Inventors

"The fact that civilization is becoming more intricate must not mean that we treat men for a longer period as immature. Does it not mean, perhaps, the opposite: that we must skillfully make them mature sooner, that we must find ways of handling the intricacy of our culture?"

"Edwin Land worked passionately to realize his vision for the betterment of society. … His vision of science for the public was a great one, and highly original. … Although Edwin Land must have realized that much about him was unique, he tried to identify those elements of his own being and experience that could be replicated to the benefit of his nation and the world. … As Ken Olsen observed in his talk this morning about Land and Polaroid, knowing where you want to go is a big advantage."

"Most large industrial concerns are limited by policy to special directions of expansion within the well-established field of the company. On the other hand, most small companies do not have the resources or the facilities to support "scientific prospecting." Thus the young man leaving the university with a proposal for a new kind of activity is frequently not able to find a matrix for the development of his ideas in any established industrial organization."

"There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically — we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first!"

"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."

"We have not found anti-intellectualism a problem at the Polaroid Corporation, except in the very initial state of penetration. It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!"

"If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it. So you make the system to fulfill that need, rather than starting the other way around, where you have something and wonder what to do with it."

"There's a rule they don't teach you at the Harvard Business School. It is, if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess."

"Ordinarily when we talk about the human as the advanced product of evolution and the mind as being the most advanced product of evolution, there is an implication that we are advanced out of and away from the structure of the exterior world in which we have evolved, as if a separate product had been packaged, wrapped up, and delivered from a production line. The view I am presenting proposes a mechanism more and more interlocked with the totality of the exterior. This mechanism has no separate existence at all, being in a thousand ways united with and continuously interacting with the whole exterior domain. In fact there is no exterior red object with a tremendous mind linked to it by only a ray of light. The red object is a composite product of matter and mechanism evolved in permanent association with a most elaborate interlock. There is no tremor in what we call the "outside world" that is not locked by a thousand chains and gossamers to inner structures that vibrate and move with it and are a part of it. The reason for the painfulness of all philosophy is that in the past, in its necessary ignorance of the unbelievable domains of partnership that have evolved in the relationship between ourselves and the world around us, it dealt with what indeed have been a tragic separation and isolation. Of what meaning is the world without mind? The question cannot exist."

"I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company, and that this new company is the frontier for the next generation."

"My motto is very personal and may not fit anyone else or any other company. It is: Don't do anything that someone else can do. Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible."

"Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going. All of us who are mature feel that there are historic principles of behavior and morality, of things that we all believe in that are being lost, not because young people couldn't believe in them, but because there is no language for translating them into contemporary terms. The search for that language, the search for the ways to tell young people what we know as we grow older — the permanent and wonderful things about life — will be one of the great functions of this system. We are losing this generation. We all know that. We need a way to get them back."

"An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn't work out, you had your head cut off."

"The world is a scene changing so rapidly that it takes every bit of intuitive ability you have, every brain cell each one of you has, to make the sensible decision about what to do next. You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do."

"My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had."

"Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention."

"I believe it is pretty well established now that neither the intuition of the sales manager nor even the first reaction of the public is a reliable measure of the value of a product to the consumer. Very often the best way to find out whether something is worth making is to make it, distribute it, and then to see, after the product has been around a few years, whether it was worth the trouble."

"It was not a question of the ineptitude that might be revealed by the truth, or the possible damage that the whole program of negotiation for peace may have suffered … and it was not a question of whether with foresight that particular crisis could have been avoided. The issue was this: Does an American, when he represents all Americans, have to tell the truth at any cost? The answer is yes, and the consequence of the answer is that our techniques for influencing the rest of the world cannot be rich and flexible like the techniques of our competitors. We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true."

"I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do."

"We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year."

"Now, partly that was work, and partly that was brains, but very largely it was having the guts, the guts to be immodest in the right way."

"One of the best ways to keep a great secret is to shout it."

"Land was legendary for his eccentric and exhausting work habits, which dated back to his Harvard days. Like the proverbial mad scientist, when Land was immersed in a project, he would lock himself in the lab for days on end, stopping only long enough to eat and often not bothering to change clothes. When he was on one of these jags, Land's assistants would be scheduled in shifts to keep up with him since they had a tendency to fold at the knees without sleep."

"In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance."

"Besides energy, the dominant impressions Land created were artistic sensibility, a sense of drama, delight in experiment, relentless optimism. Less evident was a remarkable ability to keep both work and people in compartments. Less than six feet tall, Land had intense eyes and a shock of black hair that riveted attention on him. Despite a soft voice and frequent use of half-sentences, Land was able to convert interior monologues into dramatic public presentations. The watchword was: "If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.""

"my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects."

"Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's “King Solomon's Ring,” I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject."

"There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience."

"If the idea of physical reality had ceased to be purely atomic, it still remained for the time being purely mechanistic; people still tried to explain all events as the motion of inert masses; indeed no other way of looking at things seemed conceivable. Then came the great change, which will be associated for all time with the names of Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, and Hertz."

"Heinrich Hertz seemed to be predestined to open up to mankind many of the secrets which nature has hitherto concealed from us; but all these hopes were frustrated by the malignant disease which, creeping slowly but surely on, robbed us of this precious life and of the achievements which it promised."

"As a boy he won the appreciation of his parents and teachers by his high moral character. Already his pursuits showed his natural inclinations. While still attending school he worked of his own accord at the bench and lathe, on Sundays he attended the Trade School to practise geometrical drawing, and with the simplest appliances he constructed serviceable optical and mechanical instruments. ...It is in young men of unusual capacity that one most frequently observes [his] sort of timid modesty. ...their strength must be tried by some practical test before they can secure the self-reliance requisite for their difficult task. And even in later years men of great ability are the less content with their own achievements the higher their capacity and ideals. The most gifted attain the highest and truest success because they are most keenly alive to the presence of imperfection and most unwearied in removing it. ...[A]s he grew in knowledge he grew in the conviction that only in scientific work could he find enduring satisfaction."

"The difficult surface conditions met with when light passes from one medium to another, including such subjects as ellipticity, total reflection, etc., have been critically discussed among others by Neumann (1835) and Rayleigh (1888) but the discrimination between the Fresnel and the Neumann vector was not accomplished without misgiving before the advent of the work of Hertz. It appears... that the elastic theories of light, if Kelvin's gyrostatic adynamic ether be admitted, have not been wholly routed. Nevertheless the great electromagnetic theory of light propounded by Maxwell (1864, 'Treatise,' 1873) has been singularly apt not only in explaining all the phenomena reached by the older theories and in predicting entirely novel results, but in harmoniously uniting as parts of a unique doctrine, both the electric or photographic light vector of Fresnel and Cauchy and the magnetic vector of Neumann and MacCullagh. Its predictions have, moreover, been astonishingly verified by the work of Hertz (1890), and it is to-day acquiring added power in the convection theories of Lorentz (1895) and others."

"The subject of electric oscillation announced in a remarkable paper of Henry in 1842 and threshed out in its main features by Kelvin in 1856, followed by Kirchhoff's treatment of the transmission of oscillations along a wire (1857), has become of discriminating importance between Maxwell's theory of the electric field and the other equally profound theories of an earlier date. These crucial experiments contributed by Hertz (1887, et seq.) showed that electromagnetic waves move with the velocity of light, and like it are capable of being reflected, refracted, brought to interference and polarized. A year later Hertz (1888) worked out the distribution of the vectors in the space surrounding the oscillatory source. ...Some doubt was thrown on the details of Hertz's results by Sarasin and de la Rive's phenomenon of multiple resonance (1890), but this was soon explained away as the necessary result of the occurrence of damped oscillations by Poincaré (1891), by Bjerknes (1891) and others."

"When a constant electric current flows along a cylindrical wire, its strength is the same at every part of the section of the wire. But if the current is variable, self-induction produces a deviation from this... induction opposes variations of the current in the centre of the wire more strongly than at the circumference, and consequently the current by preference flows along the outer portion of the wire. When the current changes its direction... this deviation increases rapidly with the rate of alternation; and when the current alternates many million times per second, almost the whole of the interior of the wire must, according to theory, appear free from current, and the flow must confine itself to the very skin of the wire. Now in such extreme cases... preference must be given to another conception of the matter which was first presented by Messrs. 0. Heaviside and J. H. Poynting, as the correct interpretation of Maxwell's equations as applied to this case. According to this view, the electric force which determines the current is not propagated in the wire itself, but under all circumstances penetrates from without into the wire, and spreads into the metal with comparative slowness and laws similar to those which govern changes of temperature in a conducting body. ...Inasmuch as I made use of electric waves in wires of exceedingly short period in my experiments on the propagation of electric force, it was natural to test by means of these the correctness of the conclusions deduced. As a matter of fact the theory was found to be confirmed by the experiments..."

"In 1888... Heinrich Hertz succeeded in producing electromagnetic waves (to which he subsequently gave the shorter name of electric waves) standing in free space and gliding over wires; he showed that they could be reflected, refracted, polarized, diffused, and generally followed optical laws just as though they were light waves. This achievement was the first real advance toward the art of wireless telegraphy. As a detector of electric waves at a distance from whence they were emitted, Hertz employed a circlet of wire having an air gap in it of microscopic size; this he termed a "resonator." The distance to which waves could be detected with it was very limited, but it served Hertz's purpose admirably. ... Any theory advanced must conform with Maxwell's conceptions and the experiments of Hertz, but as the fundamental equations by which Maxwell evolved his theory are as broad as they are beautiful, its interpretations by various technicians are widely divergent, and the final solution is rendered all the more difficult when Hertz's work is consulted; for he not only observed electric waves in free space, but waves which traverse the surface of wires as well."

"One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them."

"Although experimenters had attempted by various means to submit Maxwell's views to a test, the technical difficulties were so great that no success had been achieved. It appeared clearly from Maxwell's equations that no appreciable effects could be anticipated unless dE/dt was very great; and this meant that the electric intensity E would have to vary with extreme rapidity. The simplest means of obtaining a result of this kind would be to produce an oscillating field of electric intensity in which the oscillations were extremely rapid, say, several millions per second. But no mechanical contrivance could yield such rapid vibrations, and... no other methods suggested themselves. ... In 1885 Helmholtz directed the attention of his pupil, Hertz, to the problem. Hertz was one of the most remarkable experimenters of the nineteenth century; he succeeded in at last vanquishing the technical difficulties and in generating by purely electrical means an oscillating electric field of extremely high frequency. Electromagnetic waves of sufficient intensity were thus produced; and after having been sidetracked for a time by a secondary phenomenon whose nature was elucidated by Poincaré, Hertz verified the fact that the waves advanced with the speed of light and indeed possessed all the essential properties of light waves other than those of visibility to the human eye. Thus, as a result of Hertz's experiments, the foundations were laid for the commercial use of wireless and radio; but, more important still, Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light establishing the intimate connection between electricity and optics had been at last vindicated."

"It is not particularly satisfactory to see equations set forth as direct results of observation and experiment, where we used to get long mathematical deductions as apparent proofs of them. Nevertheless, I believe that we cannot, without deceiving ourselves, extract much more from known facts than is asserted in the papers referred to. If we wish to lend more color to the theory, there is nothing to prevent us from supplementing all this and aiding our powers of imagination by concrete representations of the various conceptions as to the nature of electric polarisation, the electric current, etc."

"The rigour of science requires that we distinguish well the undraped figure of Nature itself from the gay-coloured vesture with which we clothe her at our pleasure."

"It's of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there."

"The most horrible whores are famous. I did what I did for love. The others did it for money."

"A writer, a brilliant writer, wants to write the real book about me. He wants to call it The Users—the people who have used me."

"I was at the studio at seven in the morning, putting on an evening gown, but I couldn't wait to get home to my children to be a nurse. What does Ava Gardner know? She never had a child, which is what it's all about. It's the truth!"

"First he married Joan Bennett, then he married me, then he married Myrna Loy. I had a wonderful first love affair. I like men. Gene Markey was the only civilized man. He used to spit into a spittoon."

"They wanted something cheap and stupid. They wanted something dumb. But I have little shelves in my brain, and it's all there, it's the truth."

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

"Is that chubby‐faced Austrian kid in Boom Town actually me? Did I really wait on the set (being the newest and having the smallest role) to do my close ups, just to wind up looking like that? Clark Gable, so warm and friendly to the insecure actress … Claudette Colbert, such a lady to me, although much higher in the MGM pecking order."

"Which director did I like? I've for gotten which. Some of them were not so nice. When somebody isn't accepted by me, it's complete hate. One director never spoke to me, not even hello in the morning. Mr. Mayer never spoke to me. One day I said, "Mr. Mayer, why don't you ever say hello to me?" He said, "Why should I? You're not my wife." It was only because I wouldn't sleep with him. I didn't know anything filthy went on."

"Ziegfeld Girl. When I see those infinite stairs in that lavish production number that out‐Metro's even Metro, I break up. The director, Robert Z. Leonard, had instructed me to walk down them regally, with Lana on one side and my dear friend Judy on the other. I was to float with head erect, arms disdainfully away from my body in the accepted Ziegfeld manner, and never, but never, look down to see where I was going. The fact that I couldn't see in the blinding lights, even straight ahead, was small consolation. And so I descended, teetering down what felt like millions of steps, in a glorious Adrian costume encrusted with enough twinkling stars to make Neil Armstrong jealous. Out of camera range, a board was strapped on my back, and part of the headdress was attached to this apparatus. Also out of camera range, my bosom was taped from behind and I felt a little like some religious penitent in the 13th century walking in a torture procession. And so I came, smilingly, my back top‐heavy, and as I paraded gingerly down each stair, I had to dispel thoughts of losing my balance and toppling over headlong down the entire set to the ground miles below—board, tapes, twinkling stars and all …"

"More stairs, only this time it's in Samson and Delilah. Now, I'm ascending them, dragging poor, blinded Victor Mature by the handle of a whip. The set is as gigantically faint‐making as anything Mr. De Mille ever conceived, and every single extra within a 50 mile radius seems to be assembled as I slowly lead Samson to the top, where he is scheduled to pull the two enormous pillars of the temple down around his ears and everyone else's. And do you know what I am thinking as I watch this panoply on my television screen? Quite simply, it is "I can't take another step in those damn forties. high heels! … " And, again, in Samson, in the scene where I look dewy‐eyed while golden coins are poured over my feet as a reward for betraying Samson. Well, Mr. De Mille, whom I got along with beautifully, dragged me out of a sick bed for that one, and the dewy eyes are a direct result of a roaring 104‐degree fever."