 fortune index all fortunes
| | #941 | | Business is a good game -- lots of competition and minimum of rules.
You keep score with money.
-- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari
| | | #942 | | Business will be either better or worse.
-- Calvin Coolidge
| | | #943 | | "But don't you worry, its for a cause -- feeding global corporations' paws."
| | | #944 | | But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a
brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and
lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877, was the
phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where
it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison's
greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company.
Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit:
the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then
immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is
the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again.
This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of
electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few
customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact the
last year any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937;
the electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since, which is
why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases.
-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
| | | #945 | | By the middle 1880's, practically all the roads except those in
the South, were of the present standard gauge. The southern roads were
still five feet between rails.
It was decided to change the gauge of all southern roads to standard,
in one day. This remarkable piece of work was carried out on a Sunday in May
of 1886. For weeks beforehand, shops had been busy pressing wheels in on the
axles to the new and narrower gauge, to have a supply of rolling stock which
could run on the new track as soon as it was ready. Finally, on the day set,
great numbers of gangs of track layers went to work at dawn. Everywhere one
rail was loosened, moved in three and one-half inches, and spiked down in its
new position. By dark, trains from anywhere in the United States could operate
over the tracks in the South, and a free interchange of freight cars everywhere
was possible.
-- Robert Henry, "Trains", 1957
| | | #946 | | By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be
boss and work twelve.
-- Robert Frost
| | | #947 | | Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
| | | #948 | | Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
| | | #949 | | Carelessly planned projects take three times longer to complete than expected.
Carefully planned projects take four times longer to complete than expected,
mostly because the planners expect their planning to reduce the time it takes.
| | | #950 | | Chairman of the Bored.
| | | | ... |
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