"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 you'd better find out how it works. ...ou set about a detailed series of experiments, and eventually, ...you have to do the sums, it wouldn't be respectable without doing the sums... ou do the sums and then you publish it as a paper in the learned society journal. ...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..." ...his very unfortunate phrase keeps coming in, "Now it is cleat that..." and "Clearly, obviously..." None of it is obvious. It wasn't the day before you started. No, you do it from the back."

“I'm like a child who's been brought up inside an institution and has never seen the outside world, the sea, or trees in a wood... Coming here was like being taken out of that box and put into the marvelous real world that there is, and I've simply been standing and gazing in wonder at all of the things that there are in the universe. And I'd just like to live to be 200, because one lifetime isn't enough. ...Of course I shall never retire, I mean when, I'm 65 I hope they'll make me Professor Emeritus, but I also hope that they'll let me go on working. ...I'm writing a book on engineering and biology and the last chapter is called "Gazing Wonder", and that's how I can sum it up.”

“I make most of my inventions when I'm talking to other people. ...I drag them from their interest into mine, and then they thank me when they leave, and I feel as if I should pay them a fee, because I feel as if I've used their brain to sort of reflect from.”

“he academic tended to dislike the industrialist and the industrialist both distrusted and feared the academic—distrusted because 'theory never works in practice' and feared because the managing director might reveal some chink in his 'armour of experience' when confronted by the academic in the presence of some of his own staff. Had not the 'long-haired Professor' long been a music-hall joke and his caricature the subject of comedy films?”

“The whole idea of modern electrical machine theory... is based on this idea of the two independent axes, co-existing, co-related but nevertheless identifiably separate. We deal with complicated matters when we deal with rates of change of current, matters that require not only the Special Theory of Relativity, but the General Theory ... Might there not exist a similar complexity also in the, if rates of change of acceleration are involved? ...Work on rates of change of acceleration is very sparse.”

“Electric motors and generators 'came of age' over almost the same period that engineering was becoming clean and respectable as a profession. Although technology... preceded science, indeed paved the way... scientists were regarded for centuries as belonging to the upper class, the intelligentsia, so closely related to philosophers as to allow overlap. In such a world, technology was not recognised as a subject and engineers... did not appear until there were 'engines' for them to look after. ...Even in the early part of the twentieth century, science as a whole was almost a 'middle class' occupation compared with studies of the classics.”

“he mirror really is itself, for it changes hands for you as you go through the mirror and changes the motor to a generator at the same time.”