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:
“Considered physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually reduces his strength. The effect of ugliness can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever anyone feels depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with ugliness, they rise with beauty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)