Apropos nothing really at all, I always found it interesting that Robert Louis Stevenson's father (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Stevenson https://en.wik

Apropos nothing really at all, I always found it interesting that Robert Louis Stevenson's father (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Stevenson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Stevenson) was a famous engineer that is mostly lost to modern history because his inventions don't really matter to us today. Which I learned from this obscure quote (not even anywhere on Google) I dug up in the Brown University archives one summer: The need of our country is not to lift marble to the fortieth story of some new office building, but to lift the level of character; not to whiten the seas with the sails of commerce, but to develop those simple fidelities and homely virtues which are the cheap defense of nations. When Tennyson wrote ``The Crossing of the Bar,'' he did more for civilization than if he built any ocean-liner or man-of-war. Thomas Stevenson did much for England when he built the lighthouses which send their radiance each night over the tossing waters of the Channel. But we owe far more to his son, Robert Louis Stevenson, because he taught us how to kindle a light within, how to keep the soul serene and steadfast in the face of pain and death. When Millet seized his brush and painted the `Angelus' on the bit of canvas that cost him three francs, he did more for labor and the laboring man than if he had seized a spade and worked for fifty years in the fields in France. Not the men who add to out quantity of materials, but the men who deepen the quality of our living, are the real benefactors and educators of the world. In such endeavor our antagonisms vanish, because we become workers together with god. -William H.P. Faunce, President of Brown University