TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index A > Category: Aqueduct

Aqueduct Quotes (4 quotes)

Engineering, too, owes its most useful materials to the achievements of chemists in identifying, separating, and transforming materials: structural steel for the framework of bridges and buildings, portland cement for roadways and aqueducts, pure copper for the electrical industries, aluminum alloys for automobiles and airplanes, porcelain for spark plugs and electrical insulators. The triumphs of engineering skill rest on a chemical foundation.
In Fundamental Chemistry, and Elementary Textbook for College Classes (1936), 8.
Science quotes on:  |  Achievement (187)  |  Airplane (43)  |  Alloy (4)  |  Aluminum (15)  |  Automobile (23)  |  Bridge (49)  |  Building (158)  |  Cement (10)  |  Chemical (303)  |  Chemist (169)  |  Chemistry (376)  |  Civil Engineering (5)  |  Copper (25)  |  Electrical (57)  |  Electrical Engineering (12)  |  Engineering (188)  |  Foundation (177)  |  Framework (33)  |  Identification (20)  |  Industry (159)  |  Insulator (2)  |  Material (366)  |  Most (1728)  |  Owe (71)  |  Plug (3)  |  Porcelain (4)  |  Portland Cement (2)  |  Pure (299)  |  Rest (287)  |  Roadway (2)  |  Separate (151)  |  Skill (116)  |  Spark (32)  |  Steel (23)  |  Structural (29)  |  Transforming (4)  |  Triumph (76)  |  Useful (260)

It is both a sad and a happy fact of engineering history that disasters have been powerful instruments of change. Designers learn from failure. Industrial society did not invent grand works of engineering, and it was not the first to know design failure. What it did do was develop powerful techniques for learning from the experience of past disasters. It is extremely rare today for an apartment house in North America, Europe, or Japan to fall down. Ancient Rome had large apartment buildings too, but while its public baths, bridges and aqueducts have lasted for two thousand years, its big residential blocks collapsed with appalling regularity. Not one is left in modern Rome, even as ruin.
In Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (1997), 23.
Science quotes on:  |  America (143)  |  Ancient (198)  |  Apartment (4)  |  Appalling (10)  |  Bath (11)  |  Both (496)  |  Bridge (49)  |  Bridge Engineering (8)  |  Building (158)  |  Change (639)  |  Collapse (19)  |  Design (203)  |  Designer (7)  |  Develop (278)  |  Disaster (58)  |  Do (1905)  |  Down (455)  |  Engineering (188)  |  Experience (494)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Failure (176)  |  Fall (243)  |  First (1302)  |  Grand (29)  |  Happiness (126)  |  Happy (108)  |  History (716)  |  House (143)  |  Industry (159)  |  Instrument (158)  |  Invention (400)  |  Know (1538)  |  Large (398)  |  Last (425)  |  Lasting (7)  |  Learn (672)  |  Learning (291)  |  Modern (402)  |  Past (355)  |  Powerful (145)  |  Rare (94)  |  Rarity (11)  |  Regularity (40)  |  Residence (3)  |  Rome (19)  |  Ruin (44)  |  Sadness (36)  |  Society (350)  |  Technique (84)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Today (321)  |  Two (936)  |  Work (1402)  |  Year (963)

It is supposed that the ancients were ignorant of the law in hydraulics, by which water, in a tube, will rise as high as the fountain-head; and hence they carried their stupendous aqueducts horizontally, from hill-top to hill-top, upon lofty arches, with an incredible expenditure of labor and money. The knowledge of a single law, now familiar to every well-instructed school-boy,— namely, that water seeks a level, and, if not obstructed, will find it,—enables the poorest man of the present day to do what once demanded the wealth of an empire. The beautiful fragments of the ancient Roman aqueducts, which have survived the ravage of centuries, are often cited to attest the grandeur and power of their builders. To me, they are monuments, not of their power, but of their weakness.
In Thoughts Selected From the Writings of Horace Mann (1872), 231.
Science quotes on:  |  Ancient (198)  |  Beautiful (271)  |  Boy (100)  |  Demand (131)  |  Do (1905)  |  Enable (122)  |  Expenditure (16)  |  Find (1014)  |  Fragment (58)  |  Grandeur (35)  |  High (370)  |  Hydraulic (5)  |  Hydraulics (2)  |  Ignorant (91)  |  Incredible (43)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Labor (200)  |  Law (913)  |  Level (69)  |  Man (2252)  |  Money (178)  |  Monument (45)  |  Power (771)  |  Present (630)  |  Ravage (7)  |  Rise (169)  |  Roman (39)  |  School (227)  |  Seek (218)  |  Single (365)  |  Stupendous (13)  |  Top (100)  |  Water (503)  |  Weakness (50)  |  Wealth (100)  |  Will (2350)

The most important object of Civil Engineering is to improve the means of production and of traffic in states, both for external and internal trade. It is applied in the construction and management of roads, bridges, railroads, aqueducts, canals, river navigation, docks and storehouses, for the convenience of internal intercourse and exchange; and in the construction of ports, harbours, moles, breakwaters and lighthouses; and in the navigation by artificial power for the purposes of commerce. It is applied to the protection of property where natural powers are the sources of injury, as by embankments forthe defence of tracts of country from the encroachments of the sea, or the overflowing of rivers; it also directs the means of applying streams and rivers to use, either as powers to work machines, or as supplies for the use of cities and towns, or for irrigation; as well as the means of removing noxious accumulations, as by the drainage of towns and districts to ... secure the public health.
1828
Science quotes on:  |  Accumulation (51)  |  Applied (176)  |  Both (496)  |  Bridge (49)  |  Bridge Engineering (8)  |  Canal (18)  |  Civil (26)  |  Civil Engineering (5)  |  Commerce (23)  |  Construction (114)  |  Convenience (54)  |  Country (269)  |  Defence (16)  |  Direct (228)  |  Engineering (188)  |  Exchange (38)  |  Health (210)  |  Injury (36)  |  Internal (69)  |  Irrigation (12)  |  Lighthouse (6)  |  Machine (271)  |  Management (23)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Mole (5)  |  Most (1728)  |  Natural (810)  |  Navigation (26)  |  Noxious (8)  |  Object (438)  |  Power (771)  |  Production (190)  |  Property (177)  |  Protection (41)  |  Public Health (12)  |  Purpose (336)  |  Railroad (36)  |  River (140)  |  Sea (326)  |  State (505)  |  Storehouse (6)  |  Stream (83)  |  Traffic (10)  |  Transportation (19)  |  Use (771)  |  Work (1402)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.