timelets

When it was the Nine Hundred and Eighty-fifth Night,
...
'To content thee, I will not kill them, but I will enchant them.' So saying, she brought out a cup and filling it with sea-water, pronounced over it words that might not be understood; then saying, 'Quit this human shape for the shape of a dog;' she sprinkled them with the water, and immediately they were transmuted into dogs, as thou seest them, O Vicar of Allah."

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3443/3443-h/3443-h.htm#chap29

“Any complex activity,” Clausewitz writes, “if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a ‘genius.’”

“Temperament functions similarly [to long poles for tightrope walkers -- ], I think, in strategy. It’s not a compass—that’s intellect. But it is a gyroscope: an inner ear complementing Clausewitz’s “inward eye.” Like poles on tightropes, temperament makes the difference between slips and safe arrivals.”
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-- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

"Pivoting requires gyroscopes,...

Machiavelli, thinking gyroscopically, advised his prince to be a lion and a fox, the former to frighten wolves, the latter to detect snares. Elizabeth went him one better by being lion, fox, and female, a combination the crafty Italian might have learned to appreciate. Philip was a grand lion, but he was only a lion. Such princes can through conscientiousness, Machiavelli warned, become trapped. For a wise ruler “cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. . . . Nor does a prince ever lack legitimate causes to color his failure to observe faith.”

---- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

... by 1905 I had fairly in mind the specifications of the kind of car I wanted to build. But I lacked the material to give strength without weight. I came across that material almost by accident.

In 1905 I was at a motor race at Palm Beach. ... foreign cars...

After the wreck I picked up a little valve strip stem. It was very light and very strong. I asked what it was made of. Nobody knew.

...it was a French steel and that there was vanadium in it. We tried every steel maker in America—not one could make vanadium steel.

I sent to England for a man who understood how to make the steel commercially. The next thing was to get a plant to turn it out. That was another problem. Vanadium requires 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The ordinary furnace could not go beyond 2,700 degrees. I found a small steel company in Canton, Ohio. I offered to guarantee them against loss if they would run a heat for us. They agreed. The first heat was a failure. Very little vanadium remained in the steel. I had them try again, and the second time the steel came through. Until then we had been forced to be satisfied with steel running between 60,000 and 70,000 pounds tensile strength. With vanadium, the strength went up to 170,000 pounds.

Having vanadium in hand I pulled apart our models and tested in detail to determine what kind of steel was best for every part—whether we wanted a hard steel, a tough steel, or an elastic steel. We, for the first time I think, in the history of any large construction, determined scientifically the exact quality of the steel. As a result we then selected twenty different types of steel for the various steel parts. About ten of these were vanadium.

--- Henry Ford, My Life and Work.