inventors

"Moog, who died in 2005, did not invent the synthesizer. Instead, “he’s the one who made it mainstream,” says Mark Ballora, professor of music technology at Penn State University. He became a celebrity, and people used “Moog” (which rhymes with “vogue”) as a synonym for electronic music."

"Les Paul's influence on electric guitar (and on recorded music in general) is inestimable. Not only was he a groundbreaking player, but he was also a visionary. [...] Today, "Lover" might sound like little more than a charming novelty, but when Paul was recording it, he was working his way toward studio recording techniques that are still in use."

"Leo Fender was to modern musical instruments what Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison were to electrical engineering. As a true pioneer, he reimagined the electric guitar with models like the Telecaster, Stratocaster, and Precision Bass, created the Fender Rhodes electric piano, and put his name to some of the best guitar amplifiers ever invented."

"A few words to the young women: When you combine a career with raising a family, the family responsibilities generally rest more heavily on you than on your husband, and you may need to proceed more slowly with your career than you would without a family. This may have its good side in that you can save up some interesting and important things to do after your children have left the nest. However, the responsibilities can often be so heavy as to frustrate a woman's career, and a lack of suitable child-care facilities is a major roadblock. To me it is no mystery why there are not more women in leadership positions in science. It has been mentioned that I am the first woman to receive the Howard Vollum Award, and of course I am very proud to be chosen. But when it is no longer considered unusual for a woman to be so honored or to achieve a position of leadership in public life, then we women will know that we have made it."

"The great problem with movable insulation is cracks. A door, shutter, or curtain is placed... The optimist notes the R value... but does not achieve it."

"If you purchase certain kinds of hardware to exploit solar energy it will be accounted for and credit will be given to the sun. If you depend on more customary old-fashioned uses of solar energy, growing food, drying clothes, sun bathing, warming a house with south windows, the sun credit is totally ignored."

"It would take an enormous crew of experts to determine the efficiency of different orientations of windows, different arrangements of shade trees, etc... To ignore these efforts and only to reward the purchase of "off the shelf hardware" is to further the disease of narrow minded quantification."

"Our present accounting system... can only discourage good house design. If the natural solar contribution to house heating from windows is ignored, then the designer knows this... No tax incentives—no credit to the sun in ERDA's graphs."

"Now that the experts have started this infantile accounting system, which evidently finds us... independent of the sun, solar energy will be admitted only so long as it has been properly collected, stored and transferred."

"The design of houses can be stilted by such graphs."

"Legislation aimed at encouraging the use of solar energy equipment by subsidizing... certain hardware must end by being pathetic and blundering."

"[W]e would be much better informed if alongside every graph showing our use of oil, coal and uranium there were also an indication or the total energy received from the sun. Since we can't do without it, let's not omit it from our accounts."

"The effect of clothes and blankets on heat loss is naturally investigated by everyone."

"[O]ur next concern in heating the building is what keeps the earth warm..? What supplies the United States with the energy to maintain an average temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit as it spins in empty space at absolute zero? This is a heating contract that no oil company would be quick to try and fill."

"A sniper scope or camera... that shows... temperatures as... colors would be an enormous help to the investigator. 30 minutes with such... could be as valuable as a week's work... without it. ...[N]ature ...treats you to such a view of the window or skylight with a pattern of frost. ...[S]eals ...[are] the entire problem."

"In the case of the United States a conservative estimate of the solar energy received in one year might be... Twenty nine thousand three hundred quadrillion Btu as opposed to the 62 quadrillion shown as used during 1968 by the U.S. Bureau of Mines."

"[I]t is very important to examine what the limits of an accounting system are—to know what the numbers and quantities... really mean."

"When small children first start paying attention to... their allowances they briefly commit their... minds to their few coins and... chores... without... considering the budget of the family's household. We can't allow our entire civilization to be similarly ignorant for long. We must ask who's keeping score and why they have such peculiar methods."

"If you install interior greenhouse lights the electricity... is faithfully recorded. If you grow the plants outside no attempt is made at an accounting."

"If you... ride and graze a horse... the horse's energy... does not appear on anyone's energy accounting."

"If you drive to... buy a newspaper the gasoline consumption appears. If you walk—using food energy—the event has disappeared from sight..."

"A few years ago Peter Van Dresser mentioned the Clothesline Paradox."

"[I]f folks don’t like the idea once they’ve given it the once-over, we’ll be glad to buy the plans back at the full $15.00 purchase price."

"The graphs which demonstrate a huge dependence on fossil fuels are fine in one respect. They are alarming. But they are... [m]isleading... [in] that they blind people to obvious answers and prime them to a frenzy of effort in poor directions. Attention... to such... trains people to attempt to deliver what is shown in these accounting systems rather than what is needed."

"The 's energy study shows the U.S.'s energy consumption in 1968 at... 62 quadrillion BTU ...[T]he average daily caloric intake is... 10,000 BTU/day/person—about 1.2% of the total consumption listed by the Bureau of Mines. But this... doesn't appear... on the graphs. Nuclear energy with 1% does... The food is solar energy. Why is it not included?"

"[T]he beadwall insulated window panels... this wonderful invention of David C. Harrison’s... a kind of super curtain that... transform[s] a clear dual-panel of glass into an opaque, well-insulated wall and back again."

"[T]here's Dave Harrison's bead wall. I teach... classes at the University of New Mexico and Dave... one of my students... said. "...I've got this idea of building a wall out of two panes of glass... and you can blow Styrofoam beads between the panes at night to insulate the wall." ...Here's a problem ...nobody has thought of a way to solve. I've tried... and... Harold Hay has... and... a lot of others... Dave Harrison has the answer! ...[A] ...low-tech ...answer ...simple ...easy to understand, that a heating and ventilating man in any town can fix... [W]e’ve made a deal with Dave so that he’ll get a big part of any royalties we realize..."

"We’ve built two greenhouses utilizing the beadwall, and our test results show... it will do much of the heating and cooling required by an average office building or home."

"Peter Van Dresser... built a solar heater here in New Mexico in 1956 or '58. We published his book, Landscape for Humans. One of the greatest forces... has been Harold Hay from California. ...I ...heard him in ’68 at the Solar Energy Conference. I had... a design and... modest success... Harold showed everyone... dead simple methods of doing the same job. He... completely changed my head around on how to attack these problems. ...[W]e’ve worked together a lot since then trying to bring some reforms into the Solar Society."

"[W]hen you're experimenting, about 80% of the ideas you try are failures... But we put all these concepts together and they performed the first time. ...[W]e had pretested most of the ideas we incorporated into this [our] home. We'd never used aluminum-skinned, honeycomb-cored structural sandwiches and... no one had... fabricated a complete building from the material... but every architectural and engineering book mentions the possibility... The 55-gallon, water-filled drums... [W]e... knew the amounts of energy... such... could pick up."

"[W]ith its unique construction—there are never any air leaks."

"Solar energy advocates are continuously humiliated by being shown "energy pies." Slices are assigned to coal, gas, oil, hydroelectric and even nuclear. but is evidently too small to appear."

"If we use the figure of 0.5% efficiency (Ayres and Scarlott)... we have consumed... 2,000,000 BTU/person/day of sunlight in producing the 10,000 BTU/person consumed. Solar energy then fills over 2/3 of the new energy pie."

"The Skylid has no switches or wires or motors... Instead, the unit contains a series of louvers. Each... is supported and balanced so that it hinges easily around its center and... the louvers are connected with a tie rod so they’ll open and close simultaneously. ...[M]ounted on one of the panels are two canisters—one on the outside and one inside ...connected by ...tubing. ... ...with a very low ...can expand ...in one canister and ...condense in the other with a temperature difference of... 1 degree Fahrenheit. This shifting of the Freon’s weight will open and close the... louvers... and the... sun—even the shade of a cloud—produces... enough temperature variation to boil the Freon from one container to the other. ...[A] locking chain... secure[s] the panels anywhere from full open to full close... to override the automatic mechanism."

"[W]e haven’t had the money... to tool up to manufacture the parts for the playground climbers on a competitive basis. The people... simply can’t afford to buy them. ...[T]hey just can’t hold their own in the market and so we’re not building them anymore."

"I want to build buildings and design systems that are beautiful and simple and that really work. ...It’s not ...exotic or earthshaking to fill 55-gallon drums with water, paint them black and place them in the walls of a home for use as solar collectors ...but it works."

"So many... good ideas... worked... but they couldn’t keep working. Some of the first buildings we put up weren’t good buildings because they leaked. Many of those first solar heaters weren’t... very good..."

"Some of our hardware is getting pretty good, but it... doesn’t make economic sense for most people. ...[O]ur zomes and heaters and so forth do not yet compete on a dollar basis with... conventional counterparts. It’s very exciting intellectually to work with these ideas but their validity will not really be proven until they start to replace... things they’re meant to replace."

"[T]he philosophical tactics and... approach taken by the giant corporations and... power groups miss the point... A pencil can break on you and you can sharpen it with your thumbnail and go right on... but if a circuit board or a resistor or condenser quits somewhere inside this recorder, we’re stopped and there’s probably not a lot we can do about it. ...[Y]et we increasingly use tape recorders instead of pencils."

"At one time an individual could fix everything in his life with his thumb nail or his teeth. ...I believe the ground rules can be transformed so that technology simplifies life instead of continually complicating it."

"[W]e started Zomeworks. Barry Hickman and Ed Heinz and I issued stock like a corporation and got a lawyer... [I]t was quite an abrupt change from just casually working together on a project the way we had before."

"When you start experimenting with, say, solar heating by covering collectors with glass or plastic and feeling the warm air blow out of them... well, it’s so exciting that you just get hooked and can’t stop."

"We started making playground climbers–using the 31–zone truss which is... explained in the Zome Primer –and... we were working on solar heating experiments."

"Right after we started Zomeworks, Day Chahroudi came out from California. He’d read the Dome Cookbook and he came walking up the road one afternoon with a rucksack on his back. ...[W]hen he started telling me his ideas about how things worked—physics ...I was so impressed by his ...approach to engineering problems that I persuaded him to stay ...He did and ...soon he developed a solar tracker... very simple and easy to build."

"I read this book of ’, Direct Use of the Sun’s Energy, and it just lit up my brain."

"I don't think that building everything out of stones and living in animal skins is necessarily... healthier... I'm saying... life can be much more satisfying for an individual if he feels that he is in control of his destiny... Society and the tools of society, should be organized to give each one of us that feeling."

"[W]hen I was... 18 I... read... Lewis Mumford and... [saw] that... we could have a science and technology... understood and controlled by the individual instead of the other way around. ...I've been trying to crack the crap in science for 15 or 16 years now."

"If you... remove the electric clothes dryer and install a clothesline the consumption of electricity drops slightly, but there is no credit given anywhere on the charts and graphs to solar energy which is now drying clothes."

"Why wouldn't it be fair to expand the slice—4% (1973—Bureau of Mines) given to hydroelectric power by a similar factor of efficiency—for the solar energy consumed in raising the water to its working head?"

"I went to in Massachusetts for a couple of years and I went to UCLA for a year or two and then I went back to Amherst... I never quite fit... that... college thing. ...I joined the Army in 1960 and got married and Holly and I went to Germany... after I got out of the Army, I went to school in ."