"Archimedes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a later age imitated and surpassed Archytas. But even Archimedes was not free from the prevailing notion that geometry was degraded by being employed to produce anything useful. It was with difficulty that he was induced to stoop from speculation to practice. He was half ashamed of those inventions which were the wonder ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... geometry from a book written for the schools of Alexandria two thousand years ago. Modern astronomy is the natural continuation and development of the work of Hipparchus and of Ptolemy; modern physics of that of Democritus and of Archimedes; it was long before modern biological science outgrew the knowledge bequeathed to us by Aristotle, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... whole social fabric. There's "virtue" for you if you like!... Of course the accent must be attended to. The right accent. That's very important. The capacious lung, the thundering or the tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... Imperial camp. Every night these Skipetars who could cross the moat betook themselves to Kursheed's quarters. One single man yet baffled all the efforts of the besiegers. The chief engineer, Caretto, like another Archimedes, still carried terror into the midst of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... flower, how much more in the gloomy forest! The light we think so pure teems with children of the night. The heavens themselves—O blasphemy!—are full of hell. That divine morning star, whose glorious beams not seldom lightened a Socrates, an Archimedes, a Plato, what is it now become? A devil, the archfiend Lucifer. In the eventime again it is the devil Venus who draws me into temptation by her ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... when she took the girls below and I lay on the turret floor. I wondered who was in command of this allied force, and did not learn until afterward that it was Grantline. The Cometara had fallen upon the Moon Apennines, not very far from where my old Planetara still lay, near the base of Archimedes. But Grantline and a few of his companions, with their powered suits, had struggled free from the gravity pull of the wreckage; and a few hours later, a ship out from ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... This worship is definable as perfect emotional solitude, close study, absolute chastity and celibacy, and at last the merging of the personal into the impersonal. This austere life is the secret of all greatness. You know how Archimedes when threatened with death by the vandalistic invaders of his country raised his head and said 'Please do not disturb my circles' and nothing more. This man was practising Yoga unconsciously. You must be able to lose all consciousness ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... sounds of footsteps that at the moment of his experiment are tormenting the surface of the globe; and amongst them all, at a distance of six thousand miles, playing in the streets of Bagdad, he distinguishes the peculiar steps of the child Aladdin. Through this mighty labyrinth of sounds, which Archimedes, aided by his arenarius, could not sum or disentangle, one solitary infant's feet are distinctly recognized on the banks of the Tigris, distant by four hundred and forty days' march of an army or a caravan. These feet, these steps, the sorcerer knows, and challenges in his heart as the feet, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... My infancy was one sickening round of glory. Did I build a house of bricks four courses high? Archimedes wasn't in it with me. Did I sing a nursery rhyme to a tune all one note? Apollo was a dabbler in music beside me. Did one of my first teeth drop out without my knowing it? Casabianca on the burning deck couldn't touch me for fortitude. Did I once and again chance to tell the truth? ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... mechanical powers were brought to the light. For this shall be as a soul to animate those, all and each—lever, screw, pulley, wheel, and axle—what you will. No engine of mightiest force ever for defence or assault invented, let it be by Archimedes himself, but could by my fire-engine be rendered tenfold more mighty for safety or for destruction, although as yet I have applied it only to the blissful operation of lifting water, thus removing the curse of it where it is a curse, and carrying ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... that long siege which ruined Athens and left Syracuse uncaptured. The second was the siege by Timoleon, who took the city almost without a blow. The third was the siege by the Romans, in which the genius of one man, the celebrated mathematician and engineer Archimedes, long set at naught all the efforts of the besieging ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... monopolising heaven, And let this little hanging ball alone; For, give ye but a foot of conscience there, And you, like Archimedes, toss the globe. ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... public curiosity, Tiffles, in the third place, took an office on Broadway, and put up a large sign inscribed in gilt capitals, "The Cosmopolitan Window Fastener Manufacturing Co." From this pou sto, Archimedes-like, he commenced to move the world of house owners. This he accomplished by the following manoeuvre: He caused double-leaded advertisements, under the head of special notices, to be inserted in all the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... and unvarying as the banks of a canal, except that canals commonly are straight, while this watercourse twisted like Archimedes's screw. The only breaks in the endless panorama of cut-banks, mud-flats, willows, and grass were the occasional little inlets, ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... the meditations of the cloister: nor is it in the least a reproach to those valuable institutions to mention truths like these. Fortunate circumstances must concur, even to the greatest, to render them eminently successful. It is not permitted to all to be born, like Archimedes, when a science was to be created; nor, like Newton, to find the system of the world "without form and void;" and, by disclosing gravitation, to shed throughout that system the same irresistible radiance as that with which the Almighty Creator had illumined its material substance. ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... Egyptian astronomy The Greek astronomers Thales Anaximenes Aristarchus Archimedes Hipparchus Ptolemy The Roman astronomers Geometry Euclid Empirical science Hippocrates Galen Physical science Geography Pliny ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... bred up a scholar, and not only versed in the law of Mahomet, but acquainted with all kinds of polite learning. For this reason he is not at all surprised when Dorax calls him a Phaeton in one place, and in another tells him he is like Archimedes. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... clear and precise thought which affects even literary expression, a flow of mathematical and physical discoveries so rapid that ten years added more to the sum of knowledge than all that had been added since the days of Archimedes, the introduction of organised co-operation to increase knowledge by the institution of the Royal Society at London, the Academy of Sciences at Paris, Observatories—realising Bacon's Atlantic dream—characterise the opening of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... apparently, backed by the use of artificial mirrors. Nizami tells that Alexander invented the steel mirror, by which he means, of course, that improved reflectors were used for telescopy in the days of Archimedes, but not early enough to have assisted Jamshid, who belongs to the fabulous and unchronicled age. In the romance of Beyjan and Manija, in the "Shah Nama," this mirror is used by the great Khosru for the purpose of discovering the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... calculus. To come into the possession of a method which would solve almost automatically problems which had baffled the keenest minds of antiquity; to be able to derive in a few moments results which an Archimedes had toiled long and patiently to reach or a Galileo had determined experimentally; such was the happy experience of mathematicians for a century and a half after Descartes, and it is not to be wondered at that along with this enthusiastic pursuit ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... larger order found it necessary to address themselves direct to the people; and the newspaper, the review, the magazine, the pamphlet, furnished them with ready vehicles of conveyance. Archimedes, during the siege of Syracuse, had to quit the sober quiet of his study, and to mix with the armed defenders of his native city, amid the wild confusion of sallies and assaults, the rocking of beleaguered ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... misquotation of "urbis et orbis" instead of "urbi et orbos," or the other way round. I forget which. Perhaps there was some further point in it that I didn't see, but, anyway, it wasn't funny. Neither is it funny if a person, instead of saying Archimedes, says Archimeeds; why shouldn't it have been Archimeeds? The English scale of values in these things is all wrong. Very few Englishmen can pronounce Chicago properly and they think nothing of that. But if a person mispronounces ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... remarkable for the rapid advance of scientific knowledge. Most of the mathematical works of the Greeks date from this epoch. Euclid wrote a treatise on geometry which still holds its place in the schools. Archimedes of Syracuse, who had once studied at Alexandria, made many discoveries in engineering. A water screw of his device is still in use. He has the credit for finding out the laws of the lever. "Give me a fulcrum on which to rest," he ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... inscriptions are no longer legible, and great part of its figures are gone. Selvatico states them as follows: Solomon, the wise; Priscian, the grammarian; Aristotle, the logician; Tully, the orator; Pythagoras, the philosopher; Archimedes, the mechanic; Orpheus, the musician; Ptolemy, the astronomer. The fragments actually remaining ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... knowledge would venture to say at what date between 3000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the momentum of Europe was greatest; but such progress as the world made consisted in economies of energy rather than in its development; it was proved in mathematics, measured by names like Archimedes, Aristarchus, Ptolemy, and Euclid; or in Civil Law, measured by a number of names which Adams had begun life by failing to learn; or in coinage, which was most beautiful near its beginning, and most barbarous at its close; or it was shown in roads, or the size of ships, or harbors; ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... world, to fix himself long in a contemplation where the present world has no part: He has no sure hold, no firm footing; he can never expect to remove the earth he rests upon, while he has no support beside for his feet, but wants, like Archimedes, some other place whereon to stand. To talk of bearing pain and grief, without any sort of present or future hope, cannot be purely greatness of spirit; there must be a mixture in it of affectation, and an alloy of pride, or perhaps ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... the form of recondite mythological erudition, grammar and exegesis, and laborious imitation of the ancients. In science only was there a healthy spirit of research. Mathematics were splendidly represented by Euclid and Archimedes, Geography by Eratosthenes, Astronomy by Hipparchus; for these men, though not all residents in Alexandria, all gained their principles and method from study within her walls. To Aristarchus (fl. 180 B.C.) and his contemporaries we owe the final revision of the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Archimedes, erst of Sicily, And of D'Israeli ... forti nil difficile, Is likewise mine. Pygmalion was a fool Who ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... very irritable and always thinking that the other shades were laughing at him or trying to take advantage of him. There were two, however, whom he hated with a fury that tormented him far more seriously than anything else ever did. The first of these was Archimedes who had instituted a series of experiments in regard to various questions connected with mechanics and had conceived a scheme by which he hoped to utilise the motive power of the stone for the purpose of lighting Hades with ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... and of which medieval civilisation was deprived. It meant the preference for Grecian models, the supremacy of the schools of Athens, the inclusion of science in literature, the elevation of Hippocrates and Archimedes to a level with Terence and Quintilian, the reproduction of that Hellenic culture which fought the giant fight of the fourth and fifth century with the Councils and Fathers of the Church. That is why the Latin restoration, which was the direct result of Petrarca's example, was ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... plank from end to end on the sole conditions of labor and time; but the discovery of truth preserves always a sudden and unforeseen character. Archimedes leaps from a bath and rushes through the streets of Syracuse, crying out, "I have found it!" Why? The flash of genius has visited him unexpectedly. Pythagoras discovers a geometrical theorem; and he offers, it is said, a sacrifice to the gods, in testimony of his gratitude. He thought therefore, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... way in such matters as these. I can depend upon myself for having no go-ahead theories that I would rashly bring into practice. My only wish is to have the opportunity of cultivating some intercourse with the hands beyond the mere "cash nexus." But it might be the point Archimedes sought from which to move the earth, to judge from the importance attached to it by some of our manufacturers, who shake their heads and look grave as soon as I name the one or two experiments that ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... rests upon you to improve each minute of your lives in fitting yourselves for a wiser, better and worthier discharge of the obligations of American citizenship. You may be constrained to ask, "What shall we do?" or, with Archimedes of old, exclaim "Give me where to stand and I will move the world." Let me advise you to stand where you are. That's the place. Act well your part, and you shall have accomplished all that is expected of you. My friends, a country like ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... Syracuse. The town had submitted to him, but then had revolted again through the treachery of some men by the use of a false message. He would have subdued it very speedily,—for he assaulted the wall by both land and sea at once,—had not Archimedes with his inventions enabled the citizens to resist an extremely long time. By his devices he suspended stones and heavy-armed soldiers in the air whom he would let down suddenly and soon draw up again. Even ships that carried towers he would dash one upon another; he would pull them up and ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... Suddenly a beautiful delf blue-and-white flower-pot, which had been set on the window-sill of an upper story, fell to the ground with a crash, and the fragments spluttered up round my father's legs. Sublime in his studies as Archimedes in the siege, he continued to read,—Impavidum ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... knowledge" which is supposed to be so dangerous? What is it "little" in relation to? If in relation to what there is to know, then all human knowledge is little. If in relation to what actually is known by somebody, then we must condemn as "dangerous" the knowledge which Archimedes possessed of mechanics, or Copernicus of astronomy; for a shilling primer and a few weeks' study will enable any student to outstrip in mere information some of the greatest teachers of the past. No doubt, that little knowledge which thinks ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... variation is the fulcrum for which Archimedes clamoured in order to lift the world with his system of levers. The Megachiles offer us one and a very great one: the indefinite variation of their materials. What will the theorists' levers lift with this fulcrum? Why, nothing at all! Whether they cut the delicate petals of the geranium ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... flashing. That's how that wise man what's his name with the burning glass. Then the heather goes on fire. It can't be tourists' matches. What? Perhaps the sticks dry rub together in the wind and light. Or broken bottles in the furze act as a burning glass in the sun. Archimedes. I have it! ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Barlow, "of how much use a superiority of knowledge is frequently capable of making individuals. But a still more famous instance is that of Archimedes, one of the most celebrated mathematicians of his time. He, when the city of Syracuse was besieged by the Romans, defended it for a long time by the surprising machines he invented, in such a manner that they began to despair of taking it." "Do ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... very anxious to know how this small machine could accomplish more than our united strength. I explained to him, as well as I could, the power of the lever of Archimedes, with which he had declared he could move the world, if he had but a point to rest it on; and I promised my son to take the machine to pieces when we were on shore, and explain the mode of operation. I then told them that God, to compensate ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... thought highly of, and made great use of, by his successors. He worked both as an observer and an inquirer, mapping out the heavens by his observations, and collecting the accounts of the eclipses which had been before observed in Egypt. He was the friend of Archimedes of Syracuse, to whom he sent his problems, and from whom he received that great ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... vestiges of a temple of Diana, converted into a monastery, and the nearly perfect remains of that amphitheatre which Cicero pronounced the largest in the world, are not to be seen in every morning's walk! Of Archimedes, without being able to fix his proper tomb among so many, the name here is enough. One ought to be able to conjure with it; the genius that concentrated the sun of Syracuse on the hostile anchorage, was of no common measure. We spent our day on a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... painter, the astronomer, the mathematician, the legislator, the soldier. Raffaelle had in him some of 'the stuff that dreams are made of.' Never tell me that that same stuff, differently treated, would equally well have furnished forth an Archimedes or ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... What Archimedes said of the mechanical powers, may be applied to Reason and Liberty. "Had we," said he, "a place to stand upon, we might raise ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... onwards, Jews were industrious translators of all the important masterpieces of scientific and philosophical literature. Their zeal included the works of the Greek astronomers and mathematicians, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, and many others. Alfonso X commissioned several Jews to co-operate with the royal secretaries in making new renderings of older Arabic works on astronomy. Long before this, in 959, the monk Nicholas joined the Jew Chasdai in translating Dioscorides. Most of the Jewish translators ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... proposition in physics, known as the "Principle of Archimedes," runs to the following effect:—"Every body plunged into a liquid loses a portion of its weight equal to the weight of the fluid which it displaces." Everybody has verified this principle, and knows ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... thinking by himself, and even seriously racking his brain to find a direction for this single force four times multiplied, with which he did not doubt, as with the lever for which Archimedes sought, they should succeed in moving the world, when someone tapped gently at his door. D'Artagnan awakened Planchet and ordered him to ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... advancement and facilitating of classical learning, are above one hundred volumes of authors, in folio, all in Greek, with mostly their versions. All the Roman classics without exception. All the Greek mathematicians, viz. Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy, both his Geography and Almagest, which I had in Greek (with Theon's Commentary, in folio, above 700 pages) from my learned friend Fabricius, who published fourteen volumes of his Bibliotheque Grecque, in quarto, in which, after he had finished his account of Ptolemy, on ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... the miner, with an expression of countenance which Archimedes might have worn when ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... wherever it was possible, tunnels were constructed, and the water drained off to a lower level.[1036] In the deeper mines this, of course, could not be done, and such workings had to be abandoned, until the invention of the Archimedes' screw (ab. B.C. 220-190), when the water was pumped up to the surface, and so got rid of.[1037] But before this date Phoenicia had ceased to exist as an independent country, and the mines that had once been hers were either no longer worked, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... and a fable may illustrate like a fact. But the philosophers are wrong, as they generally are, even in the commonest things; because they seldom look beyond their own tenets, unless through captiousness, and because they argue more than they meditate, and display more than they examine. Archimedes and Euclid are, in my opinion, after our Epicurus, the worthiest of the name, having kept apart to the demonstrable, the practical, and the useful. Many of the rest are good writers and good disputants; but unfaithful suitors of simple science, boasters ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... false, either seraphic or demoniac, Inspiration or Insanity. But in the former case too, as in common Madness, it is Fantasy that superadds itself to sight; on the so petty domain of the Actual plants its Archimedes-lever, whereby to move at will the infinite Spiritual. Fantasy I might call the true Heaven-gate and Hell-gate of man: his sensuous life is but the small temporary stage (Zeitbuehne), whereon thick-streaming ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the most illustrious American of his age. Looking over the expanse of the ages, we think more earnestly and lovingly of Cadmus, who gave us the alphabet; of Archimedes, who invented the lever; of Euclid, with his demonstrations in geometry; of Faust, who taught us how to print; of Watt, with his development of steam, than of the resonant orators who inflamed the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... to cast stones and darts, assaulted the walls, relying on the abundance and magnificence of his preparations, and on his own previous glory; all which, however, were, it would seem, but trifles for Archimedes and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... erected on the dike,—as you see them in every direction,—many of which work water-wheels, pumps being but seldom used. The apparatus for removing the water is of several kinds, including a scoop-wheel, the screw of Archimedes, and the inclined scoop-wheel. The water is not lifted to any ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... which had been there above two hundred and fourteen years, for it was so great that they could not by any device get it so much as above the ground, although they used all the means that are found in Vitruvius de Architectura, Albertus de Re Aedificatoria, Euclid, Theon, Archimedes, and Hero de Ingeniis; for all that was to no purpose. Wherefore, condescending heartily to the humble request of the citizens and inhabitants of the said town, he determined to remove it to the tower that was erected for it. With that he came to the place where it was, and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... with metaphysics as we should with a problem from Euclid, and expected by rigorous reasoning to discover the truth. He, like Archimedes, had wished for a standing place from which to use the lever, that should overturn the world; but, having a sure standing place in the indubitable fact of his own existence, he did not possess sufficient courage to ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... only an expert should deal—even in the few sentences required for our purpose—with such matters as the calculation of the capacity and proportional relations of cylinders, or with the mechanics and hydrostatics of Archimedes. That philosopher so far understood the laws of applied force that he had boasted: "Give me a place to stand on and I will move the world." What he and others had learned concerning fluid pressure, or concerning pulleys, levers, and other mechanical devices, had not been lost by ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... before Greece became a part of the Roman Empire. Its application dates back to the Cloaca Maxima, and may have been of Etrurian invention. It was not known to Egyptians, or Persians, or Indians, or Greeks. Some maintain that Archimedes of Sicily was the inventor, but to whomsoever the glory of the invention is due, it is certain that the Romans were the first to make a practical application of its wonderful qualities. It enabled them to rear vast edifices ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... your return. Approach Mid-Northern hemisphere, region of Archimedes, forty thousand toises[C] off nearest ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... in science, of respect for scientific pursuits, and of freedom in scientific research, was especially received by the school of Alexandria, and above all by Archimedes, who began, just before the Christian era, to open new paths through the great field of the inductive sciences ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... contemporaries. His scheme was enthusiastically applauded, and furiously attacked. The friends of improvement extolled him as the greatest of all the benefactors of his city. What, they asked, were the boasted inventions of Archimedes, when compared with the achievement of the man who had turned the nocturnal shades into noon-day? In spite of these eloquent eulogies the cause of darkness was not left undefended. There were fools in that age who opposed the introduction of what was called ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... there used to be some Star-of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner. The grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and glossier. Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my monumental memorial-flower. Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... not, however, be superfluous to mention the measurement of some of the largest ships constructed by the ancients. A very large ship was built for Hiero, king of Syracuse, under the direction of Archimedes. We ought, therefore, to pause before we decide, that any deficiency in scientific skill rendered it a useless and unwieldy hulk. That it was not calculated to keep the sea when an English frigate would be sailing under close-reefed topsails, there can be no doubt; but we must ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Archimedes, the greatest geometer of antiquity, was consulted by the king in regard to a gold crown suspected of being fraudulently alloyed with silver. While considering the best method of detecting any fraud, he ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Samoan Islands there were born a child having the singular and extraordinary genius of Mozart. What could he accomplish? At the most, extend the gamut of three or four tones to seven, and create a few more complex melodies; but he would be as unable to compose symphonies as Archimedes would have been to invent an electric dynamo. How many creators have been wrecked because the conditions necessary for their inventions were lacking? Roger Bacon foresaw several of our great discoveries; ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... told, young gentlemen, that a certain Seignior Seignioroni, a surgeon of Seville, has recently invented an admirable substitute for the clumsy, old-fashioned tourniquet. As I understand it, it is something like a pair of calipers, working with a small Archimedes screw—a very clever invention, according to all accounts. For the padded points at the end of the arches"—arching his forefinger and thumb—"can be so worked as to approximate in such a way, as to—but ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... two educations—one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives himself." Archimedes said, "Give me a standing-place and I will move the world." But Goethe more happily says, "Make good thy standing-place and move the world." Circumstances may afford a standing-place, but self-reliance alone can give the leverage power. We must learn ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... descending or a spring in uncoiling returns theoretically the amount of work expended in raising or coiling it, and in no possible way can it do more. In practice, on account of friction, etc., we know it does less. This law, being invariable, of course limits us, as it did Archimedes and Pythagoras; we have simply utilized sources of power that their clumsy workmen allowed to escape. Of the four principal sources—food, fuel, wind, and tide—including harnessed waterfalls, the last two do by far the most work. Much of the electrical energy in every thunderstorm is ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... fact to principle is sometimes slow, sometimes rapid, and at all times a source of intellectual joy. When rapid, the pleasure is concentrated, and becomes a kind of ecstasy or intoxication. To any one who has experienced this pleasure, even in a moderate degree, the action of Archimedes when he quitted the bath, and ran naked, crying 'Eureka!' through the streets of Syracuse, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... to hear a volcano sneeze, as a firemaster (who is to burn a whole fleet) exclaim against the atmosphere. I fully expected that his very approach would have scorched up the town like the burning-glasses of Archimedes. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... The frame was made at Mr. Smith's request, by Mr. Pilgrim, of the Archimedes; the original experimental vessel in which this mode of propulsion was first tried upon the large scale. Mr. Pilgrim has been long versed in all that relates to the mechanism of this instrument, and is indeed a most ...
— A Project for Flying - In Earnest at Last! • Robert Hardley
... brave orators are; where so many grave philosophers; Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates. Where so many heroes of the old times; and then so many brave captains of the latter times; and so many kings. After all these, where Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes; where so many other sharp, generous, industrious, subtile, peremptory dispositions; and among others, even they, that have been the greatest scoffers and deriders of the frailty and brevity of this our human life; as Menippus, and others, as many as there have been such as he. Of all ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... works of geometry, Galileo passed to the writings of Archimedes; and while he was studying the hydrostatical treatise[3] of the Syracusan philosopher, he wrote his essay on the hydrostatical balance,[4] in which he describes the construction of the instrument, and ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... you that Petey boy was a wonder at getting up ideas. Think of it! Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Christopher Columbus, old Bill Archimedes and all the rest of the wise guys had overlooked this simple little discovery of how to make a neophyte initiate himself. It was too good to be true. We held a war dance of pure delight, and we whistled some more. We got behind stone walls, and whistled. We ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... and Archimedes, evoked from their long sleep, were to contemplate, with minds calmed by removal from contemporaneous interests, the state of mankind in the present year, with what different feelings would they regard the influence of their respective lives upon the existing human world of 1843! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... Bath.—One of the most valuable discoveries made by Archimedes, the famous scholar of Syracuse, in Sicily, relates to the weight of bodies immersed in water. Hiero, King of Syracuse, had given a lump of gold to be made into a crown, and when it came back he suspected that the workmen had kept back some of the gold, and had made up the weight by ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... better known to the reader than those I am preparing for him. When the magistrates of Syracuse were showing to Cicero the curiosities of the place, he desired to visit the tomb of Archimedes; but, to his surprise, they acknowledged that they knew nothing of any such tomb, and denied that it ever existed. The learned Cicero, convinced by the authorities of ancient writers, by the verses of the inscription which he remembered, and the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of carnage as they occurred. The besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire did not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it. The musketry of the besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by being directed from below upwards, was deadly. The rim of the hole in the ceiling was speedily surrounded by ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... chasms, and of tunnelling mountains inspired the boy. What was Newton making his calculations from which to deduce his fundamental laws, or Galileo watching the stars from his Florentine tower? This young captain was Archimedes and Euclid, Newton and Galileo, all in one. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... wall of the first circuit all the mathematical figures are conspicuously painted—figures more in number than Archimedes or Euclid discovered, marked symmetrically, and with the explanation of them neatly written and contained each in a little verse. There are definitions and propositions, &c. &c. On the exterior convex wall is first an immense drawing of the whole ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... private habits of the persons who have been peculiarly distinguished by their genius, our information is small; but the little that has been recorded for us of the chief of them,—of Sophocles, Archimedes, Hippocrates; and in modern times, of Dante and Tasso, of Rafaelle, Albrecht Duerer, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Fielding, and others,—confirms this observation.' Schiller himself confirms it; perhaps more strongly than most of the examples here adduced. No man ever wore ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... raised Nestorian Syrians to offices of importance, and the latter under the patronage of their masters continued their studies of Greek science and philosophy and translated those writings into Syriac and Arabic. Among the authors translated were, Hippocrates and Galen in medicine, Euclid, Archimedes and Ptolemy in mathematics and astronomy, and Aristotle, Theophrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisias in philosophy. In many cases the Greek writings were not turned directly into Arabic but as the translators ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... brain must from the first incline largely to that one species of impressions, to which must be added years of engrossing pursuit. We may gaze with envy at the fervour of a botanist over his dried plants, and may wish to take up so fascinating a pursuit: we may just as easily wish to be Archimedes when he leaped out of the bath; a man cannot re-cast his brain nor re-live his life. A taste of a high order, founded on natural endowment, formed by education, and strengthened by active devotion, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... its colleges and churches, afterwards expressing the great delight and profit which he had derived from his visit. He was entertained while there by Mr. Robertson, an eminent mathematician, then superintending the publication of an edition of the works of Archimedes. The architectural designs of buildings that most pleased him were those of Dr. Aldrich, Dean of Christchurch about the time of Sir Christopher Wren. He tore himself from Oxford with great regret, proceeding by Birmingham on his way home to Shrewsbury: "Birmingham," he says, "famous ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... ship you can work. In an ordinary frigate if a fellow has the talents of all the scientific men from Archimedes downwards compressed into his own peculiar skull they are all lost. Even if it were possible to study in a midshipmen's berth, you have not room in your "chat" for more than a dozen books. But in the "Rattlesnake" ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... strength to the task of heaving off this incubus from the breast of our body politic, but with small avail, for he has no lever to assist him—no fulcrum whereon to rest it; otherwise he might say with Archimedes, 'With these I could move a world.' He is unaided, this eagled-eyed prophet of ours, looking sorrowfully, sagaciously down into the ages! South Carolina is the Joseph, that his cruel brothers, the remaining Southern States, have sold to the Egyptians, as a bond-slave. But they shall yet come ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... that no powers of mind constitute a security against errors of this description. Touching God and His ways with man, the highest human faculties can discover little more than the meanest. In theology the interval is small indeed between Aristotle and a child, between Archimedes and a naked savage. It is not strange, therefore, that wise men, weary of investigation, tormented by uncertainty, longing to believe something, and yet seeing objections to every thing, should submit themselves absolutely ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... announced in these words: 'Que toutes les fois qu'une proposition sera prouvee par le genre de preuve qui lui appartient, l'objection quelconque, MEME INSOLUBLE, ne doit plus etre ecoutee.' Suppose, for example, that by a consensus of testimony it were perfectly proved that Archimedes set fire to the fleet of Marcellus by a burning-glass; then all the objections of geometry disappear. Prove if you can, and if you choose, that by certain laws a glass, in order to be capable of setting fire to the Roman fleet, must have been as big as the whole ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... my machine for teazing wool? Wonderful invention! horse labor entirely superseded: a little steam, and a man or two,—give me these, and I'll teaze the whole world. Wonderful the progress of the human intellect since the time of Archimedes!—But no doubt you are acquainted ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... Demosthenes, Cicero, Mirabeau, Burke, Webster and Clay; among poets, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare; among painters and sculptors, Phidias, Parrhasius, Zenxis, Praxiteles, Scopas, Michael Angelo, Raphael and Rubens; among philanthropists, John Howard; among inventors, Archimedes, Watt, Fulton, Arkwright, Whitney and Morse; among astronomers, Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Newton, La Place and the elder Herschel. Here are sixty names of distinguished men, and yet the great religious leaders, excepting ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... the noblest cities in Sicily. The Romans took it during the second Punic war, on which occasion the great Archimedes lost his life. It is now destroyed, and no remains of the place are left. ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... indistinction, and make but one blot with infants. If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in a moment. How many pulses made up the life of Methuselah, were work for Archimedes: common counters sum up the life of Moses his man. Our days become considerable, like petty sums, by minute ac- cumulations: where numerous fractions make up but small round numbers; and our days of a span long, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... vans will remove the whole furniture of a drawing-room, almost as it stands, without packing. My chief difficulty is with the fulcrum; but that is a difficulty that met the philosopher of old. You have heard of Archimedes, William—the man who said he could make a lever big enough to move the world, if he could only get a fulcrum to rest it on. But Archimedes was weak in that point. He ought to have known that, even if he did ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... to his imitation of Archimedes, only relaxing the intensity of his attention to the text (which blurred into jargon before his fixed gaze) when he heard that light laugh again. He pursed his lips, looked up at the ceiling as if slightly puzzled by some profound question beyond the reach ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... declared the luxuries of Capua were their best allies. He stayed in the south, however, trying to gain the alliance of the king of Macedon, and stirring up Syracuse to revolt. Marcellus, who was consul for the third time, was sent to reduce the city, which made a famous defence, for it contained Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of his time, who devised wonderful machines for crushing the besiegers in unexpected ways; but at last Marcellus found a weak part of the walls and surprised the citizens. He had given ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... commend a serene indifference to hubbub. I like Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Balzac, Darwin, and other sages, for having been so concentrated on this or that eternal verity in art or science or philosophy, that they paid no heed to alarums and excursions which were sweeping all other folk off their feet. It is with some shame that I haunt the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... ARCHIMEDES, "a fulcrum, and I will raise the earth." "Give me," says the author of the Vestiges, "gravitation and development, and I will create a universe." ALEXANDER'S ambition was to conquer a world, our author's is to create one. But he is wrong in saying that ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Themis, with no mean applause Pronounc't and in his volumes taught our Lawes, Which others at their Barr so often wrench: To day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench In mirth, that after no repenting drawes; Let Euclid rest and Archimedes pause, And what the Swede intend, and what the French. To measure life, learn thou betimes, and know Toward solid good what leads the nearest way; For other things mild Heav'n a time ordains, And disapproves that care, though wise in show, That with superfluous ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... Archimedes with his lever desired a place to stand that he might move the world of matter. Garrison with his paper, having found a place for his feet, demonstrated speedily his ability to push from its solid base the world of mind. His ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... hopes it may be as lawful for him to write a thousand lines of as light a subject. Socrates (whom the oracle pronounced the wisest man of Greece) sometimes danced: Scipio and Laslius, by the sea-side, played at peeble-stone: Semel insanivimus omnes. Every man cannot with Archimedes make a heaven of brass, or dig gold out of the iron mines of the law. Such odd trifles as mathematicians' experiments be artificial flies to hang in the air by themselves, dancing balls, an egg-shell that shall climb up to the top of a spear, fiery-breathing gores, poeta noster professeth ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... the only true religion; and I would to God our country was full of it. For it is the only spice to embalm and to immortalize our republic. Any politician can sketch out a fine theory of government, but what is to bind the people to the practice? Archimedes used to mourn that though his mechanic powers were irresistible, yet he could never raise the world; because he had no place in the heavens, whereon to fix his pullies. Even so, our republic will never be raised above the shameful factions and ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... and regardless of moving shadows, or cooing doves, my two friends gave up the sense of hearing to their reels, and that of seeing to the career of the little zinc hooks at the end of their gut lines. When I looked at the insular P——, and his active rod, I thought him like to Archimedes who had found his extramundane spot of ground, and, as he threw the fly, and bent his back to let it touch the water lightly, was endeavouring to fasten his lever to the base of the adjacent mountain in order to consummate his wish ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Nile's overflowing; this want is supplied by spiral pumps, which are turned by oxen, in order to bring the water into pipes, which convey it to these lands. Diodorus speaks of a similar engine invented by Archimedes in his travels into Egypt, which is ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... in the lively touches of the passion; or we must conclude, as I think we may, that even in imperfect plots there are less degrees of nature, by which some faint emotions of pity and terror are raised in us; as a less engine will raise a less proportion of weight, though not so much as one of Archimedes's making; for nothing can move our nature, but by some natural reason, which works upon passions. And, since we acknowledge the effect, there must be something ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... 'You have. Archimedes, Newcomen, Watt, Telford, Stephenson, those are your father's direct ancestors. Have you forgotten them? Have you forgotten your father, and the railways he made over half Europe, and his great energy and skill, and all connected with him as ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... have only to ask that I be dismissed from further service with your kind wishes. I will hold the occasion ever dear to my remembrance, for it is here I have found the solution of the great political problem. Like Archimedes, I have found the fulcrum by whose aid I may move the world—the moral world—and that fulcrum is ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... accepted that the use of toothed wheels to transmit power or turn it through an angle was widespread in all cultures several centuries before the beginning of our era. Certainly, in classical times they were already familiar to Archimedes (born 287 B.C.),[3] and in China actual examples of wheels and moulds for wheels dating from the 4th century B.C. have been preserved.[4] It might be remarked that these "machine" gear wheels are characterized by having a "round number" of teeth (examples with 16, 24 and 40 teeth ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... thoroughly detests, for their undue addiction to intellectual speculation, and considers to have been, by an inevitable fatality, morally sacrificed to the formation of a few great scientific intellects,—principally Aristotle, Archimedes, Apollonius, and Hipparchus. Any one who knows Grecian history as it can now be known, will be amazed at M. Comte's travestie of it, in which the vulgarest historical prejudices are accepted and exaggerated, to illustrate ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... attended the lectures of Socrates before this decree, disguising himself in a woman's dress, used to go from Megara to Athens by night to hear Socrates, a distance of twenty miles and back. Imprudent and excessive was the fervour of Archimedes, a lover of geometry, who would not declare his name, nor lift his head from the diagram he had drawn, by which he might have prolonged his life, but thinking more of study than of life dyed with his life-blood the figure he ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... mystic, like Archimedes, believes that in order to measure the purpose of external creation, he must ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... order to waive irrelevant disputes.) But then the true inference will be—not that vegetable increase proceeds under a different law from that which governs animal increase, but that, through an accident of position, the experiment cannot be tried in England. Surely the levers of Archimedes, with submission to Sir Edward B. Lytton, were not the less levers because he wanted the locum standi. It is proper, by the way, that we should inform the reader of this generation where to look for Coleridge's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... one or two detached remarks suggested by Condorcet's picture, which it may be worth while to make. He is fully alive, for example, to the importance to mankind of the appearance among them of one of those men of creative genius, like Archimedes or like Newton, whose lives constitute an epoch in human history. Their very existence he saw to be among the greatest benefits conferred on the race by Nature. He hardly seems to have been struck, on the other hand, with the appalling and incessant waste of these benefits ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... in everything but myself, I boldly and voluntarily entered the arena of commercial activity at the pliable age of eight. My first job away from home was in a mattress factory. Ah, that first job! I was a triumphant Archimedes who had found his fulcrum. I helped move the world, for twelve hours a day and for two ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... any rate the forerunner, of the new era of humanity. Future generations will gratefully refer to him as one of the supreme conquerors in the victorious struggle for the sources of life. He is in very truth a practitioner of the "divine art" of which Archimedes spoke. ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... afraid it is a brake I am not strong enough to work," said Rendel; "like Archimedes, I have not a lever powerful ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... Trespass—from the Calcutta Review. The writer of it, on reading in India this story of Omar's Grave, was reminded, he says, of Cicero's Account of finding Archimedes' Tomb at Syracuse, buried in grass and weeds. I think Thorwaldsen desired to have roses grow over him; a wish religiously fulfilled for him to the present day, I believe. ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... distinctly, "Wait!" He saw the tears in Paul's eyes,—tears drawn from an honorable man by the shame of this discussion as much as by the peremptory speech of Madame Evangelista, threatening rupture,—and the old man stanched them with a gesture like that of Archimedes when he cried, "Eureka!" The words "peer of France" had been to him like a torch ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... [Footnote 22: Archimedes, a great philosopher of antiquity, used to say, "Only give me a place to stand on, and I will move the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... It is the drunkenness of drugs, and woe be unto him that crosseth the threshold of its dream-curtained portal, for though gifted with the strength of Samson, the courage of Richard and the genius of Archimedes, he shall never return, and of him it is written that forever ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... would do benefit to the age in which he lives must bathe deep in the spirit of classical antiquity and then return to his own time to be in it, but not of it." That is, if we are to move the world with Archimedes' lever, we must have an historical basis to rest on. If a man ever had this it was Wasson. He went back to the Vedas in his study of religion; to the German forests and the pyramids in his investigation of politics and history. It was this which gave his arguments such cogency and ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... war, and to join me at Palermo; leaving one or two ships to cruise between Capri and Ischia, in order to prevent the entrance of any English ships into the Bay of Naples. On the 23d, at seven in the evening, the Vanguard, Samnite, and Archimedes, with about twenty sail of vessels, left the Bay of Naples, The next day, it blew much harder than I ever experienced since I have been at sea. Your lordship will believe, that my anxiety was not lessened by the great charge that was with ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... reconciling their philosophies. This work he never completed. He wrote a treatise on music which was used as a text-book as late as the present century; and he translated the works of Ptolemy on astronomy, of Nicomachus on arithmetic, of Euclid on geometry, and of Archimedes on mechanics. His great work in this line was a translation of Aristotle, which he supplemented by a commentary in thirty books. Among his writings are a number of works on logic and a commentary on the 'Topica' of Cicero. In addition to these, five theological tracts are ascribed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... every reform work is sure to lead women to the ballot-box. It is idle for them to hope to battle successfully against the monster evils of society until they shall be armed with weapons equal to those of the enemy—votes and money. Archimedes said, "Give to me a fulcrum on which to plant my lever, and I will move the world." And I say, give to woman the ballot, the political fulcrum, on which to plant her moral lever, and she will lift the world into a nobler ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... days. He had no pens or ink, and only a Bible in the way of books. He had some blank paper and a single lead pencil, which were utilized to their fullest extent. For a slate or blackboard, he used the beach, as did Archimedes of ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... the dignity of a mill. The Japanese, however, have mills for hulling rice, turned by very respectable water-wheels. The Egyptians and Greeks had water-wheels, and in fact understood all the mechanical powers. Archimedes, all the world knows, astounded the Romans by mechanical combinations which showered rocks on the besiegers of Syracuse, and boasted he could make a projectile of the world itself, if he could only find ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... covered at the top with a great mass of earth, in which there grew not merely flowers and shrubs, but tress also of the largest size. Water was supplied from the Euphrates through pipes, and was raised (it is said) by a screw, working on the principal of Archimedes. To prevent the moisture from penetrating into the brick-work and gradually destroying the building, there were interposed between the bricks and the mass of soil, first a layer of reeds mixed with bitumen, then a double layer of burnt brick cemented with gypsum, and thirdly ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... commonplace. The same is true of the elaboration of the Vergilian parcere subiectis, where the poet describes Marcellus' clemency to the vanquished Syracusans, and makes brief allusion to the unhappy death of Archimedes (xiv. 673): ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... friends, intercourse, and society divide their affection, and the separation from home rarely, if ever, costs them a pang. Not so with Becker's two sons; their world was New Switzerland; therefore, like the rays of the sun absorbed by the mirror of Archimedes, all their affections were ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... matter as a greenhouse could be dilated into a crystal palace, and with two common materials—glass and iron—he raised the palace of the genii; the brightest idea and the noblest ornament added to Europe in this century—the koh-i-noor of the west. Livy's definition of Archimedes ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... published a little slip and entered it at Stationers' Hall. He says he has done it by actual measurement; and I hear from a private source that he uses a disc of twelve inches diameter which he rolls upon a straight rail.' The 'rolling is a very creditable one; it is as much below the mark as Archimedes was above it. Its performer is a joiner who evidently knows well what he is about when he measures; he is not wrong by 1 in 3000.' Such skilful mechanicians as the builders of the pyramid could have obtained a closer approximation still ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... wondring: Apo taute:s te:s he:meras, peri pantos, Archime:dei legonti pisteuteon. From this day, forward (said the King) Credit ought to be giuen to Archimedes, what soeuer ...
— The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara • John Dee
... the cell, in a circle traced with a fragment of plaster detached from the wall, sat a man whose tattered garments scarcely covered him. He was drawing in this circle geometrical lines, and seemed as much absorbed in his problem as Archimedes was when the soldier ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... so that the time over an equal arc at either apse was proportional to the distance. He conjectured that this might prove to be true for arcs at all parts of the orbit, and to test this he divided the orbit into 360 equal parts, and calculated the distances to the points of division. Archimedes had obtained an approximation to the area of a circle by dividing it radially into a very large number of triangles, and Kepler had this device in mind. He found that the sums of successive distances from his 360 points were approximately proportional ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... vanquished his rivals in all else, he is matched against Arjuna the great arithmetician and is asked to express numbers greater than 100 kotis.[56] In reply he gave a scheme of number names as high as 10^{53}, adding that he could proceed as far as 10^{421},[57] all of which suggests the system of Archimedes and the unsettled question of the indebtedness of the West to the East in the realm of ancient mathematics.[58] Sir Edwin Arnold, {16} in The Light of Asia, does not mention this part of the contest, but he speaks of Buddha's training at the hands ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... arts are based, we find that the English and the French are richly represented. The supreme leaders in science, the men whose discoveries have been fecundating and fundamental, seem to be at least seven—Euclid, Archimedes, Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, Lavoisier, and Darwin. This list might well be larger; it could not be less; and no matter how it might be extended it would include these seven. None of them was merely an inventor of specific devices; ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... same battalion with architects' clerks on the one hand, or students at law on the other,—you may have, in your algebra class, a goldsmith who is afraid of being snobbish if he speaks to a map-engraver, or a tailor who does not presume to address an opinion on Archimedes' square ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... discoveries of recent years, the study of ordinary matter is hardly inferior, either in interest or audacity, to the work of the astronomer. And there is the same foundation in both cases—marvellous apparatus, and trains of mathematical reasoning that would have astonished Euclid or Archimedes. Extraordinary, therefore, as are some of the facts and figures we are now going to give in connection with the minuteness of atoms and molecules, let us bear in mind that we owe them to the most solid and severe processes of ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... income both at home and in Great Britain. Such results are seldom achieved without deep study and seclusion; and, accordingly, Joshua Fullalove, when the inventive fit was on, would be buried deep as Archimedes for a twelvemonth, burning the midnight oil: then, his active element predominating, the pale student would dash into the forest or the prairie, with a rifle and an Indian, and come out bronzed, and more or less be-panthered or be-buffaloed; thence invariably to sea for a year or two. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... claims his attention—my best bound quarto—is spread upon a piece of bedroom furniture readily at hand, and of sufficient height to let him pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor, with only one article of attire to separate him from the condition in which Archimedes, according to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry. He had discovered a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a very important period. As he expounded it, turning up his unearthly face from the book with an almost painful expression ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... in all ages, been open to the imputation of endeavoring to prove the most general facts of the outward world by sophistical reasoning, in order to avoid appeals to the senses. Archimedes, says Professor Playfair,(240) established some of the elementary propositions of statics by a process in which he "borrows no principle from experiment, but establishes his conclusion entirely by reasoning a priori. He assumes, indeed, that equal bodies, at the ends ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... remembered the formula for that—or else remembered part of it and obligingly invented the remainder. I had never any real confidence in that formula; and even had we got it from a book, there were difficulties in the way of the application that might have daunted Archimedes. We durst not drop any considerable pebble lest the sentinels should hear, and those that we dropped we could not hear ourselves. We had never a watch—or none that had a second-hand; and though every ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... incongruous stranger, and saw him engaged in a well-meant attempt to press a currant bun upon a carriage-horse tethered to one of the trees—a feat of abstraction which, at such a time, was only surpassed by that of Archimedes at ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... admired the Stelvio road. "I will endeavour to give him a look capable of action and energy," he said; "but he must be contemplative, grave, simple. He is a good subject. I wish to make him look like an Archimedes." ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... fonteis; : Atque haurire: iuratque (sic) novos decerpere flores. : Unde prius nulli velarint tempora nausae. : Primum quod magnis doceo de rebus; et arctis : Religionum animos nodis exsolvere pergo. : Lucret. lib. 4 : Dos pou sto, kai kosmon kineso. : Archimedes. : London: : Printed by P. B. Shelley, : 23, Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... other siege material, they felt confident that, with so many hands employed, they would in five days get their works in such an advanced state as to give them the advantage over the enemy. But in this they did not take into account the abilities of Archimedes;[91] nor calculate on the truth that, in certain circumstances, the genius of one man is more effective that any numbers whatever. However they now learned it by experience. The city was strong from the fact of its ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... Lever of Archimedes."—In the revival agitation which swept over America in the decades following 1830 practically all of the English Lutheran churches (the German churches, in part, stood aloof) caught the contagion in a malignant form and in great numbers. While even Prof. J. W. Nevin, ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... thinking of Archimedes?" he asked. "What he said was 'Eureka' and what he found out wasn't anything about ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... in the human values we must remember that the quest for righteousness is Oriental, the quest for knowledge Occidental. With the great prophets of the East—Moses, Isaiah, Mahomet—the word was, "Thus saith the Lord"; with the great seers of the West, from Thales and Aristotle to Archimedes and Lucretius, it was "What says Nature?" They illustrate two opposite views of man and his destiny—in the one he is an "angelus sepultus" in a muddy vesture of decay; in the other, he is the "young light-hearted master" of the world, in it ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Marcellus, and did not long resist his efforts; for the whole island was conquered in the conquest of one city. Syracuse, its great and, till that period, unconquered capital, though defended by the genius of Archimedes, was at last obliged to yield. Its triple wall and three citadels, its marble harbor and the celebrated fountain of Arethusa, were no defence to it, except so far as to procure consideration for its beauty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... fished up from the bottom of the Adriatic, where the ship armed with them had been sunk hundreds of years ago. Even Perkins's steam-gun was an old invention revived by Leonardo da Vinci and by him attributed to Archimedes.[8] The Congreve rocket is said to have an Eastern origin, Sir William Congreve having observed its destructive effects when employed by the forces under Tippoo Saib in the Mahratta war, on ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... Erigena or Roger Bacon. Let them be. They have their reward. And so also has the patient and humble man of science, who, the more he knows, confesses the more how little he knows, and looks back with affectionate reverence on the great men of old time—on Archimedes and Ptolemy, Aristotle and Pliny, and many another honourable man who, walking in great darkness, sought a ray of light, and did not seek in vain,—as integral parts of that golden chain of which he is but one link more; as scientific forefathers, without ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley |
