The Things We Make Quotes

“By considering his forebears and contemporaries, Wedgwood was posting the guardrails on his path. In this way, a skilled engineer can be called a kind of “conservative,” not in a political sense but in the broader definition of looking to preserve the functional solutions of the present and past while making cautiously incremental adjustments—just enough to solve their particular problem at hand—that make sure attempted solutions don’t veer into uncharted territory where oversights can have real consequences in the real world. They know that the best results come from making small changes to the state of the art, while a radical engineer risks building a bridge that will collapse. An intuition constructed from records, experience, and institutional knowledge, like rules of thumb, never guarantees success, but it does point the engineer toward the trials and errors that are most likely to produce useful results and deepen the collective well of knowledge.”
― Bill Hammack, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans

“A wonderful feature of engineering by evolution," [Frances] Arnold said when accepting the Nobel Prize, "is that solutions come first; an understanding of the solutions may or may not come later."...As our knowledge about the universe expands, an engineer will always be out front, working in the penumbra of understanding. Because advances don't remove uncertainty. They simply move the borderline between certainty and uncertainty.”
― Bill Hammack, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans

“...the line between successful and unsuccessful inventions is manufacturability.”
― Bill Hammack, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans