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Before joining General Electric, I’d never really thought of household appliances as “high tech.” The functions they perform—heating, cooling, cleaning, blowing, mixing—are as old as civilization itself. In my youth our kitchen had an icebox that was periodically supplied with 25-pound blocks of ice. We also had a wood stove in the kitchen, a fireplace [...]
Sweeping visions were something of a specialty for William Durant, founder of General Motors, and he ran true to form in a 1922 interview. “Most of us,” he said, “will live to see this whole country covered with a network of motor highways built from point to point as the bird flies, the hills cut [...]
When retired railroad conductor Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, he touched off the modern oil industry. For the next 40 years the primary interest in oil was as a source of kerosene, used for lighting lamps. Then came the automobile and the realization that the internal combustion engine ran best on [...]
A list of great achievements by mankind. 1. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa A work of art that has captured the imagination of humanity. The mysterious smile, the penetrating eyes. The air of mystique surrounding the Mona Lisa cannot easily be explained but, it is more than just a supreme example of renaissance art, it [...]
Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was truly a gift to mankind. His inventionsprofoundly helped to shape the modern world. His genius, insatiable curiosity and unstoppable persistence combined to bring us the incandescent electric light bulb, the telephone receiver, the microphone, the motion pictureprojector, the phonograph, the mimeograph, the dictating machine, the alkaline nickel-iron storage battery and so much [...]
Are successful inventors just lucky or is there a strategy for coming up with these golden ideas? Many say a strategy does exist. Think about what types of problems you would like to solve. As an inventor, that is your goal. The trick is to come up with a unique invention that is the solution [...]
Earlier this year, the prestigious Time magazinecame out with an issue highlighting the previous year’s great inventions, an annualpractice. There was lots of stuff that made computers work more efficiently and which made things around the house better. There was a bicycle with a hydrogen-powered fuel-cell engine. Why, there was even a robot cat that could recognize and follow speech commands. [...]
What are inventions? Well, basically an invention is when someone comes up with an idea or an object that has never been thought of before. Typically this idea or object will help other people in some way. For example, electricity was an invention when it was first discovered. People inventednew ways to use it and to bring it into [...]
The problem with believing you’re in a recession is that you start to feel that you cannot achieve your goals. Recession – or any of the negative words that are associated with it – is in fact in the mind of the beholder. You don’t need to be an economist to see that things are [...]
Achievers are always looking for ways to become more successful; to reach goals more quickly and with greater assurance. And, for centuries authors have been sharing the factors that help anyone reach their goals. If you consider achievement and achievers, you hopefully would recognize that one piece of the goal achievement puzzle is attitude. In [...]