"Combustion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "It means 'Cheating-fire.' Sometimes this gas, rising to the top of the water in bubbles, takes fire (by what they call spontaneous combustion, or by mixing with some other gas, or in some other way), and then, as one bubble after another takes fire and goes flickering along, it looks as if some one were walking through the woods ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... with them; he can intend consequences instead of just letting them happen—all synonymous ways of saying the same thing. At the same stroke, the flame has gained in meaning; all that is known about combustion, oxidation, about light and temperature, may become an intrinsic part of its ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... of high plateau is obstacle to efficient fuel combustion, as well as to physical activity by those unaccustomed to it from birth; flooding in the ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... trembled, and his entire attention was immediately swallowed up in the depths of contemplation. The rapid and vigorous conversion of his soul to intellect can only be compared with the instantaneous ignition and combustion, which dazzle the sight, when a bundle of dry reeds, or other light inflammable substance, is thrown upon a fire already rich ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... these years? What had they meant? By the internal combustion which had so suddenly lighted up the dark corners of his being, he saw with almost clairvoyant distinctness how it must have been. He saw her growing older, as he had grown older, but in the dull apathy of monotony. She had none of this great filling Labour wherewith to drug herself into day-dreams ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think—as you or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... of niton 5.6 days. These unquestioned facts, together with the enormous amount of heat evolved by the disintegration of these substances (that from radium being about 250,000 times the heat evolved by the combustion of carbon), have thrown a great deal of doubt upon the older estimates of the age of ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... similar to that by which coals are burnt in the fire, oil in a lamp, wax in a candle, and the earth itself in a volcano. To keep each of those fires alight, oxygen is needed; and the products of combustion, as they are called, are more or less the same in each ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... digests them in the internal protoplasm by the aid of an acid secretion. It breathes oxygen, and excretes carbonic acid and urea, through its whole body surface. Its mode of gaining the energy which it manifests is therefore apparently like our own, by combustion of food material. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... powers an automobile. This cellular burning does not happen violently with flame and light. Living things use enzymes to break complex organic molecules down into simpler ones like sugar (and others) and then enzymatically unite these with oxygen. But as gentle as enzymatic combustion may seem, it still is burning. Microbes can "burn" starches, cellulose, lignin, proteins, and fats, as ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... fireplace of mud and stone, some three feet high, four or five feet long by one and a half wide, with two, three, or more side ventilators and draught-holes. By this ingenious contrivance he manages to increase the combustion of the dried dung, the most trying fuel from which to get a flame. On the top of this stove a suitable place is made to fit the several raksangs (large brass pots and bowls), in which the brick tea, duly pounded first in a stone or wooden mortar, is boiled and stirred with ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... draughts, fires, trap doors, and other means employed in assisting the ventilation of coal mines are adopted. To stop strong draughts, too, in the passages, tall, straw-thatched hurdles are set up. In narrow caves the breath of the workmen, the gases given off by fermentation, and the products of combustion of the lamps would soon so vitiate the atmosphere as to render the caves uninhabitable were they not properly ventilated. Indeed, it frequently occurs that caves in which mushrooms have been grown continuously for some ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... reasonable or worth while, on any account, to make it denser. Nor has any movement been renewed for going. But the plan of the bundle of "things" seemed more feasible, as the things would not require oxygen. The only precaution seemed to be that which was necessary for protecting the parcel against combustion as it shot through the earth's atmosphere. We had not asbestos enough. It was at first proposed to pack them all in one of Professor Horsford's safes. But when I telegraphed this plan to Orcutt, he demurred. Their atmosphere was but shallow, and with a little too much force ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... tinted cellars of Greenwich Village; in the saloons of ships. But the Club would give a false impression of its mind and heart if it allowed any one to suppose that Food is the chief object of its quest. It is true that Man, bitterly examined, is merely a vehicle for units of nourishing combustion; but on those occasions when the Club feels most truly Itself it ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... gradually becoming exhausted. On the other hand, within living memory, new sources of fuel, such as petroleum, have been made available, and old varieties of fuel have been used to better advantage, as witness the internal-combustion engine driven by smoke from sawdust. Moreover, in the ocean tides is a vast energy that one day may take ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... Engineers: Andrew L. Riker, vice-president of Locomobile Company, electrical and mechanical engineer and inventor of many automobile devices. Howard E. Coffin, vice-president of Hudson Motor Car Company and active in the development of internal-combustion engines. ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... unit is equipped with an induced draft fan, proper size vent must be provided to remove the gases of combustion. It is recommended that a 4" to 5" increaser be used for venting the 87CPO and 108CPO and a 4" to 6" increaser be used for the 128CPO. For abnormal runs ...
— Installation and Operation Instructions For Custom Mark III CP Series Oil Fired Unit • Anonymous
... flint, and affording a succession of sparks: but this apparatus always required a person to work it, and was not entirely free from danger. The fire-damp was known to be light carburetted hydrogen gas; but its relations to combustion had not been examined. It is chiefly produced from what are called blowers or fissures in the broken strata, near dykes. Sir Humphry made various experiments on its combustibility and explosive nature; and discovered, that the fire-damp requires a very strong heat for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction—Volume 13 - Index to Vol. 13 • Various
... Calefaction. — N. increase of temperature; heating &c. v.; calefaction[obs3], tepefaction[obs3], torrefaction[obs3]; melting, fusion; liquefaction &c. 335; burning &c. v.; ambustion[obs3], combustion; incension|, accension[obs3]; concremation[obs3], cremation; scorification[obs3]; cautery, cauterization; ustulation[obs3], calcination; cracking, refining; incineration, cineration[obs3]; carbonization; cupellation[Chem]. ignition, inflammation, adustion[obs3], flagration| [obs3]; deflagration, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... main flue, which also forms the dust chamber, is placed underneath the furnace hearths. The Fryer furnace ordinarily burns from 4 to 6 tons of refuse per cell per 24 hours. It will be observed that the outlets for the products of combustion are placed at the back near the refuse feed opening, an arrangement which is imperfect in design, inasmuch as while a charge of refuse is burning upon the furnace bars the charge which is to follow lies on the dead hearth near the outlet flue. Here it ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... revolution is in the information and information management areas- which, in the U.S., are heavily commercially oriented. Future military application may well be analogous to the impact of the internal combustion engine and wireless radio on land, sea, and air forces in the 1920s and 1930s. The size of this technological lead between ourselves and the rest of the world, especially in the base for new information products and services, should widen further in knowledge and in application. The ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... use: arable land 3%; permanent crops NEGL%; meadows and pastures 25%; forest and woodland 52%; other 20%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: cold, thin air of high plateau is obstacle to efficient fuel combustion; overgrazing; soil erosion; desertification Note: landlocked; shares control of Lago Titicaca, world's ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of St. Louis, committed an act of spontaneous combustion. When came the turn of the black satin and the bobbing curls to bend over the rail directly above him, he flung wide his ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... the meaning of this? what a disorder! what a quarrel! what a racket! what a row! what a noise! what a dispute! what a combustion! What is the matter, gentlemen? what is the matter? what is the matter? Come, come, is there no way of making you agree, let me be your pacificator; suffer me to ...
— The Jealousy of le Barbouille - (La Jalousie du Barbouille) • Jean Baptiste Poquelin de Moliere
... homicide case. That is the penetrating, persistent odor you smelled at Fortescue's and also here. It's a very good poison—if you are not particular about being discovered. A pound of ordinary smoking tobacco contains from a half to an ounce of it. It is almost entirely consumed by combustion; otherwise a pipeful would be fatal. Of course they may have thought that investigators would believe that their victims were inveterate smokers. But even the worst tobacco fiend wouldn't show traces of the weed ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... of us now, computers, silicon chips, data processing, cybernetics, and all the other innovations of the dawning high technology age are as mystifying as the workings of the combustion engine must have been when that first Model T rattled down Main Street, U.S.A. But as surely as America's pioneer spirit made us the industrial giant of the 20th century, the same pioneer spirit today is ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and completely consume and decompose the body, in an incredibly short space of time. Even the large quantity of water it contains is decomposed by the extreme heat, and its elements, instead of retarding, aid combustion, as is the case in fierce conflagrations. The gaseous products of combustion are conveyed away by flues; and means being adopted to consume anything like smoke, all that is observed from the outside is occasionally a quivering ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... for at the time of writing that he was the irresistible hero, and remembered himself as always nearly omnipotent in Virginia. Therefore, instead of expressions of gratitude to Newport we read this: "Now in Jamestown they were all in combustion, the strongest preparing once more to run away with the pinnace; which with the hazard of his life, with Sakre, falcon and musket shot, Smith forced now the third time to stay or sink. Some no better than they should be, had plotted to put him to death by the Levitical law, for the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... While ultra conservatism is the rust which eats away the nation's life, radicalism is the oxygen in which it consumes itself too rapidly away. Or perhaps, a better simile would be found in the components of atmospheric air—nitrogen and oxygen; the one a non-supporter of combustion, the other giving it a too dazzling brilliancy at the expense of the material upon which it feeds; yet both, properly combined, so as in a measure to neutralize each other, supporting the steady and enduring flame which gives forth a mild and cheering light ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... diversity. It was not Clarendon alone who saw and dreaded the danger of disturbance. His fears were shared even by those counsellors, such as Clifford and Arlington, who were his jealous opponents; and it was only too evident how many sources of combustion went to feed the flame of discontent. The Presbyterians, however little in sympathy with the aims of the wilder sectaries, were bitterly disappointed at the ecclesiastical settlement, and deemed that their ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... power to communicate with our minds over a distance, and some of us are able to transport things with our minds over a distance. We do not need your rich terrestrial air, because we take oxygen directly from the soil and store it in our bodies for combustion purposes. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... have been married on the spot, so superfine was his broad-cloth, glossy his linen, and perfect the fit of his gloves. While pride and happiness so fermented in his youthful bosom, there would have been danger of spontaneous combustion if dancing had not proved a safety valve, for his strong sense of the proprieties would not permit him to vent his emotions in ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... thrown overboard, and another hole having been cut in the deck on the other side, the other pump was rigged, and double the quantity of water poured into the hold; but it was evident to Philip that the combustion increased. The smoke and steam now burst through the interstices of the hatchways and the holes cut in the deck, with a violence that proved the extent of the fire which raged below, and Philip thought it advisable to remove all the women and ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... treatment of the inflamed eyes. Upon a disk of lead he folded a little piece of cotton cloth in the shape of a tent, and, setting fire to it, allowed it to burn out completely. Then with a wet camel's-hair brush he gathered up the slight yellow residuum of the combustion and painted it over the eyes, holding the lids open with thumb and finger and drawing the brush through and through. An incredulous spectator, noticing the sacred monogram neatly stamped upon the disk of lead, made some sneering remark to me about "Romish superstition," ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... supped, and send M'Barak with an invitation to the headman and his sons. The blessed one makes his way to the headman's hut, while Salam clears up the debris of the meal, and the Maalem, conscious that no more work will be expected of him, devotes his leisure to the combustion of hemp, openly and unashamed. With many compliments the headman arrives, and I stand up to greet and bid him welcome—an effort that makes heavy call upon my scanty store of Arabic. The visitors remove their slippers and sit at ease, while Salam makes a savoury mess of green tea, heavily sweetened ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... formed the basis of the Packard diesel's design.[3] Using elements from Dorner's engines, Woolson and Dorner designed the Packard diesel with the help of Packard engineers and Dorner's assistant, Adolph Widmann. Woolson was responsible for the weight-saving features, and Dorner for the combustion system. ...
— The First Airplane Diesel Engine: Packard Model DR-980 of 1928 • Robert B. Meyer
... brilliant discovery the spectroscope opened windows into the nebulae, and showed very plainly that they were on fire; and fire is a compound; it can not burn without fuel and something to support the combustion; so that settled the alleged simplicity of the nebulae. It is now demonstrated, therefore, that every known substance existing in nature is a compound, and therefore can not be eternal. And the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. No number of finite existences can be eternal. The ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... their sad end. They began poorest of the poor, "two Knights to one Horse," as their Seal bore; and they at last took FIRE on very opposite accounts. "To carouse like a Templar:" that had become a proverb among men; that was the way to produce combustion, "spontaneous" or other! Whereas their fellow Hospitallers of St. John, chancing upon new work (Anti-Turk garrison-duty, so we may call it, successively in Cyprus, Rhodes, Malta, for a series of ages), and doing it well, managed to escape ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... encountering Angels fought On either side, the least of whom could wield These elements, and arm him with the force Of all their regions: How much more of power Army against army numberless to raise Dreadful combustion warring, and disturb, Though not destroy, their happy native seat; Had not the Eternal King Omnipotent, From his strong hold of Heaven, high over-ruled And limited their might; though numbered such As each divided legion might have seemed A numerous host; in strength each armed ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... were known to the First Born I could not have doubted, in view of the attack of the fleet upon us the day before, nor could the stopping of the pumps of Omean at the psychological moment have been due to chance, nor the starting of a chemical combustion within the one corridor through which we were advancing upon the Temple of Issus been due ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... preparation. Still others use tinder made by burning linen rags, as our forefathers used to do. This will not flame, but merely smoulders until the breath blows it into a glow. The tinder is made by charring linen rags, that is, burning them to a crisp, but stopping the combustion before they are ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... which separates the true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but exalted nature, from the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing with a morbid state of the body, that it is no wonder they are often confounded. And thus many good women are suffered to perish by that form of spontaneous combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and night with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek whitens, and, as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes. The more they over-work themselves, the more exacting becomes the sense of duty,—as the draught ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... there that does not perceive it? And yet by reason of these fooleries they not only set slight by others, but each different order, men otherwise professing apostolical charity, despise one another, and for the different wearing of a habit, or that 'tis of darker color, they put all things in combustion. And among these there are some so rigidly religious that their upper garment is haircloth, their inner of the finest linen; and, on the contrary, others wear linen without and hair next their skins. Others, ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... when a car-axle heats when run without proper oiling to reduce friction; or it may be condensation, as when tinder is ignited by condensing the air about it; or chemical reactions, when molecular structure is changed as in combustion, or an electrical current, which implies a dynamo and steam-engine or water-power. If light appears, its antecedent has been impact or friction, condensation or chemical action, and if electricity appears the same sort of antecedents are present. Whether the one or the other ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... liquefaction of oxygen; the existence of radium, of helium, of polonium, of argon; the different powers of Roentgen and Cathode and Bequerel rays. And as we may finally prove that there are different kinds and qualities of light, so we may find that combustion may have its own powers of differentiation; that there are qualities in some flames non-existent in others. It may be that some of the essential conditions of substance are continuous, even in the destruction of their bases. Last night I was thinking of ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... with great decision, the commander gives the general orders to submerge. The internal combustion engines, the oil motors which, during surface navigation are used to accelerate the speed of the boat, are immediately disconnected, as they consume too much air underseas, and electric motors are now quickly attached and set in motion. They are supplied by a large storage battery, ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... mechanics, did it. It had long been known that, if a horseshoe nail were tied to a cord and the point heated to whiteness, the iron nail could be made to burn in common air by being whirled in a circle. The ring of sparks proved a combustion. Mr. Bessemer was the first however to show that if air was forced, not upon the surface, but into and amongst the particles of molten iron, the same sort of ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... done by gas is so generally acknowledged by the heads of our national libraries, that it is strictly excluded from their domains, although the danger from explosion and fire, even if the results of combustion were innocuous, would be sufficient cause ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... depends upon the maximum charge burned in it, since the combustion must be complete when the projectile reaches the open air. It results from this that although guns of great length are capable of throwing projectiles with small charges, it is possible to use shorter pieces ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... no more of this, Sir Knight; you take your aim amiss: For you will find it a hard chapter 585 To catch me with poetic rapture, In which your mastery of art Doth shew itself, and not your heart: Nor will you raise in mine combustion By dint of high heroic fustian. 590 She that with poetry is won, Is but a desk to write upon; And what men say of her, they mean No more than on the thing they lean. Some with Arabian spices strive 595 T' embalm her cruelly alive; Or ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... was 'the destruction of the atmospheric air,' as Dr. Lardner termed it. Elaborate calculations were made by that gentleman to prove that the provision of ventilating shafts would be altogether insufficient to prevent the dangers arising from the combustion of coke, producing carbonic acid gas, which in large quantities was fatal to life. He showed, for instance, that in the proposed Box tunnel, on the Great Western Railway, the passage of 100 tons would deposit about 3090 lbs. of noxious gases, ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... rule of the Pashas once more asserted itself over the Sudan, a general combustion became inevitable: the first spark would set off the blaze. Just then it happened that Mahommed Ahmed, the son of an insignificant priest in Dongola, having quarrelled with the Sheikh from whom he was receiving religious instruction, set ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... and depending upon the walls of the room for support. On account of the careful and economical use of fuel by these people the light and inflammable material of which the chimney is constructed does not involve the danger of combustion that would be expected. The perfect feasibility of such use of wood is well illustrated in some of the old log-cabin chimneys in the Southern States, where, however, the arrangement of the pieces is horizontal, not vertical. These latter curiously ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... was a rite in its way, yet required only the saucer and two matches. The letter, when well torn, flamed nicely, only a few scraps holding out against immediate combustion. There was one little fragment on top, observable from the beginning; ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of a chemical compound into its elements by a sufficiently high degree of heat. All compounds are susceptible of dissociation, so that it follows that combustion ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... Avenue Terminal to East New York Station, a distance of 5-1/4 miles. One of the requirements of this improvement was that the motive power should be changed to some form of power not involving combustion. This led to the adoption of electricity, and, in order to meet operating necessities, involved the electrification of connecting lines beyond the improvement proper, so that local service could be handled to the end ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles W. Raymond
... solar energy while in a state of extreme attenuation; and that the vapours so dissociated are drawn towards the sun in consequence of solar rotation, are flashed into flame in the photosphere, and rendered back into space in the condition of products of combustion. With respect to the influence of the sun's light on geology, Dr. Siemens says: "The effect of this continuous outpour of solar materials could not be without very important influences as regards ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... will absorb more heat than any other substance, hence will take from the boiler practically all the heat produced in the combustion of fuel. As the temperature of the water is automatically controlled, the atmosphere of the rooms may be kept at the desired degree, the presence of radiators in each room, all of the same temperature, giving an even heat over ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... watching? He ran to the port and looked out at the deserted desert. He was alone in the great rocket, and the fuel pumps were going. He could almost picture the stream of boron hydride blending with the oxidizer and flowing in an ever-increasing stream toward the combustion chamber. He heard the scrape as the ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... the substance reported by Capt. Callam to have fallen upon his vessel, near Java, "offered complete resemblance to the residue resulting from combustion of a steel wire in a flask of oxygen." (Zurcher, Meteors, p. 239.) Nature, Nov. 21, 1878, publishes a notice that, according to the Yuma Sentinel, a meteorite that "resembles steel" had been found in the Mohave Desert. In Nature, Feb. 15, 1894, we read that one of the meteorites ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... minutes, but the fire did blaze up royally in the end. You see, it wasn't a slow-combustion-grate, and it burned too much fuel, and flared away the coal, and did all sorts of comfortable, uneconomical things. So did Jane, who had put in a ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... my dear," he went on, "is one of the most convincing proofs of the theory of the Absolute. All life involves combustion. According to the greater or the lesser activity of the fire on its hearth is life more or less enduring. In like manner, the destruction of mineral bodies is indefinitely retarded, because in their case combustion is nominal, latent, or imperceptible. ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... no wood, to soil your apartments. By night, as well as by day, you can have a fire in your room, without a servant being obliged to look after it. Nothing in the thermolampes, not even the smallest portion of inflammable air, can escape combustion; while in our chimnies, torrents evaporate, and even carry off with them the greater part of the ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... the grates. The first of these items is the most important of the three. In most cases the greatest preventable waste of coal in a boiler plant is directly due to excess air. Excess air simply means the amount of air which gets into the furnace and boiler which is not needed for completing the combustion of the coal. Very often twice as much air is admitted to the boiler setting as is required. This extra or excess air is heated and carries heat out through the chimney instead of heating the water in the boiler to make steam. There are two ways in which this excess air gets into the furnace ...
— Engineering Bulletin No 1: Boiler and Furnace Testing • Rufus T. Strohm
... The heat of our bodies comes from the food we eat; the heat for cooking and for warming our houses comes from coal. The production of heat through the burning of coal, or oil, or gas, or wood, is called combustion. Combustion cannot occur without the presence of a substance called oxygen, which exists rather abundantly in the air; that is, one fifth of our atmosphere consists of this substance which we call oxygen. We ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... girl for that dazzling reflection; for owning that charming truth, and submitting to the conscious triumph? Give her her part of vanity, of youth, of desire to rule and be admired. Meanwhile Mr. Clive's drawings have been crackling in the fireplace at her feet, and the last spark of that combustion ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to be considered, that this is the only means we know of whereby free oxygen is given to supply the quantity constantly consumed in respiration, combustion, and other vast and endless oxygen-using processes. It follows, therefore, that animals are dependent upon plants for their pure oxygen, as well as for their food. But the vegetable kingdom might exist independently of the animal; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... and the human mind. We cannot create force anywhere; we merely appropriate existing force. The heat of our fires has been derived from the solar fire. We cannot lift a weight in the hand without the combustion of a certain amount of food; we cannot think a thought without a similar demand; and the force that goes in one way is unavailable in any other way. While we are expending ourselves largely in any single function—in muscular exercise, in digestion, in thought and feeling, the remaining ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... the end cut off—which might have led to a discovery of the poison. The plan also shows a certain knowledge of chemistry; the poison was not intended merely to be dissolved in the moisture of the mouth. The idea evidently was that the steam generated by the combustion of the leaf at the distal end, would condense in the cooler part of the cigar and dissolve the poison, and the solution would then be drawn into the mouth. Then the nature of the poison and certain similarities of procedure seem ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... a place I came to when I had a problem to thrash out. That morning I had been trying to work out an equation to give the coefficient of discharge for the matter in combustion. You may call it gas, if you wish, for we treated it like gas at the center for convenience—as it came from the ...
— Houlihan's Equation • Walt Sheldon
... seeds, not much unlike in appearance, and two of larger size. Hand them to the learned Pundit, Chemistry, who tells us how combustion goes on in the lungs, and plants are fed with phosphorus and carbon, and the alkalies and silex. Let her decompose them, analyze them, torture them in all the ways she knows. The net result of each is a little sugar, a little fibrin, a little water—carbon, potassium, sodium, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the King to visit England, where he arrived on the eighteenth of May, 1826. He there proceeded to construct a working engine on the principle above mentioned, but soon discovered that his flame-engine, when worked by the combustion of mineral coals, was a different thing from the experimental model he had tried in the highlands of Sweden, with fuel composed of the splinters of fine pine wood. Not only did he fail to produce an extended and vivid flame, but the intense heat so seriously ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... you send up a column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night—the most conspicuous of signals—every time you shoot. So the next step was the invention of a smokeless powder. In this the oxygen necessary for the combustion is already in such close combination with its fuel, the carbon and hydrogen, that no black particles of carbon can get away unburnt. In the old-fashioned gunpowder the oxygen necessary for the combustion of the carbon and sulfur was in a separate package, in the ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... the tens of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, and it may amount to hundreds of thousands; it has, indeed, been reckoned as high as a million degrees. This vast discharge is not due to any kind of burning action—i.e., to the combustion of substances, as in a fire. It must be produced by the gradual falling in of the materials, due to the gravitation of the mass toward its centre, each particle converting its energy of position into heat, as does the meteorite when it ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... culinary purposes are self-evident, not alone as a protection against explosions, but for the health of the occupants of the house, remembering that a larger supply of oxygen is said to be necessary for the perfect combustion of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... flood, cataclysm steep, precipitous wonder, astonishment speed, velocity sparkle, scintillate stir, commotion stir, agitate strike, collide learned, erudite small, diminutive scare, terrify burn, combustion fire, conflagration fall, collapse uproot, eradicate skin, excoriate hate, abominate work, labor bright, brilliant hungry, famished eat, devour twisted, contorted thin, emaciated ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... present time. The origin of fire as represented in any of the myths of the superstitious beings of early ages is as suitable as any other, inasmuch as definite knowledge is unavailable. Active volcanoes, spontaneous combustion, friction, accidental focusing of the sun's image, and other means may have introduced primitive beings to fire. A study of savage tribes of the present age combined with a survey of past history of mythology, of material relics, and of ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... friction soon brings about combustion for the larger reed is heated to such a point that the tow ignites. Leaves and dry grasses are thrown on and the Elder watches ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... he should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids—more than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents, for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of truth, was frequently ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... insurance regulations. Also, if steam or hot water pipes go through flooring or are close to the wooden trim, there should be at least three-quarters of an inch clearance. Otherwise, the heat dries and carbonizes the wood. Then slight additional heat may produce spontaneous combustion. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, that spontaneous combustion is a rare and exceptional phenomenon; that if a cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger. And I believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is ready to be done, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... and one can be comfortable there with the rest of the family, without fear and without reproach. These lesser country-houses of genteel aspirations are much given to patent subterfuges of one kind and another to get heat without combustion. The chilly parlor and the slippery hair-cloth seat take the life out of the warmest welcome. If one would make these places wholesome, happy, and cheerful, the first precept would be,—The dearest fuel, plenty of it, and let half the heat go up the chimney. If you can't afford this, don't ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of heat was used in raising steam, at a pressure of, say, 120 lb. to the square inch, as the hydrogen was capable of developing when properly burned. There were, however, conditions under which alone that combustion could take place—one being that the heat of the chamber must be 3,700 deg., and that carbon ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... of the internal combustion engine to fixed rails may not be new, but it was unexpected by Lettow. And the German engineers left it a little too late; they panicked at the last and destroyed wholesale, but without intelligence. True, they put an explosive charge into the cylinders ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... a gentleman—a generous soul,' says he, quite overcome; and, grasping my hand, sobs out, 'I'll promise'. 'Done, along with you, drysalter,' says I, 'you're a trump;' and we shook hands till he got so red in the face, I began to be afraid of spontaneous combustion. 'There's nothing like striking when the iron's hot,' thinks I; so I made him sit down there and then, and we wrote a letter together to old Coleman, telling him the resolution we had come to, and saying, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... the level meadow, which he planted year after year with potatoes. Scattered over this small clearing, here and there might be seen the but-end of some half-burnt hemlock tree, which had escaped the general combustion of the log heaps, and now formed a striking contrast to the white limestone rocks which showed their rounded surfaces ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Fire-place, and consequently no current of air from the room setting up the Chimney, which is the case in Germany, and all the northern parts of Europe, where rooms are heated by stoves, whose Fire-places opening without are not supplied with the air necessary for the combustion of the fuel from the room;—and although in most of the rooms abroad, which are so heated, the windows and doors are double, and both are closed in the most exact manner possible, by slips of paper pasted over the crevices, or ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... mode—sausages, rolls and buns—whereupon both of them laugh in a significant, silvery way, and you feel the back of your neck setting your collar on fire. You can smell the bone button back there scorching and you're glad it's not celluloid, celluloid being more inflammable and subject to combustion ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... sufficient to make the small particle of iron red-hot. This spark falling upon the tinder set fire to it. The next stage of the operation was to blow upon the tinder, in order, as I said, to nourish the flame; in other words, to promote combustion by an increased supply of oxygen, just as we use an ordinary pair of bellows for the purpose of fanning a fire which has nearly gone out into ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... beneath that awful heat, to glow and sparkle in a blaze! At the same time I kept stirring up the channels, and sent men upon the roof to stop the conflagration, which had gathered force from the increased combustion in the furnace; also I caused boards, carpets, and other hangings to be set up against the garden, in order to protect us from the violence ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... the failure to carry out the treaty. Such a resolve on the part of the two kings would restore all things to tranquillity and bring the Spaniard and his adherents 'in terminos modestiae. But so long as France is keeping a suspicious eye upon England, and England upon France, everything will run to combustion, detrimental to their Majesties and to us, and ruinous to all ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of oxide of lead (litharge) and 10 grammes of oxychloride of lead are employed to afford oxygen for the combustion of 1 gramme of fuel in a crucible. From the weight of the button of lead, and taking 8,080 units as the equivalent of carbon, the total heat-units of the fuel is calculated. This experiment is very imperfect and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... mechanism of balancing weights and the breath of a mysterious spirit hidden within it. There may yet arise one credulous enough to state that the mysterious spirit was precursor of the internal combustion engine, but, however that may be, the pigeon of Archytas almost certainly existed, and perhaps it actually glided or flew for short distances—or else Aulus Gellius was an utter liar, like Cassiodorus and his fellows. In far later times a certain John Muller, better known as Regiomontanus, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... the world a new tool—the internal-combustion engine—destined to work almost as great a change in the human life as the steam engine in its time, making possible a tool for the waterway that the waterway had never had before, making it possible to use for the highway what the highway had never had before, ...
— Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highway Transport Committee Council of National Defence • US Government
... the window he always dropped from when the police came. After that we saw the house where Mr. Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock's lawyer, used to live, and also the house where old Krook was burned up by spontaneous combustion. Then we went to Bolt Court, where old Samuel Johnson lived, walked about, and talked, and then to another court where he lived when he wrote the dictionary, and after that to the "Cheshire Cheese" Inn, where he and Oliver Goldsmith often used to ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... sufficient air had been breathed into the jar. Clearly, then, he argued, air once breathed is not suitable for respiration, unless much diluted with pure air. He argued from this that if a candle using oxygen for combustion could not burn in expired air, therefore an individual using oxygen for the renewal of the blood could not be properly supplied in a room partially saturated with the expired ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... if the house had been set on fire," Archie continued confidentially. "I'm going to have detectives look into it. It must have been either that or spontaneous combustion in the drawing-room." ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... amused at her ingenuousness. "But I don't think it's what the sentimental schoolgirl feels for the college football player. As for love at first sight, I consider that simply absurd. To my way of thinking, love isn't a spontaneous combustion. It's a slow, steady growth and the soil in which ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... answered. "I'm not hankering for a dump-cart. You have an idea that all the wisdom in the world is locked up in the concrete; unless a thing has wheels, pistons, some sort of combustion, or a chemical action you are not interested. What gives you the control over your machinery? Brains! But what makes ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... sufficiently uncommon to attract unusual attention. A similar phenomenon occurred in the year 1604, when the new star—in this case appearing in the constellation of Serpentarius—was explained by Kepler as probably proceeding from a vast combustion. This explanation—in which Kepler is said to have followed. Tycho—is fully in accord with the most recent theories on the subject, as we shall see in due course. It is surprising to hear Tycho credited with so startling ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of these gases and test for properties, as colour, odour, combustion, action with lime-water; the place occupied by these gases in ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education |
