A Quote by Michael A. Stackpole

The advent of ebooks is no more going to kill the pleasure of reading than the introduction of the internal combustion engine made horses extinct. — © Michael A. Stackpole
The advent of ebooks is no more going to kill the pleasure of reading than the introduction of the internal combustion engine made horses extinct.
It's so easy to demagogue the issue and make someone who speaks out against the internal-combustion engine sound like an insane communist, when the truth is that the internal-combustion engine is the biggest threat to my life in the next 25 years, in terms of what it's doing to our environment and how it's depleting the ozone layer and so forth.
Everybody thinks an automobile needs an engine. Well, an automobile doesn't necessarily need an engine. What we do is shift electric motors into the wheels of our automobiles and so we have a completely different kind of thing where we have four independent intelligent wheels rather than a traditional internal combustion engine and power train and so on.
Technological revolutions are very hard to predict. My favourite example is someone in 1850 taking care of horses as a farrier. They would have said, "Look, horses have been part of human existence for 5,000 years. We are horse people. It's permanent." But all of a sudden, the internal combustion engine comes along and, with it, oil fields and automobiles, which basically replace the horse completely. So we often have these long periods of stability and then a sudden inflection point.
If the numbers mean anything, they tell us that vastly more life is left in the reviled internal-combustion engine than any of the blue-state lefties could imagine. First, that madman Bush wins, and now this news. How depressing.
Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration.
By 2025, more than half of the power units you see on the road will have some relevance of electrification. There may be a base combustion engine, but it is combustion and electrification that will make the machine run.
I believe fuel cells could end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine.
The substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind.
It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse.
Holding back technology to reserve business models is like allowing blacksmiths to veto the internal combustion engine in order to protect their horseshoes.
...it ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period.
If you tried to transplant an internal combustion engine and gearbox into another car, you have to bring with it all the systems and everything else to communicate with each other. But in an electric car, it's much simpler.
[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?
I think the internal combustion engine will disappear from the streets of our cities in the next thirty years because transportation will be mass transportation, or probably electrical power.
I believe fuel cells will finally end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine. . . Fuel cells could be the predominant automotive power source in 25 years.
The vanishing point leads to the missiles of today, which can take us out of this world. It could be that the west's greatest mistakes were the 'invention' of the external vanishing point and the internal combustion engine.
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