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Quotes of the Day for 6 October 2004 - Electricity

George Westinghouse was born at Central Bridge, New York on this day in 1846. He worked in his father's shops in his youth, where farm equipment was made. He spent two years in the cavalry in the Civil War before becoming a navy engineer. He went to college for three months in 1865 but dropped out when he got his first patent for a rotary steam engine. He prevailed in the great debate whether to use alternating or direct current for electrical generation, essentially his chief scientist (Nikola Tesla) developed a much better system than Edison's scientist (Edison himself). He lit the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the first large-scale demonstration of electric lighting, and won the contract to build the generators at Niagara Falls the same year.

Talent is like electricity - we do not understand electricity. We use it.
     - Maya Angelou

We are striking it big in the electric light, better than my vivid imagination first conceived. Where this thing is going to stop Lord only knows.
     - Thomas Alva Edison, 1847 - 1931

There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, including the vacuum cleaner, seems to offer more entertainment possibilities than the [television] set.
     - Harriet Van Horne

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self- employment and artistic autonomy.
     - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
     - Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1856 - 1941

If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as "candle making industry threatened".
     - Newt Gingrich

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