[T]he mirror really is itself, for it changes hands for you as you go — Eric Laithwaite

"Isaac Newton was right when he declared "If I can see further than others it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." And you start counting up Newtons giants... Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Archimedes. You soon run out of ideas. But Newton knew nothing of Faraday even, and Maxwell, Rutherford, Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Geiger, Einstein, Mach. Our list of giants runs in the hundreds. So the opportunities for new inventions and discoveries... were never greater than they are today. And of one thing we can be sure, they will be... even greater next year."

"West Germany branched... into... another new topology with a large-scale demonstration of the system... Permanent s were used to provide the lift from the underside of a ground rail. Guide wheels were used to control the gap. The philosophy... better to provide a lifting force of 120 per cent of the vehicle weight and run the wheels on a ceiling..."

"When you discover something or observe something for the first time, you... wonder how that works, and then you make one, and you look at it, and you decide youd better find out how it works. ...[Y]ou set about a detailed series of experiments, and eventually, ...you have to do the sums, it wouldnt be respectable without doing the sums... [Y]ou do the sums and then you publish it as a paper in the learned society journal. ...[Y]ou write it as if it was done from the front, as if on morning one you said "I will now invent the magnetic river..." ...[T]his very unfortunate phrase keeps coming in, "Now it is cleat that..." and "Clearly, obviously..." None of it is obvious. It wasnt the day before you started. No, you do it from the back."

"So there is the first message for all of you as potential inventors. Take your own ideas a little further before giving them up. Keep your experience like a sort of treasure house that you can draw on whenever you like. But never, never let it be your master. Be on the lookout for impossible things, the sort the Red Queen dreamed up before breakfast."

"The research director of Linear Motors Ltd told me in the late 1970s that he had then listed over one thousand different applications for linear motors. By this he meant that motors had been manufactured and sold for that number of different jobs. The most common applications included sliding doors, traveling cranes and conveyors. The items that were moved varied from 0.1 mg... to over 5 tonnes."

"I have been told by different people on separate occasions that the first patent on linear motors was filed by the Mayor of Pittsburgh in 1890, and that it was an induction machine applied to loom shuttle propulsion. ...[T]here is certainly a patent with the same objective in 1895. ...[T]he name [flying] given to James Kays shuttle of 1733 suggests movement without contact and, as with modern transport in which it is proposed to have ground vehicles hovering clear of the ground, Teslas invention promised immediate success if it could be applied in linear form. ...The... 70-80 years during which progress in linear motors was extremely slow clearly needs an explanation. ...[T]here are many contributing factors, not least that of the amateur status of the textile inventors in the world of electrical engineers."