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Quotes of the Day for 27 March 2007 – Wires
Adolphus Washington Greely was born at Newburyport, Massachusetts on this day in 1844. At seventeen he joined the Massachusetts Volunteers and was wounded three times during the Civil War. Afterwards, he joined the Army Signal Corps and set out to learn what he could about electricity. He built the telegraph network for the original Weather Service. In 1881 he volunteered for an arctic mission, leading 25 men to the northernmost point reached to that time. Because supply ships failed to reach him two summers in a row, he returned with only five men. For the next twenty years he strung wire in warmer climes, over 25,000 miles worth in Cuba, Puerto Rico, China, and the Philippines. Today's theme is Wires.
The quotes:
A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.
- Sophia Loren
In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.
- Henry Lewis Mencken, 1880 - 1956
[Edward R. Murrow] believed that ... there had to be a message to start with, that in the beginning was the Word. Otherwise, he said, "all you have is a lot of wires and lights in a box."
- Alexander Kendrick
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
- Henry David Thoreau, 1817 - 1862
With electricity we were wired into a new world, for electricity brought the radio, a "crystal set" and with enough ingenuity, one could tickle the crystal with a cat's whisker and pick up anything.
- Theodore H. White, 1915 - 1986
Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three - and paradise is when you have none.
- Doug Larson
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