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Engineering Quotes

“As electrical energy can create mechanical vibrations (perceived as sound by the human ear), so in turn can mechanical vibrations create electrical energy, such as the previously mentioned ball lightning. It could be theorized, therefore, that with the Earth being a source for mechanical vibration, or sound, and the vibrations being of a usable amplitude and frequency, then the Earth's vibrations could be a source of energy that we could tap into. Moreover, if we were to discover that a structure with a certain shape, such as a pyramid, was able to effectively act as a resonator for the vibrations coming from within the Earth, then we would have a reliable and inexpensive source of energy.”

EnergyEngineeringPyramidsVibrationMegalithic MonumentsFree Energy
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“Energy is the basis of creating electricity that we can utilize, so how can we harness the power of an earthquake? Obviously, today, if that much energy were being drawn from the Earth through the Great Pyramid, tourists would not be parading through it every day. In order for the system to work, the pyramid would need to be mechanically coupled with the Earth and vibrating in sympathy with it. To do this, the system would need to be "primed"—we would need to initiate oscillation of the pyramid before we could tap into the Earth's oscillations. After the initial priming pulse, though, the pyramid would be coupled with the Earth and could draw off its energy. In effect, the Great Pyramid would feed into the Earth a little energy and receive an enormous amount out of it in return. How do we cause a mass of stone that weighs 5,273,834 tons to oscillate? It would seem an impossible task. Yet there was a man in recent history who claimed he could do just that! Nikola Tesla, a physicist and inventor with more than six hundred patents to his credit—one of them being the AC generator—created a device he called an "earthquake machine." By applying vibration at the resonant frequency of a building, he claimed he could shake the building apart. In fact, it is reported that he had to turn his machine off before the building he was testing it in came down around him. [...] The New York World-Telegram reported Tesla's comments from a news briefing at the hotel New Yorker on July 11, 1935: 'I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could get it in tune with the vibration of the building. I put it up notch after notch. There was a peculiar cracking sound. I asked my assistants where did the sound come from. They did not know. I put the machine up a few more notches. There was a louder cracking sound. I knew I was approaching the vibration of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher. Suddenly, all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street there was pandemonium. The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants to say nothing. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That's all they ever knew about it.”

EnergyEngineeringVibrationsPyramidsMegalithic MonumentsNikola TeslaFree Energy
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“Subsequent experiments conducted by Tom Danley in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid and in Chambers above the King's Chamber suggest that the pyramid was constructed with a sonic purpose. Danley identifies four resident frequencies, or notes, that are enhanced by the structure of the pyramid, and by the materials used in its construction. The notes form an F Sharp chord, which according to ancient Egyptian texts were the harmonic of our planet. Moreover, Danley's tests show that these frequencies are present in the King's Chamber even when no sounds are being produced. They are there in frequencies that range from 16 Hertz down to 1/2 Hertz, well below the range of human hearing. According to Danley, these vibrations are caused by the wind blowing across the ends of the so-called shafts—in the same way as sounds are created when one blows across the top of a bottle.”

ExperimentsEngineeringPyramidsVibrationMegalithic MonumentsHarmonics
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“In 1983 Donald Rahn of Rahn Granite Surface Plate Co. told me that diamond drills, rotating at nine hundred revolutions per minute, penetrate granite at the rate of one inch in five minutes. In 1996, Eric Leither of Tru-Stone Corp. told me that these parameters have not changed since then. The feedrate of modern drills, therefore, calculates to be .0002 inch per revolution, indicating that the ancient Egyptians drilled into granite with a feedrate that was five hundred times greater or deeper per revolution of the drill than modern drills! The other characteristics of the artifacts also pose a problem for modern drills. Somehow the Egyptians made a tapered hole with a spiral groove that was cut deeper through the harder constituent of the granite. If conventional machining methods cannot answer just one of these questions, how do we answer all three?”

EngineeringPyramidsDeep Human HistoryMegalithic MonumentsMachiningLost Human Civilizations
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“Ultrasonic drilling fully explains how the holes and cores found in the Valley Temple at Giza could have been cut, and it is capable of creating all the details that Petrie and I puzzled over. Unfortunately for Petrie, ultrasonic drilling was unknown at the time he made his studies, so it is not surprising that he could not find satisfactory answers to his queries. In my opinion, the application of ultrasonic machining is the only method that completely satisfies logic, from a technical viewpoint, and explains all noted phenomena. [...] The most significant detail of the drilled holes and cores studied by Petrie was that the groove was cut deeper through the quartz than through the feldspar. Quartz crystals are employed in the production of ultrasonic sound and, conversely, are responsive to the influence of vibration in the ultrasonic ranges and can be induced to vibrate at high frequency. When machining granite using ultrasonics, the harder material (quartz) would not necessarily offer more resistance, as it would during conventional machining practices. An ultrasonically vibrating tool bit would find numerous sympathetic partners, while cutting through granite, embedded right in the granite itself. Instead of resisting the cutting action, the quartz would be induced to respond and vibrate in sympathy with the high-frequency waves and amplify the abrasive action as the tool cut through it.”

EngineeringArchaeologyDeep Human HistoryMegalithic MonumentsMachiningLost Ancient Civilizations
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“In order to draw mechanical vibrations and relieve the stresses that build up within the Earth, we would need an object that would respond sympathetically with the Earth's fundamental frequency. This object would need to be designed in such a way that its own resonant frequency was the same as, or a harmonic of, the Earth's. In this manner, energy transfer from the source would be at maximum load. In harmony with the Earth's vibrations, this object would have the potential to become a coupled oscillator. (A coupled oscillator is an object that is in harmonic resonance with another, usually larger, vibrating object. When set into motion, the coupled oscillator will draw energy from the source and vibrate in sympathy as long as the source continues to vibrate.) Because the Earth constantly generates a broad spectrum of vibration, we could utilize vibration as a source of energy if we developed suitable technology. Naturally, any device that attracted greater amounts of this energy than is normally being radiated from the Earth would greatly improve the efficiency of the equipment. Because energy will inherently follow the path of least resistance, it follows that any device offering less resistance to this energy than the surrounding medium through which it passes would have a greater amount of energy channeled through it. Keeping all of this in mind and knowing that the Great Pyramid is a mathematical integer of the Earth, it may not be so outlandish to propose that the pyramid is capable of vibrating at a harmonic frequency of the Earth's fundamental frequency.”

EnergyEngineeringPyramidsVibrationMegalithic MonumentsAncient Advanced Technology
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“Due to the progressing sickness that the doctors appeared not to understand, I could only hold a job for months before I would be laid off. My manager would slowly become aware that I had health issues. Chronic fatigue and mental confusion are hard to hide on a daily basis! I was working for older electrical engineering managers and they also appeared to have health issues. One was constantly taking vitamin energy drinks, another had a brain tumor removed in the past, another would open his desk drawer and there would be several bottles of prescription medications in there, and another had been wondering the streets in confused state a year earlier! Engineering staff I was supervising had unusual personalities and issues with progressing their work. Some appeared to have health issues comparable to my own. This was the reality of my “American Dream”.”

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Book:Magee’s Disease
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“When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece. Ford replied,''Produce it anyway.”

ImpossibleCarEngineeringAutomobilePossibleThink And Grow RichEngineerNapoleon HillHenry FordMotorcar
Author:Henry Ford
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“Who scouts through wilderness and cold And finds the stone that turns to gold, The gems of Nature's wealth untold-- The Engineer. Who gets five paltry plunks per day To give the thing he finds away To some one else who makes it pay-- The Engineer. Who's heart is always in the game, When trouble comes it's just the same, But when it comes, who gets the blame? The Engineer. - Robert Elmer Horton (Water Power and Water Supply Preliminaries, 1913, Michigan Engineer)”

EngineeringEngineerWater PowerWater SupplyHydrology
Author:Robert Elmer Horton
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“The technosphere is described here as if neither history nor social or political dynamics mattered. It does not take into account collective agency or political, economic, and social structures, let alone the evolution of knowledge with its powerful impact on shaping technological systems. Has human technology now reached a stage (or will it any time soon) at which it attains the autonomy of an organism with its own agency - an autopoietic structure reproducing its own organization? Such generalizations tend to overlook some essential features of human interaction with the global environment. For instance, while the biosphere has proven its resilience over the course of at least 3.5 billion years of evolution, the technosphere may turn out to be a rather fragile scaffolding for human existence. While it is quite conceivable that the sum total of the unintended consequences of our actions has developed its own dynamics, even in the age of the Anthropocene escape routes may still be left to us - an observation, however, that does not imply, vice versa, that there will be a guarantee for the existence of an escape route. It rather appears that the dynamics underlying the Anthropocene might well enhance both the challenges with which we are confronted and our opportunities to react to them, leaving the question open as to whether the latter will always be sufficient to match the former. Is it possible, for instance, that geoengineering can intervene in the planetary system to the point that a new state of the planetary system would be reached in which high carbon dioxide concentration, radioactive pollution, and other unintended consequences of industrialization are no longer challenging problems but can be safely kept under control by novel technologies? Given the fact that macro-scale interventions in the Earth system are beyond anything that human engineering has achieved so far, and given the fact that there are still important gaps in our knowledge about our planetary system, we are certainly on the safer side to prioritize, at least for the time being and to the extent that it is possible at all, the preservation of our existing Earth system and damage control.”

EarthEngineeringDamage Control
Book:The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene
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“Humanitarian Engineer (The Sonnet) The burning scent of molten solder is just as intoxicating to me as the musky scent of soil drenched in the first downpour of monsoon. In the right human hands, a soldering iron can solder the cracks in accessibility, while in the hands of just clever apes, soldering iron cooks up circuits of privilege, while burning down the bridges of equality. Any engineer can tell the voltage of a battery from taste, but only a humane engineer knows how to put each volt and amp to humanitarian use. The burnt fingertips count for something, only when your innovation is catalyst for good.”

TechnologyInnovationEngineeringElectronicsEngineerEngineering EducationEngineering EthicsEngineering PoetryRadio Shack
Book:Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience
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“The precision in these artifacts is irrefutable. Even if we ignore the question of how they were produced, we are still faced with the question of why such precision was needed. Revelation of new data invariably raises new questions. In this case it is understandable for skeptics to ask, "Where are the machines?" But machines are tools, and the question should be applied universally and can be asked of anyone who believes other methods may have been used. The truth is that no tools have been found to explain any theory on how the pyramids were built or the granite boxes were cut. More than eighty pyramids have been discovered in Egypt, and the tools that built them have never been found. Even if we accepted the notion that copper tools are capable of producing these incredible artifacts, the few copper implements that have been uncovered do not represent the number of such tools that would have been used if every stonemason who is supposed to have worked on the pyramids at just the Giza site owned one or two. In the Great Pyramid alone there are an estimated 2,300,000 blocks of stone, both limestone and granite, weighing between two-and-one-half tons and seventy tons each. That is a mountain of evidence, and there are no tools surviving to explain even this one pyramid's creation.”

EngineeringPyramidsPrecisionDeep Human HistoryMachiningLost Ancient Civilizations
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“The knowledge needed to evaluate certain of these ancient artifacts was not available until very recently. Even today there may be numerous articles that we will not understand until we further develop our own technology. We cannot fathom technology that is unknown to us, and we seldom consider things that seem impossible to us. Petrie, though knowledgeable in engineering and surveying, could not be expected to know anything about ultrasonic machining; hence his amazement at the machining abilities of the ancient Egyptians. Even if he had been aware of this technology, the intellectual climate of his time may have precluded his considering the possibility that these methods were known to the ancient Egyptians. Quite simply, the greatest barrier to our understanding may not necessarily be knowledge. It may be attitude.”

AttitudeKnowledgeTechnologyEngineeringMachiningAncient Advanced TechnologyAncient Artifacts
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“Stephenson had large wrought-iron boiler plates available and he also had the courage of his calculations... The idea found its best-known expression in the Menai railway bridge opened in 1850. Stephenson's beams, which weighed 1,500 tons each, were built beside the Straits and were floated into position between the towers on rafts across a swirling tide. They were raised rather over a hundred feet up the towers by successive lifts with primitive hydraulic jacks. All this was not done without both apprehension and adventure; they were giants on the earth in those days.”

InspirationalScienceEngineering
Book:The New Science of Strong Materials: Or Why You Don't Fall through the Floor
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“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.”

ScienceSpaceExplorationRole ModelsEngineeringScientists
Book:Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
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“They had all comprehended the idea in an instant, and saw no real difficulty in it. An American sees no real difficulty in anything. Whoever said that the word "impossible" is not French, was certainly wrong: he mistook the dictionary. In America everything is easy, everything is simple, from throwing off 50,000 printed impressions in an hour, to moving monster hotels, guests and all, to any quarter of the city at pleasure. In America, engineering difficulties seem to be all still-born. Between Barbican's project and its complete realization, no true American could see the shadow of a difficulty. To say it, meant to do it.”

IdeasWorkSpaceImpossibleDreamsEngineeringUnited States Of America
Book:From the Earth to the Moon
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“Ah… Yeah, it’s weird… We tell people to follow their dreams and when they do we call them losers for not being employable! Because they studied poetry and art history instead of engineering and medicine. We live in a terrible society!”

PoetryDreamsSocietyMedicineEmploymentEngineeringArt HistoryLosers
Book:2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)
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