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. . . INVENTIONS see "DISCOVERY" for related links Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. --Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) American newspaperman, wit, and satirist. _The Cynic's Word Book_ [1906] {retitled in 1911 as _The Devil's Dictionary_} - Frederic Tudor, the son of George Washington's Judge Advocate General, an upper-crust Bostonian, the very last type you would expect to become the first tycoon, the founding father of the art of salesmanship, or the inspirer of anything so democratic as an ice-cream parlor. He was born in 1784. His three brothers went to Harvard, but he wanted to be up and doing, so he quit school at thirteen. He became a merchant, and an inventor with so many mad ideas that didn't payoff that a whimsical brother wondered why he didn't break up the ice on the Boston ponds and ship it to the tropics. The youngest Tudor ignored the crack and seized on a brain wave. He shipped one hundred and thirty tons of ice to Martinique. It melted in six weeks. Insulation was the big problem, and with the fanaticism of Edison in pursuit of a filament, Tudor tried everything from straw to blankets and he beat it in the end with sawdust. To procure uniform blocks of ice, he got a friend to design an ice cutter with two parallel runners made of iron with saw teeth. They were pulled across the ponds by horses. Within fifteen years he had collared title to the New England ponds, got monopoly rights on building icehouses in Havana and New Orleans and Charleston and had his own fleet shipping ice in thousands of tons to the West Indies, Persia, India, and Europe. The foreigners were delighted with the product but slightly bemused about what to do with it. Tudor responded by anticipating two centuries of salesmanship and advertising. He realized that the golden rule of merchandizing is to create an appetite for something you didn't even know you wanted. He sailed around half the globe convincing dazed clients that iced drinks were the elixir of health, that a hospital without ice was ready for the plague, that a meal without ice cream was a cannibal's snack. Pretty soon malaria victims were dabbing ice on their foreheads, and fashionable houses in London, Cairo, and Casablanca were serving ice cream. --Alistair Cooke [Alfred Cooke] (1908-2004) British-born American broadcater and journalist. _America_ [1973] In the thirty-five years between the end of the Civil War and the end of the century, the golden time of American inventiveness, the United States Patent Office granted more than half a million patents. Alexander Graham Bell produced the miracle of the telephone; George Eastman, the handy family camera, a marvel known in all languages as simply a Kodak. And there was the home sewing machine, and the typewriter (invented, oddly, fifty years before it caught on), and an immense improvement in dynamos and motors. And, capping this great age -- which declined as the loner in the woodshed gave way to teams of technologists in labs -- was the achievement of Orville and Wilbur Wright with the heavier-than-air flying machine. --Alistair Cooke [Alfred Cooke] (1908-2004) British-born American broadcater and journalist. _America_ [1973] - The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. --Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-American physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. [24 May 1946] Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line; and where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defense as that 10,000 men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them? --Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) American politician, inventor, and scientist. In a letter to Jan Ingenhousz [16 January 1784]. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus When he said the world was round They all laughed when Edison recorded sound They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother When they said that man could fly; They told Marconi Wireless was a phony-- It's the same old cry! --Ira Gershwin (1896-1983) American songwriter. "They All Laughed" [1937 song] - "Then there is electricity!" exclaimed Clifford. "Is that a humbug too? Is it a fact--or have I dreamed it--that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?" "If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye toward its wire, alongside the rail track, "it is an excellent thing. A great thing, indeed, sir; particularly as regards the detection of bank robbers and murderers." --Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) American novelist and short-story writer. _The House of the Seven Gables_ [1851] - People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things. --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) German scientist and drama critic. In J. P. Stern's _Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions_ [1959], p. 309 "Further Excerpts from Lichtenberg's Notebooks." In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American Jew whom I had known in the States. He said: 'Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable those Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility.' --Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim (1840-1916) American-born British inventor, in _The Times_ [I I July 1915], (Taking the advice, Maxim invented the machine-gun) ...and yet the true creator is necessity, which is the mother of invention. --Plato (427?-347 B.C.) Greek philosopher. _The Republic_ Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. --Albert von Szent-Györgyi (1893-1992) Hungarian-born biochemist. winner of the 1937 Nobel prize for Medicine. In Irving Good (ed.) _The Scientist Speculates_ [1962]. - It is said to have been reported to one of the Roman emperors, as a piece of good news, that one of his subjects had invented a process for manufacturing unbreakable glass. The emperor gave orders that the inventor should be put to death and the records of his invention should be destroyed. If the invention had been put on the market, the manufacturers of ordinary glass would have been put out of business; there would have been unemployment that would have caused political unrest, and perhaps revolution. --Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) English historian. _Change And Habit: The Challenge Of Our Time_ [1966], Chapter 7 - Success. Four flights Thursday morning. All against twenty-one mile wind. Started from level with engine power alone. Average speed through air thirty-one miles. Longest fifty-nine seconds. Inform press. Home Christmas. --Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) and Orville Wright (1871-1948) Designed the first airplane; (Telegram to the Reverend Milton Wright, from Kitty Hawk, N.C. [17 December 1903]) - Press Release (AP) Austin, Texas - Dr. Calvin Rickson, a scientist from Texas A&M University has invented a bra that keeps women's breasts from jiggling, and prevents the nipples from pushing through the fabric when cold weather sets in. At a news conference announcing the invention, a large group of men took Dr. Rickson outside and kicked the s*** out of him. --unk. ----- neoteric ee-uh-TER-ik, adjective: Recent in origin; modern; new.  . . see "MONEY" for related links "Never mind how I got it. Bank it." --Said to have been said by Tallulah Bankhead in 1933, when FDR called in the gold, and she showed up at the bank with a large stack of gold coins, and the teller raised his eyebrows and said, "Why, Miss Bankhead, you've been hoarding." {Tallulah Bankhead (1903-1968) American actress.} An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. --Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) American scientist, diplomat, and publisher  IOWA . . see "PLACES" for related links Iowa, a really fecund state, throws its corn over into Nebraska and Illinois, and its old folks all the way to California. --John Gunther (1901-1970) American author. _Inside U.S.A._ [1947] Des Moines has the largest per capita ice cream consumption in America. The second largest gold-fish farm in the world is located withint seventy miles of Des Moines. The best pair of overalls made on the American Continent came from Iowa. There is no group of two and a half million people in the world who worship God as Iowans do. --unnamed Iowa State College professor, in H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken (1880-1956) _Americana_ [1925] ;void(0)) IRISH (THE) & IRELAND . . see "PLACES" for related links see "PEOPLE" for related links The Irish Leprechaun is the Faeries' shoemaker and is known under various names in different parts of Ireland: Cluricaune in Cork, Lurican in Kerry, Lurikeen in Kildare and Lurigadaun in Tipperary. Although he works for the Faeries, the Leprechaun is not of the same species. He is small, has dark skin and wears strange clothes. His nature has something of the manic-depressive about it: first he is quite happy, whistling merrily as he nails a sole on to a shoe; a few minutes later, he is sullen and morose, drunk on his home-made heather ale. The Leprechaun's two great loves are tobacco and whiskey, and he is a first-rate con-man, impossible to out-fox. No one, no matter how clever, has ever managed to cheat him out of his hidden pot of gold or his magic shilling. At the last minute he always thinks of some way to divert his captor's attention and vanishes in the twinkling of an eye. --From: _A Field Guide to the Little People_ by Nancy Arrowsmith and George Moorse see "ELVES" - Ireland is far more favoured than Britain by latitude, and by its mild and healthy climate ... There are no reptiles, and no snake can exist there; for although often brought over from Britain, as soon as the ship nears land, they breathe the scent of its air, and die. The island abounds in milk and honey. --Bede the Venerable (672-735) Anglo-Saxon theologian and historian. _Ecclesiastical History of the English People_ [731-732] - I was made to feel ashamed of being Irish so I buried my Irishness and I buried my accent....I had to create an identity for myself and I took on the role of a young Cockney lad. --Pierce Brosnan , interview in the _Mirror_ (UK) [May 1997] We are told that if Irishmen go by the thousand to die, not for Ireland, but for Flanders, for Belgium, for a patch of sand on the deserts of Mesopotamia, or a rocky trench on the heights of Gallipoli, they are winning self-government for Ireland. But if they dare to lay down their lives on their native soil, if they dare to dream even that freedom can be won, then they are traitors to their country. --Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916) British public servant who was executed for treason and became an Irish martyr. In Brian Inglis _Roger Casement_ [1973] This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. --Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Austrian psychiatrist. (Referring to the Irish.) God created whiskey to keep the Irish from taking over the world. --Kinky Friedman (1944- ) American singer, songwriter, and novelist. To begin with Ireland, the most western part of the continent, the natives are peculiarly remarkable for their gaiety and levity of their disposition ; the English, transplanted there, in time lose their serious melancholy air, and become gay and thoughtless, more fond of pleasure and less addicted to reasoning. --Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) Anglo-Irish writer, poet, and dramatist. The Irish are a fair people--they never speak well of one another. --Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English poet, critic, and lexicographer. In James Boswell _The Life of Samuel Johnson_ [1791] For God's sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country. --Reginald Maudling, Conservative home secretary, after a visit to Northern Ireland [1 July 1970]; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 930 Cohan & Major explain: Britain had sent troops into the province on 14 Aug. 1969 after the outbreak of serious clashes between the Protestant and Catholic communities. The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad. --George Orwell [Eric Blair] (1903-1950) English novelist. The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants, and the fatuity of idiots. --Sydney Smith (1771-1845) English clergyman and essayist, in 1802 cofounded "The Edinburgh Review." _Letters of Peter Plymley_ [1807] I'm very proud of my Irish side also. . . I went there when I broke up with my girlfriend. . . but all you can do is drink Guinness and cry and look at the ocean and want to kill yourself. --Ben Stiller (1965- ) American comedian, actor, and film director. The Irish are difficult to deal with. For one thing the English do not understand their innate love of fighting and blows. --Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) English poet. Quoted in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir [1897]. Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy. --William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Irish poet and dramatist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. - Drink is the curse of the land. It makes you fight with your neighbor. It makes you shoot at your landlord - and it makes you miss him. --Irish proverb . . see "FRIENDS / FRIENDSHIP" for related links see "ALCOHOL" for related links see "FOOD & DRINK" for related links May there always be work for your hands to do, May your purse always hold a coin or two. May the sun always shine warm on your windowpane, May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain. May the hand of a friend always be near you, And may God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you. May the grass grow long on the road to hell for want of use. May those who love us, love us, And those who don't love us, May God turn their hearts, And if he doesn't turn their hearts, May he turn their ankles So we'll know them by their limping. May you have warm words on a cold evening, A full moon on a dark night, And the road downhill all the way to your door. There are good ships and there are wood ships, And ships that sail the sea. But the best ships are friendships, And may they always be. May the saddest day of your future be no worse Than the happiest day of your past. May you live to be a hundred years, With one extra year to repent. May you have the hindsight to know where you've been, the foresight to know where you are going, and the insight to know when you have gone too far. May the blessing of light be on you, light without and light within. May the blessed sunshine shine on you and warm your heart till it glows like a great peat fire, so that the stranger may come and warm himself at it, and also a friend. May the good Lord take a liking to you... But not too soon. May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back, May the sun shine warm upon your face. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the hollow of his hand. May your glass be ever full. May the roof over your head be always strong, And may you be in heaven Half an hour before the devil knows you're dead. May the roof above us never fall in, And may friends gathered below never fall out. May your home always be too small to hold all of your friends. These things I warmly wish for you: Someone to love, some work to do, A bit o' sun, a bit o' cheer, And a guardian angel always near. Here's to a fellow who smiles, When life runs along like a song, And here's to a lad who can smile, When everything goes dead wrong. Here's to temperance supper, With water in glasses tall, And coffee and tea to end with, And me not there at all. Dance as if no one were watching, Sing as if no one were listening, And live every day as if it were your last.  IRONY . . see "LANGUAGE" for related links Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware, both of that 'more' and of the outsider's incomprehension. --Henry W. Fowler (1858—1933) English schoolmaster and lexicographer. ^ Headline in the Narragansett (R.I.) Times. LITERARCY GRANT BENEFITS LOCAL STUDENTS --_New Yorker_ (magazine) [24 December 2007] ^ It is after you have lost your teeth that you can afford to buy steaks. --Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841—1919) French painter. Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding. --Agnes Repplier (1855—1950) American author. A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself. --Jassamyn West (1902—1984) American novelist and screenwriter. ----- ironic (adjective) [I-'rah-nik] (1) Pertaining to a surprising state of affairs opposite to what would naturally be expected (irony). (2) Pertaining to a figure of speech (irony) in which the intended meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning. . . see also: "FOREIGN POLICY" see also: "PACIFISM" Wherever the standard of freedom and independence ... shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But [America] does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy ... She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. --Secretary of state John Quincy Adams [4 July 1821] in Walter LaFeber (ed.) _John Quincy Adams and Continental Empire_ [1965] (John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) 6th President of the United States) The isolation which has meant so much to the United States, and still means so much, cannot persist in its present form ... Hitherto, the American preference and desire for peace has constituted the chief justification for its isolation. At some future time the same purpose ... may demand intervention ... If [the United States] wants peace, it must be spiritually and physically prepared to fight for it ... The power of the United States might well be sufficient when thrown into the balance, to tip the scale in favor of a comparatively pacific settlement of international complications. Under such conditions a policy of neutrality would be a policy of irresponsibility and unwisdom. --Herbert Croly (1869-1930) American political writer and editor, _The Promise of American Life_ [1909] pp.311-312. ;void(0)) ITALY . . see "PLACES" for related links When you are at Rome live in the Roman style; when you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere. --St. Ambrose (c. 339-397) French-born bishop of Milan, advice to St. Augustine, in Jeremy Taylor _Ductor Dubitantium_ [1660], 1, 1, 5 STREETS FLOODED. PLEASE ADVISE. --Robert Benchley (1889-1945) U.S. humorist, newspaper columist (telegraphed message on arriving in Venice) Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There's no looking at a building here after seeing Italy. --Fanny Burney (1752-1840) English novelist and diarist The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad. --G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton (1874-1936) English essayist, novelist, and poet, "Roman Converts", _Dublin Review_ [January-March 1925] - Th[e] Circus, the largest of several in Rome, had been in use perhaps since the time of the kings and had been improved and enlarged by Julius Caesar. After the signal had been given for the sport to begin, by a state official who dropped a white napkin onto the sand-covered arena, there would be displays of equestrian skill followed by horse races, then by chariot races, as many as twelve chariots emerging from the stables at once. Drawn by two or four horses, occasionally by ten, the chariots hur- tled round the track, bearing the colours, red, white, blue or green, of the factiones or stables from which they came. Their highly skilled and highly rewarded drivers, heroes to the shouting crowd, leaned back against the reins, whips in their hands, clothed in tunics of their stables' colours, daggers sheathed by their side in case they had to cut themselves loose after one of the accidents that frequently occurred when a charioteer turned too close to the posts at the end of the track or brought his chariot into collision with another in the clouds of sand thrown up by the wheels and the thundering hoofs. While women and men were allowed to sit next to each other at the Circus, this was not permitted in the Colosseum. This vast amphi- theatre, with surrounding walls rising in four storeys to a height of 187 feet, stood on the site of the drained lake in the grounds of Nero's van- ished palace, the Domus Aurea, and had been dedicated in AD 80 by the Emperor Titus. Here women were relegated to the top storey, an enclosed colonnaded gallery which they shared with the poor; beneath them, also enclosed, sat slaves and foreigners; below them were tiers of marble seats, the upper reserved for the middle class, the lower for more distinguished citizens. The most distinguished of all - senators, magis- trates, priests, Vestal Virgins and members of the Emperor's family - sat in boxes just above the level of the ringside, from which they were sep- arated by rotating cylinders designed to prevent enraged animals from getting into the stands should they manage to leap over the barriers. These privileged spectators were further protected from the rain or the rays of an unpleasantly hot sun by an awning which was pulled across the top of the amphitheatre by sailors on the roof of the topmost gallery. The show was usually opened by a parade of gladiators: impressed criminals, prisoners of war and men who had chosen the precarious existence in the hope of achieving fame or the admiration of women. Wearing purple and gold cloaks, they drove around the arena in char- iots, then, followed by slaves carrying their weapons, they marched towards the Emperor's box where, with raised right arms, they cried, 'Hail, Emperor! We who are about to die salute thee!' [ . . . ] Some gladiators appeared in armour, others were almost naked, most had heavy swords and daggers, some had nets in which they hoped to entangle their opponents before killing them with a spear or a trident. The fate of a wounded gladiator who fell to the ground was decided by his antagonist if the Emperor was not present or, if the imperial box was occupied, by the Emperor himself. As the spectators who had roared in wild excitement throughout the contest shouted their advice, he, raising his thumb as a sign of reprieve, turning it down as a verdict of death, made his decision known. --Christopher Hibbert _Cities and Civilizations_ [2003 ed.] Ch. 3 "Rome in the days of the Emperor Trajan AD 98-117" - Artists will sometimes speak of Rome with disparagement or indifference while it is before them; but no artist ever lived in Rome and then left it, without sighing to return. --George Stillman Hillard (1808-1879) American lawyer and author . . see: "THE BODY" 'Tain't no sin to take off your skin And dance around in your bones. --Edgar Leslie, "Tain't No Sin" [1929] end page | IDAHO - IDIOTS | IDLENESS - IMMATURITY | IMMIGRATION & IMMORALITY | IMMORTALITY - IMPOSTORS | IMPRESSIONABLE - INDECISION | INDEPENDENCE - INDIANA | INDIFFERENCE - INDIVIDUALITY | INDOCTRINATION - INFORMATION | INGRATITUDE - INNOVATION | INNUENDO - INSPIRATION | INSULTS - INTENTIONS | INTERESTED(ING) - INTUITION | INVENTIONS - ITCHING | JACKSON - JOGGING | JOHNSON (LYNDON) - JOY | JOURNALISM | JUDGE (TO) - JUSTICE | | H | I - J | K - L | M | N - O | P - Q | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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