"Vacuum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... belong to you. If I hold my breath for a moment wickedly (for I can't do it breathing), and try to look at the world with you out of it, I seem to have fallen over a precipice; or rather, the solid earth has slipped from under my feet, and I am off into vacuum. Then, as I take breath again for fear, my star swims up and clasps me, and shows me your face. O happy star this that I was born under, that moved with me and winked quiet prophecies at me all through my childhood, I not knowing what it meant:—the dear radiant thing naming ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... the matron saw that we were interested, she asked if we didn't want to borrow No. 31 for a few days. She said they sometimes lent children for two weeks or so. When she said it, she sounded just as though a child were a typewriter or a vacuum cleaner, sent on ten days' free trial. I looked at Dad and Dad looked at me, and then he said, "We'll take her!" It didn't take long for the matron to do up her few clothes and to get her ready. She was so glad to make the loan that she hurried. Little ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... loss of blood is to cause intense thirst. A quantity of liquid being taken out of the body. Nature seems to point out in this way that the loss should be supplied; you know she is said to abhor a vacuum. If he had had all his senses about him, he would merely have taken a sup and held it in his mouth some time before swallowing it; but he was half dazed, and did not know where he was, and he yielded to the instinct ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... contraction, thus adding to the enlargement of the chest by increasing its depth. The abdominal muscles relax and allow the stomach, liver, and other organs in the abdomen to move downward to make room for the depressed diaphragm. This causes a vacuum in the chest. The lungs expand to fill this vacuum and the air rushes in ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... ought to have about one hundred sixty-watt lamp capacity for the complete farm; that would take care of the small motor of the vacuum cleaner and sewing machine." ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log — shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, .. perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy! Thus, while ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... idiot!" he snapped. "We can't have a live pirate aboard—we're going to be altogether too busy with outsiders directly. Don't worry, I'm not going to give him a break. I'm taking a Standish and I'll rub him out like a blot. Stay right here until I come back after you," he commanded, and the heavy, vacuum insulated door of the lifeboat clanged shut behind him as he leaped out ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... times when the grief itself came uppermost; there were nights when she lay awake crying for her mother, when she was nothing but a bereft child in a vacuum of love. Her father's tenderness could not make up to her for the loss of her mother's. Very soon after her mother's death, his mercurial temperament jarred upon her. She could not understand how he could laugh and talk ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... was the agonizing thought that rushed through Sam's, mind. In a jiffy he was out of bed and had begun to dress. He did not spend longer than was necessary on his toilet. Then he hurried out of the room and gazed about him. An assistant janitor was nearby, running a vacuum cleaner ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... erat cava, recessusque habuit, et saxeos specus, euntes in vacuum montem; sive natura pridem factos, sive exesos mari, et undarum crebris ictibus: In hos enim cum impetu ruebant et fragore, aestuantis maris fluctus; quos iterum spumantes reddidit antrum, et ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... his head pumped out like a vacuum pan, or stuffed full of odds and ends like a bologna sausage, and do his work right. It doesn't make any difference how mean and trifling the thing he's doing may seem, that's the big thing and the only thing for him just then. ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... the lack of that hunting party for years to come, Jane. There will be a vacuum in my inner consciousness. I shall wake up in the middle of the night sighing for that hunting party. But you see to-day is Wednesday, and we must leave Friday, and Frank and I have sworn by every fish in the creek to take to-morrow off for a fishing trip. Chicken Little, there is only one ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... empty. A stable occupied all one side; the other three were formed by bunk houses and necessary out-buildings. Here, too, dwelt absolute solitude and absolute silence. It was uncanny, as though one walked in a vacuum. Everything was neat and shut up and whitewashed and apparently dead. There were no sounds or signs of occupancy. I was as much alone as though I had been in the middle of an ocean. My mind, by now abnormally sensitive and alert, leaped on this idea. For the same reason, it insisted—lack ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... charge of the English or rather Scotch engineer, Mr. David Duguid, who had taken the place of the two Arab firemen, began with 7 1/2 knots an hour, 68 revolutions per minute, and a pressure of 9 lbs. to the square inch. The condenser-vacuum was 26 inches (30 being complete)—13 lbs. Next morning the rate declined to six miles in consequence of the boiler leaking, and matters became steadily worse. As a French writer says of the genre ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... not fill up the vacuum of which Constance daily complained; and of private intrigue, the then purity of her nature was incapable. When people have really nothing to do, they generally fall ill upon it; and at length, the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... day: the ancient or more massive door, or portal, is secured from shutting; but a temporary, small, shabby wooden door, covered with dirty green baize, opening and shutting upon circular hinges, just covers the vacuum left by the absence ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... fashion." Such an illustration is worthless. The individual chosen does not fairly represent the class. If, on the other hand, a teacher in physics should announce that "all bodies fall at the same rate in a vacuum," and should illustrate by saying, "If I place a bullet and a feather in a tube from which the air has been exhausted, they will be found to fall equally fast," his example would be a fair one, as the two objects differ in no manner essential to the experiment ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... documents which you have in your hand, you will have some faint idea. Ivor, when it's your funeral, I'll smile. Mabel, Duchess of Datchet, it is beginning to dawn upon the vacuum which represents my brain that I've been the victim of one of the prettiest things in practical jokes that ever yet was planned. When that fellow brought you that card at Cane and Wilson's—which, I need scarcely tell you, never came from me—some one walked out of the front ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... year—it would take not less than 40,000 years to reach the nearest star among its neighbours, while for the more remote ones millions of years must be reckoned. The huge space separating these masses is practically devoid of matter; it is a vacuum. ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... 'Wallenstein', in the spring of 1799, Schiller was not long in selecting a new dramatic theme. The unwonted leisure was irksome to him, so that he felt like one living in a vacuum. At first, being weary of war and politics, he was minded to try his hand upon something altogether imaginary, some unhistorical drama of passion. But the aversion to history and the balancing of attractions did ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... objected Willis, "if two persons were to talk in what you call a vacuum, they would not hear ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... would be in this city what the quack medicine men call 'a sense of goneness,' and I think we should have to send to the wise men of the East, Dr. Atkinson, for example, to tell us how to supply the vacuum." Taking my cue from that generous compliment, I venture to suggest that if the South should suddenly withdraw from Wall Street, it would occasion such a contraction of the currency in that district as would demand ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... on the bar and it was our business to keep the engines going at full speed until she was gradually urged over. At intervals she bumped. Some mass of rock or clay on which she rested would collapse and immediately the propeller would shove her a little further over. Our vacuum almost disappeared, for the injection pipe got blocked with mud. This meant more work for me in starting the ballast pump, and when that got choked too, I had to open it up and clean the valve-boxes. It ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... stillness in the air, not the natural stillness of the Wild, but an unhealthy one, as of a suspension of something, of a vacuum, of bated breath. It was curiously full of terror. More and more he felt like a trapped animal, caught in a vast cage. The sky to the north was glooming ominously. Every second the horizon grew blacker, more bodeful, and Locasto stared at it, with a sudden ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... be alone in the dark. I'm not. Well, I just knelt there—I'd risen to my knees—and stared at him. And then I began to take in a long breath—I swelled and swelled with it. It's a wonder I didn't use up all the air on the island and create a vacuum—in which case the tiger would have blown up. I remember wondering what that big breath was going to do when it came out. I didn't know. I had no plan. I looked at the tiger and he looked at me and whined—like a spoiled spaniel asking for sugar. That was too much. I thought of Ivy, ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... legal methods and the methods of diplomacy (in which I here include international conversations of every sort) is that the latter take place, as it were, in a vacuum. There is no Sovereign, no common denominator, no unifying system in which both parties are related by their common obligations. They exist and act in two separate moral spheres, and no real intercourse is possible between them. For all their ambassadors and diplomatic conferences ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... real and existent. The ideas of space and time are therefore no separate or distinct ideas, but merely those of the manner or order, in which objects exist: Or in other words, it is impossible to conceive either a vacuum and extension without matter, or a time, when there was no succession or change in any real existence. The intimate connexion betwixt these parts of our system is the reason why we shall examine together the objections, which have been urged against both of them, beginning with those ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... Person living: Namely, the Establishing and Promoting Real Knowledge; and (next to what is Divine) truly so called; as far, at least, as Humane Nature extends towards the Knowledge of Nature, by enlarging her Empire beyond the Land of Spectres, Forms, Intentional Species, Vacuum, Occult Qualities, and other Inadequate Notions; which, by their Obstreperous and Noisy Disputes, affrighting, and (till of late) deterring Men from adventuring on further Discoveries, confin'd them in a lazy Acquiescence, and to be fed with Fantasms and fruitless Speculations, which signifie ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... should be constructed at a minimum of cost and may later, after you have become familiar with the operation of radio appliances, easily be converted into a set of much greater range by the use of a vacuum tube as detector and may even, by slight changes, be given the much ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... porter's lodge, with entrances from it to the offices, as represented in the plan on the adjoining page Beyond the entrance, and just within the inclosure may be seen a great crane used for receiving or delivering the vast masses of metal, the shafts, the cylinders, the boilers, the vacuum pans, and other ponderous formations which are continually coming and going to and from the yard. Beyond the crane is seen the bell by which the hours of work ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... process must take place in it which takes place at all. But let us suppose that cavities exist in this otherwise universal medium, as caverns exist in the earth, or cells in a Swiss cheese. In such a cavity there would be absolutely nothing. It would be such a vacuum as cannot be artificially produced; for if we pump the air from a receiver there remains the luminiferous ether. Through one of these cavities light could not pass, for there would be nothing to bear it. Sound could not come from it; nothing ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... we'll need the protection. With a ship like that, you could run through a planetoid without hurting the hull. We'll make the relux inner wall about an inch thick, with a vacuum between them for protection in a warm atmosphere. And if some tremendous force did manage to crack the outer wall, we wouldn't ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... space, n. extension, vacancy; vacuum; distance, interval; interspace (intervening space); interstice; abyss. Associated Words: ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... cigars, perhaps, or a basket of rare fruit. Housewives, groaning over their endless routine of bathing the baby, ordering the meals, sweeping the floors and so on, would be amazed by the sudden appearance of one of our deputies, in the service uniform of gray and silver, equipped with vacuum cleaner and electric baby-washing machine, to take over the domestic chores for one day. The troubles of lovers were under our special care. We saw how much anguish is caused by the passion of jealousy. Many an engaged damsel, tempted to mild escapade in some perfumed conservatory, ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... banished from science hypothetical causes and all the entities admitted by the ancients,—such as the creative power of matter, the horror of a vacuum, the esprit recteur, etc. (p. 22),—admits immediately, as necessary to the comprehension of chemical phenomena, a series of entities no less obscure,—vital force, chemical force, electric force, the force of attraction, etc. (pp. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... constant pain Of constant thought. I see dawn from my hill, And watch the lights which fingers from the waters Twine from the sun or moon. Or look across The waste of bays and marshes to the woods, Under the prism colors of the air, Held in a vacuum silence, where the clouds, Like cyclop hoods are tossed against the sky In ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... left untried to remedy the deficiency. The gentleman whose name is mentioned in the preface, and who, from the statement there made, might be supposed able to fill the vacuum, has declined the task-this, for satisfactory reasons connected with the general inaccuracy of the details afforded him, and his disbelief in the entire truth of the latter portions of the narration. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... form a sort of variety museum of all manner of bizarre and even grotesque figures. Critics naturally marvelled at this; and as in the days of old, men explained the effects of morphine by saying that it contained the soporific principle, and the action of the pump by nature's abhorring a vacuum, so critics explained this fact, so strange in the healthy, clear-eyed, measure-loving Turgenef, by saying that he had a natural fondness for the fantastic and the strange. In truth, however, the choice of his subjects was part of his very art ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... you ever go down the streets of Boston and notice the number of signs of palmists and astrologers and vacuum cures?" exclaimed Davison. "But perhaps it ain't fair to ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... explosive is in double vacuum containers, and it will be safe for some time yet. Besides, it's in the cellar. It's the carbide I'm most worried about. We daren't ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... as commander-in-chief was the result of no design on his part; and of no efforts on the part of his friends; it seemed to take place spontaneously. He moved into the position, because there was a vacuum which no other could supply: in it, he was not sustained by government, by a party, or by connections; he sustained himself; and then he sustained everything else. He sustained Congress against the ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... help to reduce the man's labor, a vacuum cleaner will do likewise for his wife. If the stock at the barn needs a good water system to help it grow, the stock in the house needs it too, and needs it ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... and sometimes polishing the furniture. Open the windows top and bottom, dust and brush them inside and out; use a soft brush or a dust mop to take the dust from the floor. Use a carpet sweeper for the rugs unless you have electricity and can use a vacuum cleaner; collect the sweepings and ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... our ear drums," answered Paul. "It is the concussion, that is, the rushing back of air into the vacuum caused by the shot, that does the damage. By opening your mouth you equalize the air pressure on the inside and the outside of your ear drums, just as you do when you go through a river tunnel. When there is ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... roof-garden is being laid out for the recreation of the staff, and the velocity of the numerous lifts has been keyed up to concert pitch. Steam heat will be conveyed from the basement to radiators on every floor, and each room is being provided with a vacuum-cleaning apparatus, a wireless telephonic outfit and an American bar. The renovation of the library is practically complete, the obsolete books which cumbered its shelves having been replaced by the works of DELL, BARCLAY, WELLS, ZANE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... Crookes had in 1874 applied himself to the task of creating something more nearly like a vacuum than the old air-pumps afforded. When he had found the means of reducing the quantity of gas in a tube until it was a million times thinner than the atmosphere, he made the experiment of sending an electric discharge through it, and found ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... the senses he admits but four to the first rank: touch, sight, smell, and hearing; the claims of taste, he affirms, are open to contention. He then passes on to discuss the properties of matter: fire, moisture, cold, dryness, and vacuum. The last-named furnishes him with a text for a discourse on a wonderful lamp which he invented by thinking out the principle of the vacuum. This digression on the very threshold of the work is a sample of what the reader may expect to encounter all through the twenty-one books of the De Subtilitate ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... words were futilities. He had to keep himself in reckoning with the world of work and material life. And it became more and more difficult, such a strange pressure was upon him, as if the very middle of him were a vacuum, and ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... but unfortunately the glass tubes break readily and difficulty was constantly experienced. An attempt was next made to substitute hard-rubber tubing for the glass tube, but this did not prove to be an efficient insulator. More recently we have used with perfect success a special form of vacuum-jacketed glass tube, which gives the most satisfactory insulation. However, this system of insulation is impracticable when electric-resistance thermometers are used for recording the water-temperature ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict
... north wind, were seeking to divine the cause of its unvarying direction. The theory was advanced that, since his departure for the antarctic pole, the sun, by heating the southern hemisphere, had rarefied all its currents of air, elevated them, and left on the surface of that zone a vacuum, into which the currents of air of ours, which were lower on account of being more dense, were violently rushing. That thus the northern pole, loaded with these denser vapors, which had been collecting and cooling since ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... thing. Often have I laughed at the pains man took to preserve his property from man. Stone and iron are made to do their best-armed sentries walking night and day—when all the time I have, with the coolest composure, been daily wallowing in the best of every thing. Nature abhors a vacuum, and will not allow us to starve, especially in the midst of plenty; but I may safely say, that I never wantonly destroyed, and, if possible, have always preferred the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... still to explain atmospheric mysteries. The other day a Yorkshire girl, when asked why she was not afraid of thunder, replied because it was only her Father's voice; what knew she of the rushing together of air to fill the vacuum caused by the transit of the electric fluid? to her the thunder-clap was the utterance of the Almighty. Still in North Germany does the peasant say of thunder, that the angels are playing skittles aloft, and of the snow, that they are shaking up the ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... was this transformation which was now brought about through the agency of steam. Engines in which steam was used as a means of draining mines had long been in use; but the power relied on was mainly that of the weight of the air pressing on a piston beneath which a vacuum had been created by the condensation of steam; and the economical use of such engines was checked by the waste of fuel which resulted from the cooling of the cylinder at each condensation, and from the expenditure of heat in again raising it ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... influence of her surroundings, just as she had mistaken the effects of physical weakness when she was ill for a desire to die. Such feelings were the result of a void which the whole universe, as she thought, never could fill, but it was really a temporary vacuum, like that caused by the loss of a first tooth. These teeth come out with the first jar, and nature intends them to be speedily replaced by others, much more permanent; but children cry when they are pulled out, and fancy they are in very tight. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... despair. Now love was buried; and despair had flown Before the healthful zephyrs that had blown From heights serene and lofty; and the place Where both had dwelt, was empty, voiceless space And so I took my long-loved study, art, The dreary vacuum in my life to fill, And worked, and labored, with a right good will. Aunt Ruth and I took rooms in Rome; while Roy Lingered in Scotland, with his new-found joy. A dainty little lassie, Grace Kildare, Had snared ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... "It seems to be nothing but wind. I'm inclined to think there had been an area of low pressure about this region, caused possibly by some other storm, and the air from another region is now rushing in, filling up the partial vacuum." ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... variety and infinity. It must be extremely pleasant. But felicity was denied to Roderick Anthony's contemplation. He was not a common sort of lover; and he was punished for it as if Nature (which it is said abhors a vacuum) were so very conventional as to abhor every sort of exceptional conduct. Roderick Anthony had begun already to suffer. That is why perhaps he was so industrious in going about amongst his fellow-men who ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... remarked so plainly that, whenever I had been hungry for any length of time, it was just as if my brains ran quite gently out of my head and left me with a vacuum—my head grew light and far off, I no longer felt its weight on my shoulders, and I had a consciousness that my eyes stared far too widely open ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... the Cave?" returned Esau. "Gold is what I want," and for his share in Machpelah he took the gold realized from the sale of the possessions Jacob had accumulated outside of the Holy Land. But God "filled the vacuum without delay," and Jacob was as rich ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... ship steadied enough to let him pick himself off the instrument room floor, and again, a few minutes later and with much more immediacy, from the escape hatch, made no sense—seemed simply to have no meaning. The pressure meters said there was a vacuum outside the Queen's skin. That vacuum was dark, even pitch-black but here and there came momentary suggestions of vague light and color. Occasional pinpricks of brightness showed and were gone. And there had been one startling phenomenon like a distant, giant explosion, a sudden ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... many square feet. These were nearly all hardy perennials,[347:1] with the addition of a few hardy annuals, and the great object seems to have been to have had something of interest or beauty in these gardens at all times of the year. The principle of the old gardeners was that "Nature abhors a vacuum," and, as far as their gardens went, they did their best to prevent a vacuum occurring at any time. In this way I think they surpassed us in their practical gardening, for, even if they did not always succeed, it was surely something for them to aim ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... your mind: if you will cancel it I will write something to fill up the vacuum. Please to direct ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... engine; the whole ventilator gets covered with sea every now and then, during which period until the baffle drains get the water away no air can get in, so the engine has a good suck at the air in the boat, the result of all this being a slight vacuum in the boat. It is a very unpleasant sensation, and made me very sick. This is really a form of sickness due ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... entirely fill the vessell, driving out all before it. The balance being of greater density than the rest would be the last to go, but in the end its inertia would be overcome and all would be expelled, and there would be a perfect vacuum. The ball would then burst, but you would not be aware of the fact on account of the loudness of a sound varying with the density of the place in which it is generated, and not on that in which it ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... hundred pounds, or more than sixteen times its own weight. Perhaps a clearer idea may be attained by the statement of the fact, that, were it possible to remove this resistance, or, in other words, to fire a ball in a vacuum, it would fly ten miles in a second,—the same time it now requires to move sixteen hundred feet. Bearing in mind this enormous resistance, it will be more readily apparent that even a slight motion of the element through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... This structure consists of a midrib and a number of transverse flat ridges capable of being raised or depressed. The disc has a membranous continuous edge or margin. When the fish presses the soft edge of the disc against any smooth surface and depresses the ridges and the intervening spaces, a vacuum is formed, giving it enormous holding power. Other countries have sucker fish of different form; but it remained for the benighted Australian blacks, among a few other savage races, to make practical use of the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... substitutes for scientific thought as the declaration that the perfect line is a circle, and hence that the planets must move in absolute circles—a statement which led astronomy astray even when the great truths of the Copernican theory were well in sight; also, the declaration that nature abhors a vacuum—a statement which led physics astray until Torricelli made his experiments; also, the declaration that we see the lightning before we hear the thunder because "sight is ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... must copy an important passage of Montfaucon: Turris ingens rotunda.... Caeciliae Metellae.... sepulchrum erat, cujus muri tam solidi, ut spatium perquam minimum intus vacuum supersit; et Torre di Bove dicitur, a boum capitibus muro inscriptis. Huic sequiori aevo, tempore intestinorum bellorum, ceu urbecula adjuncta fuit, cujus mnia et turres etiamnum visuntur; ita ut sepulchrum Metellae quasi ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... are very simple, the fresh milk being put into a great copper tank with a steam jacket. While it is being heated sugar is added, and the mixture is then drawn off into a vacuum tank, where evaporation ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... distinctness with which you can see the objects. This consciousness of air in a picture of low horizon is a very difficult thing to describe and explain. We know when it is there and when it is not. It has to be seen, to be enjoyed, and recorded. Holbein painted Edward VI. standing, so to speak, in a vacuum. Every line of his face is sharply defined. In real life air softens all lines, so that even the edge of a nose in profile is not actually seen as a sharp outline. The figures in Richard II.'s picture stand in the most exhausted vacuum, ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... the pulse, the stride of walking. All action and reaction whatever is rhythmic, both in nature and in man. "Rhythm is the rule with Nature," said Tyndall; "she abhors uniformity more than she does a vacuum." So deep-rooted, in truth, is this principle, that we imagine it and feel it where it does not exist, as in the clicking of a typewriter. Thus there is both an objective rhythm, which actually exists as rhythm, and a subjective rhythm, which is only ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... which came out fresh and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a girl's face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring—her ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... any event, it's not who—but how. How does the man breathe? Vacuum sucks a man's lungs up out of his mouth, bursts ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... that the great difficulty does not lie either in the expense of emancipation, or in the expense or the means of deportation, but in the attainment—1, of the requisite asylums; 2, the consent of the individuals to be removed; 3, the labour for the vacuum ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... attend to business, and nothing could be done without him. The young girls felt all the reaction that comes with the sudden interruption of eager plans. A stagnation seemed to succeed to their excitement and energy. They were thrown back into a vacuum. ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... should show wasteful expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The psychological law has already been pointed out that all men—and women perhaps even in a higher degree abhor futility, whether of effort or of expenditure—much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure; and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore intrinsically ugly. Hence we find that in all ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... emotion, I ventured to embrace her, assuring her that she was the cynosure of my neighbouring eyes, and supplied the vacuum and long-felt want of my soul, and while occupied in imprinting a chaste salute upon her rosebud lips—who'd have thought it! her severe matronly parent popped in through the curtains and, surveying me with a cold and basilican ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... mills, cloth manufactories, etc., and, at the same time, for purifying such waters, Mr. Schuricht, of Siebenlehn, employs a sort of filter like that shown in the annexed Figs. 1 and 2, and underneath which he effects a vacuum. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... was L8,000,000; that the country banks would desire, by agreement with the Bank of England, to reduce this by one-half; and that it might become necessary for that establishment to make fresh issues in order to supply the vacuum. The cases then in which he would allow the Bank to do so, would be those of a country bank failing, or closing, or commuting its own circulation for that of the Bank of England. With respect to the question, whether the bullion on which the Bank of England was to issue ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... an intricate apparatus which bore some resemblance to a television radio. There were countless vacuum tubes and their controls, tiny motors belted to slotted disks that would spin when power was ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... objects of sense there is a third nature in which they are contained—that is to say, space, which may be explained in various ways. It is the element which surrounds them; it is the vacuum or void which they leave or occupy when passing from one portion of space to another. It might be described in the language of ancient philosophy, as 'the Not-being' of objects. It is a negative idea which in the course of ages has become positive. It is originally derived from ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... he replied. "We found some, once, when I was on that expedition into Idaho, in what must have been the stockroom of a hotel. Vacuum-packed in moisture-proof containers, and free from radioactivity. It wasn't nearly as good ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... percentages of the different impurities vary with the variation of the soils in which the cane is grown. The next step, following clarification, is evaporation, the boiling out of a large percentage of the water carried in the juice. For this purpose, a vacuum system is used, making possible a more rapid evaporation with a smaller expenditure of fuel. These two operations, clarification and evaporation by the use of the vacuum, are merely improved methods for doing, on a large scale, what was formerly done by boiling in pans or ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... world, except for those phlegmatic natures, who, I suspect, would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope, and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the vacuum in gentleman and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... many speakers is that they go before an audience with their minds a blank. It is no wonder that nature, abhorring a vacuum, fills them with the nearest thing handy, which generally happens to be, "I wonder if I am doing this right! How does my hair look? I know I shall fail." Their prophetic souls are ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Domitian once thrust his senate, in a frolic, to read their own names on the coffin-lids placed against the wall. The darkness seemed to press upon us from every side, as if it were a dense jetty fluid, out of which our light had scooped a pailful or two, and that was rushing in to supply the vacuum; and the only objects we saw distinctly visible were each other's heads and faces, and the lighter parts of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... ignited platinum wire, the electric arc between two carbons, an electric machine spark, an induction coil spark, and a vacuum tube glow. Also a large nail was magnetized by being wrapped in the current, and two helices were suspended and seen to direct and ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... that the vacuum was due to the fact that his breakfast had consisted of a piece of bread and his last night's supper of a dish of soup, but the Dunne pride inclined to reservation on family and personal matters. He speared another small potato and paused, with fork ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Montauto I studiously avoided. The forlorn cavern of a parlor, or ball-room, I remember to have seen only once. There was a painful vacuum where good spirits ought to have been. Along the walls were fixed seats, like those in the apse of some morally fallen cathedral, and they were covered with blue threadbare magnificence that told the secrets of vanity. Heavy tables crowded ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... engine-driver pulls open the regulator, and we glide back and are attached to the train. We have air-breaks worked on the engine, vacuum-breaks which can pull us up quickly, and when all the connections are made the "Flying Dutchman" is ready; he is harnessed to his eight coaches full of people—the solemn and sorry; the glad and the cheerful; and boys and girls, going on all ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... fire into it; if the liquid is confined, or is under pressure, then an explosion will ensue; if paper be moistened with it and put on an anvil and a smart blow given with a hammer, a sharp detonation ensues; if gunpowder or the fulminates of mercury, silver or gun-cotton be ignited in a vacuum by a galvanic battery, none of them will explode; if any gas be introduced so as to produce a gentle pressure during the decomposition, then a rapid evolution of gases will result; the results of decomposition in a vacuum differ from those under atmospheric pressure or when they are ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... as their brethren at Albemarle had treated Sothel. The next year saw William and Mary on the English throne; Shaftesbury had died seven years before; and the Great Model subsided without a bubble into the vacuum of historical absurdities. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... in Querida's work that still remained absent in his. He felt its absence but he could not define what it was that was absent, could not discover the nature of it. He really began to feel the lack of it in his work, but he searched his canvas and his own heart in vain for any vacuum unfilled. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... attention. As we approached, methought there issued from it a slight humming noise as from one of your Spaceland bluebottles, only less resonant by far, so slight indeed that even in the perfect stillness of the Vacuum through which we soared, the sound reached not our ears till we checked our flight at a distance from it of something ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... room and its furniture, it is always best to use a carpet sweeper, a vacuum cleaner, or a damp cloth, as much as possible, the broom as little as may be, and the feather duster never. The two latter stir up disease germs resting peacefully on the floor or furniture, and set them floating in the air, where you can suck them ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... the more gentle or enthusiastic to escape from the religious vacuum into which schism has precipitated them. Quite different is the course of the more strict and dauntless theologians; and the ascendency of logic over pious feeling carries with these the majority of the Bezpopovtsy. No consequence is too revolting for them, and no hesitating subterfuge ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... this and other official statements is, that only a small number of immigrants leave the colony at the expiration of their industrial residence. In the manufacture of sugar from the cane, considerable improvement has been effected by the introduction of new methods of boiling and grinding. The vacuum pan and the system of Wetsell are all tending to economise the cost of production, and to save that loss which for years amounted, in grinding alone, to nearly one-third of the juice of the cane. The planters begin to find that they can increase the value ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... drinking, and breathing flies; they go down our throats in spite of our teeth, and we wear them all over our bodies; they creep up one's clothes and die, and others go after them to see what they died of. The instant I inhale a fly it acts as an emetic. And if Nature abhors a vacuum, she, or at least my nature, abhors these wretches more, for the moment I swallow one a vacuum is instantly produced. Their bodies are full of poisonous matter, and they have a most disgusting flavour, though they taste sweet. They also cause great pains and discomfort to our eyes, which ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... of reading, he regretted a moment spent away from his books; and every day, when not engaged in writing, devoured the compositions of the ancient Greeks and Romans": ("Erat in hoc homine inexhaustus quidem legendi amor; nullum enim patiebatur esse vacuum tempus. Quotidie aut scribebat, aut aliquid ex Graecis Latinisque litteris mandabat"):—"Mittas ad me, rogo, singula commentariola mea, hoc est, excerpta illa ex variis libris, quos legi, quae sunt plurima, ac dispersa; collige ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... these valves can be seen just below and to the left of the cylinder. When the throttle was placed in idle position this valve rotated to a position which cut off almost all of the airflow into its cylinder. This increased the vacuum formed toward the end of the intake stroke, thereby causing more resistance, which reduced the idling rpm to that ...
— The First Airplane Diesel Engine: Packard Model DR-980 of 1928 • Robert B. Meyer
... eye. Actinic rays. Hertzian waves. High-tension apparatus. Vacuum tubes. Character of the ultra-violet rays. How distinguished. The infra-red rays. Their uses. X-rays not capable of reflection. Not subject to refraction. Transmission through opaque substances. ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... reason for this is that the fine wire would burn up if there were any air in the lamps. When you knock the point off the globe, it leaves a space into which the water can be pushed. Since the air is pressing hard on the surface of the water except in the one place where the vacuum in the lamp globe is, the water is forced violently into this ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... were both speaking of the same idea," replied Jim. "You see, my father is financing the wonderful patent Ken's father invented. Dr. Evans is a great inventor, and every once in a while he has a big idea. That was how he planned the vacuum sweepers, and the self-stop on the victrolas. He has lots of unusual patents granted him, and now he ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... notion of subjection to the primeval order of nature. The alternative is to consider independent communities as not related to each other by any law, but this condition of lawlessness is exactly the vacuum which the Nature of the jurisconsults abhorred. There is certainly apparent reason for thinking that if the mind of a Roman lawyer rested on any sphere from which civil law was banished, it would instantly fill the void with ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... galaxies, until the light which a telescope might now register had been born before the Earth. Looking from his air-lock cave, past the radio web and the other ships, Coffin felt himself drown in enormousness, coldness, and total silence—though he knew that this vacuum burned and roared with man-destroying energies, roiled like currents of gas and dust more massive than planets and travailed with the birth of new suns—and he said to himself the most dreadful of names, I am that I am, and sweat formed chilly ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... to this description: "No, sir; it should be all precipice,—all vacuum. The crows impede your fall. The diminished appearance of the boats, and other circumstances, are all very good description, but do not impress the mind at once with the horrible idea of immense height. The ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... were not au fait in the art of conversation, and that instead of recurring to their cards, when the discourse began to flag, the minutes between the time of assembling and the placing the card-tables are spent in an irksome suspense. To relieve this vacuum in social intercourse and prevent cards from engrossing the whole of my visitors' minds, I have presented them with objects the most attractive I could imagine—and when that fails there are the cards.' Hanway ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... by high mountain ranges on either side, or the effects of heat and cold, the air being evaporated over a certain area because of great heat, say a volcano, or something like that; though I don't know that they have volcanoes here. That creates a vacuum, and other air rushes in to fill the vacant space. That's all wind is, anyhow, air rushing in to fill a vacuum, or low pressure zone, for you remember that nature ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton |
