Decline
Following the retirement of Charles Penrose, Jr., a succession of directors lacked the zeal and vision which had driven captains of industry to found Newcomen. Despite its mandate to promote engineering and technology, Newcomen's clubby rituals seemed dated in the age of the internet and video conferencing. In a struggle to survive, Newcomen sold the Exton campus and its sumptuous furnishings. Its collection of antique model engines was auctioned by Christie's in 2001. But to no avail -- on December 17, 2007, Chairman Daniel V. Malloy and the trustees announced that The Newcomen Society of the United States would close due to declining membership. Over its 84-85 year existence, it honored more than 2,500 organizations and institutions. The archive of Newcomen Society histories is preserved at The National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
- "Actorum memores simul affectamus agenda." ("We look back but go forward.") -- motto of The Newcomen Society.
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Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.”
—Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)