Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Contraption. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Contraption Quotes And Sayings by 98 Authors including Ralph Waldo Emerson,Bruno Munari,Freda Mcmanus,Ellen Glasgow,Susan Meissner for you to enjoy and share.
Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.
An object should be judged by whether it has a form consistent with its use.
background. 5. Rubin's vase
In her abhorrrence of a vacuum, Nature, for the furtherance of her favorite hobby, has often to resort to strange devices. If she could but understand that vacuity is sometimes better than superfluity!
uncomplicated things
I like it when you reach into a vending machine to grab your candy bar, and that flap goes up to block you from reaching up? That's a good invention. Before that, it was hard times for the vending machine owners. "Yeah, what candy bar are you getting?" "That one, and every one on the bottom row!"
One always starts work with the subject, no matter how tenuous it is, and one constructs an artificial structure by which one can trap the reality of the subject-matter that one has started from.
Pour a liquid out of its container, and it changes shape, fills the space you give it. If you give children a lot of space, it may surprise you where they'll go and the shape they'll take.
What's this "
"A needle."
"What should I do with it " He'd walked right into it. Too easy.
"Please use it to pop your head. It's obscuring my view of the room.
For, I must tell you, in this world where today all lose their minds over many & wondrous Machines
some of which, alas, you can see also in this Siege
I construct Aristotelian Machines, that allow anyone to see with Words ...
The objects in our system are instead a help to the child himself, he chooses what he wants for his own use, and works with it according to his own needs, tendencies and special interests. In this way, the objects become a means of growth.
The world that surrounded me disgusted me so I chosen to invent one of my own.
An inflated balloon
impressive to look at but hollow at the core and easily punctured.
GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.
What I cannot build. I do not understand.
I have got a scheme to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.
The original item looked like a little hand cart with the figure of a man mounted on a platform between the wheels. The man's outstretched arm always pointed south.
There was a toy gyroscope, wound with string, ready to whirr and balance itself.
It looks like a galosh with electronics in it.
I love theatrical props: a cup filled with solid fake tea, say, or a collection of fake food, including a rubber turkey, which, during the holidays, I wrap in tinfoil so it appears to have just come out of the oven.
Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes;
And galvanism has set some corpses grinning,
But has not answer'd like the apparatus
Of the Humane Society's beginning,
By which men are unsuffocated gratis:
What wondrous new machines have late been spinning.
The Air Loom, for all its florid craziness, can be seen to have a function and a rationale: as a miraculous, if temporary, fix for a breaking mind, a coping strategy for a life that had become too brutally contradictory to sustain otherwise.
A vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort.
Many of the familiar little things that we use every day have typically evolved over a period of time to a state of familiarity. They balance form and function, elegance and economy, success and failure in ways that are not only acceptable, but also admirable.
And that was all of it. The machine stretched out in an endless, dizzying series of loops and whirls and weird mechanisms, sprouting wires like tree
roots. It didn't look real to her. Neither did Myrnin, as he turned to her with a barely concealed red glow in his eyes.
And a whimsical ceramic sugar bowl shaped like an octopus.
You were torturing a cat," she says. "With a freaking prod."
"A prod I built myself in metal shop," he says. "But of course you never mention that.
I flexed my wrist, popped a silver needle into my palm, and offered it to him.
'What's this?'
'A needle.'
'What should I do with it?'
He'd walked right into it. Too easy. 'Please use it to pop your head. It's obscuring my view of the room.'
- Kate & Saiman
This small little thing, which was started to give people a way of life, with love and dedication, shall prevail in the coming change of the Age.
From the outset my main concern was with the shape and the self-contained nature of discrete things, the curve of banisters on a staircase, the molding of a stone arch over a gateway, the tangled precision of the blades in a tussock of dried grass.
One of my assistants found this old German machine. It was originally used to make underwear. Like Chanel, who started with underwear fabric - jerseys - we used the machine that made underwear to make something else.
dirt, but the machine began to make
A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.
The Coke bottle is a masterpiece of scientific, functional planning. In simpler terms, I would describe the bottle as well thought out, logical, sparing of material and pleasant to look at.
I have just created something totally illogical.
If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life.
Bee there Orr Bee A Rectangular Thyng
The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.
Interestingly one aspect of a designed tool is that it will inevitably be used in ways which were not anticipated by the designer.
An amazing invention - but who would ever want to use one?
And many such good inventions are there, that they are like woman's breasts: useful at the same time, and pleasant.
were no windows. A large round handle resembling a
Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's "Fountain"-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.
We have made many glass vessels ... with tubes two cubits long. These were filled with mercury, the open end was closed with the finger, and the tubes were then inverted in a vessel where there was mercury.
With thimble and thread And wax and hammer, and buckles and screws, And all such things as geniuses use; - Two bats for patterns, curious fellows! A charcoal-pot and a pair of bellows.
A glass pitcher, a wicker basket, a tunic of coarse cloth. Their beauty is inseparable from their function. Handicrafts belong to a world existing before the separation of the useful and the beautiful.
One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject.
The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper's seven stars speed in different directions.
The telescope ... is a conduit to the cosmos.
A weak invention of the Enemy.
The water vessel, taken as a vessel only, raises the question, "Why does it exist at all?" Through its fitness of construction, it offers the apology for its existence. But where it is a work of beauty it has no question to answer; it has nothing to do, but to be.
He started as a maker of Cartesian devils - imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He
Those props are as cunning as a bag o' weasels.
Penis? Cock? Dick? Wood? Schlong? Womb broom? Clam hammer? Yogurt slinger?
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
Trivial as her hair. This morning she was thinking about how to construct
In the cell was a rack, a winch, a furnace, a set of branding irons, a pot for melting wax, nails of different lengths. A thumbscrew, a pair of flesh-tongs, heavy tweezers, a set of surgical instruments, a series of small metal trays, ropes, wire, preparations of quicklime, a hood and a blindfold.
What I can't create I don't understand
A consultant: someone brought in to build a one-handled wheelbarrow.
Use only things you find around the bathroom to create something. Extra credit: make it in the bathroom!
I am a maker of useful things.
The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which men shall fly along distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration to be.
A prototype is a question embodied
A not complete unit or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together.
One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of thought. It is not thought which needs showing.
Something that chemistry supplies are very good for." When he gave me an odd look, I unwrapped a Bunsen burner and twirled it in the light. "Making bombs.
A light to guide, a rod To check the erring, and reprove.
In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.
That thing has a name?
Every significant invention must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.
Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?
The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality.
A running machine, that glides over mud, crud and goop.
A chair, it's like a sculpture. It starts as a thought and then becomes an idea, something I might think about for years. When the time is right, I express it on paper, usually as a simple line in space. Finally, it takes shape.
A vast engine of wonderful delicacy and intricacy, a machine that is like the tools of the Titans put in your hands. This machinery, in its external fabric so massive and so exquisitely adjusted, and in its internal fabric making new categories of thought, new ways of thinking about life.
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
That which is now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimms, and makes it indistinct As water is in water
Toys to deftly pluck up like animal crackers and deposit safely into a crate decorated with friezes of bright circus trains carrying aardvarks, dodos, swift dromedaries, baby elephants, and plastic dinosaurs. A box of mixed metaphors.
Ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. "See this? Part of my DNA, sort of. . . ." He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. "You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines.
What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?
What's got your jockstrap in a wad? (Abbie)
Creating things sometimes is difficult.
Sextants that divided the sky into angles not found in the usual geometries, microscopes whose hermetically sealed lenses distorted the viewed object into shimmering rainbow images, other instruments whose complexity and manifold adjustments quite overwhelmed my powers of speculation as to their use
By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size.
Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
What is so brilliant about the gadgets is their simplicity.
When an instrument admits two constructions, the one safe, the other dangerous, the one precise, the other indefinite, I prefer that which is safe and precise.
A glint of intention initiates the process of creation.
A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.
...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE
I point out to you, Marcus Claire Luyseyal, a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the
users to employ each other the way they employ machines.
for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom.
Elaborate apparatus plays an important part in the science of to-day, but I sometimes wonder if we are not inclined to forget that the most important instrument in research must always be the mind of man.
This book is an invention, an act of the imagination, and in no way should be mistaken for reality, the place where much good invention originates.
It's toys, boy, all toys. You'll see more and more contraptions as you get older, but if I teach you anything, you'll learn that all of this is decoration. What counts is what's inside you and what you can see in others.
I like the gizmos that transport people.
Some people wish they could have invented the wheel. But I'm trying to reinvent the wheelbarrow, to more efficiently haul around my bullshit.
It's square shaped... Roger mumbled, "Could be a remote detonator...
The contraption was necessary because my lungs sucked at being lungs.
Strong evidence suggests that we are dealing with a phenomenon that is being caused by palpable, solid objects whose characteristics are not of human design, and whose behavior is suggestive of intelligent control.
To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.