is that solutions come first; an understanding of the solutions may or may not come later."...As our knowledge about the universe expands, an engineer will always be out front, working in the penumbra of understanding. Because advances don't remove uncertainty. They simply move the borderline between certainty and uncertainty.”
― Bill Hammack, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans