"Electricity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... together slowly, but inevitably by steam and electricity. I can conceive of no greater tragedy than an attempt ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... left Hamilton Burton's eyes and into them came the harder gleam. "Paul, you know as little about finance as I know about music. I've done what I've done by following one law: the leashing of forces. Electricity is force, but electricity unharnessed is lightning which devastates. Fire, uncontrolled, ravages, but, held in check, makes power. Every force in a man's nature that is not curbed becomes a weakness. The only difference between success and failure is the ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... concerned, in the populous, weary city. A couple of hours of writing had produced nothing that would bear the test of sunlight, so I anticipated judgment by tearing up the spoiled sheets of paper, and threw myself upon the couch before the empty fireplace. It was a dense, sultry night, with electricity thickening the air, and a trouble of distant thunder rolling far away on the rim of the cloudy sky—one of those nights of restless dulness, when you wait and long for something to happen, and yet feel despondently that nothing ever will happen again. I passed through a region of ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... yawning loudly. I suddenly felt a prickling sensation all over me. I knew that the air must be strongly impregnated with electricity. Despite the whining of the wind here beside the dead whale there seemed to have fallen ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... fact, how to lift labour up from mere drudgery and toil, and would learn to love work for its own sake. My plan was not to teach them to work in the old way, but to show them how to make the forces of nature—air, water, steam, electricity, horse-power—assist them in ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... what can we compare it? Most perhaps to electricity, for here we have both light and heat, and the lightning flash strikes that which already contains the most of itself (or electricity). And the lightning of God's love strikes him whose heart contains the most love for Himself. And He strikes when He will, and afterwards visits when He will; ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... was a time of transition, and the vigor which emanated from the young President passed like electricity through all lines and hastened the change. He caused the White House to be remodeled and fitted on the one hand for social purposes which required much more spacious accommodation, and on the other for offices in which he could conduct the largely increased ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... passing, that giant steam-jets rushing through the orifices of the earth's crust constitute an enormous hydro-electric engine; and the friction of ejected materials striking against each other in ascending and descending also generates electricity, which accounts to some extent for the electrical condition ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... instrument,—which, with a stupid fatuity, the public has as yet failed to grasp. Because its signals have been first applied by means of electro-magnetism, and afterwards by means of the chemical power of electricity, the many-headed people refuses to avail itself, as it might do very easily, of the same signals for the simpler transmission of intelligence, whatever the ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... there are peaks which attract it. Certain places—certain souls—breed storms: they create them, or draw them from all points of the horizon: and certain ages of life, like certain months of the year, are so saturated with electricity, that thunderstorms are produced in them,—if not at will—at any rate when ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... divisions—how Astronomy has been immensely forwarded by discoveries in Optics, while other optical discoveries have initiated Microscopic Anatomy, and greatly aided the growth of Physiology—how Chemistry has indirectly increased our knowledge of Electricity, Magnetism, Biology, Geology—how Electricity has reacted on Chemistry and Magnetism, and has developed our views of Light and Heat. In Literature the same truth might be exhibited in the manifold effects of the primitive mystery-play, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Then, I think we have here a really unique opportunity of effecting a reform that will unite and not divide all the legitimate interests concerned. What could appear to have less in common than electricity and sanctuaries? Yet electricity in Labrador requires water-power, which requires a steady flow, which requires a head-water forest, which, in its turn, is admirably fit to shelter wild life. Except for those who would selfishly and shortsightedly ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... call that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred or tabooed persons, is conceived by the primitive philosopher as a physical substance or fluid, with which the sacred man is charged just as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity; and exactly as the electricity in the jar can be discharged by contact with a good conductor, so the holiness or magical virtue in the man can be discharged and drained away by contact with the earth, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... at left rear. He presses a button and alcove is lighted by electricity, discovering the face of a large safe. During the following scene he does not look around, being occupied with working the combination, opening the safe, putting away account books and packets of papers, and with examining other packets ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... so many important characteristics that its uses are countless. It is used for certain purposes because it stretches, for others because it is airtight and watertight, for others because it is a non-conductor of electricity, for others because it is shock-absorbing, and for ...
— The Romance of Rubber • United States Rubber Company
... previous night. Although the day had been clear and beautiful, yet the clouds gathered after the sun went down, and there were signs of a storm. Low mutterings of distant thunder and the fitful flashes of lightning showed the interchange of electricity between the earth and sky, though it might not develop to any great extent for ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... once away from this civilization which stifles me, nature will cradle me in her motherly arms; the elements will resume their empire over me; ocean, sky, flowers, foliage will draw off the feverish electricity that excites my nerves; I will become absorbed in the grand whole, I will no longer live; I will vegetate and succeed in attaining the content of the plant that opens its leaves to the sun. I feel that I must stop my brain, ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... conditions of the middle of the last century. Any such effort is foredoomed to end in failure, and, if successful, would be mischievous to the last degree. Business cannot be successfully conducted in accordance with the practices and theories of sixty years ago unless we abolish steam, electricity, big cities, and, in short, not only all modern business and modern industrial conditions, but all the modern conditions of our civilization. The effort to restore competition as it was sixty years ago, and to trust for justice solely to this proposed ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... - most electricity imported from Israel; East Jerusalem Electric Company buys and distributes electricity to Palestinians in East Jerusalem and its concession in the West Bank; the Israel Electric Company directly supplies electricity to most Jewish residents and military facilities; some Palestinian municipalities, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... conductivity of silver be taken as 100, then the conducting power of gold would be 53.2; tin, 14.5; gold being thus shown to be nearly four times as good a conductor of heat as tin. Among the metals, silver is the best conductor of electricity. If its electrical conductivity be taken at 100, then the conducting power of gold would be 77.96; tin, 12.36; gold being thus shown to be more than six times as good a ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... Experiments with electricity should not be attempted by persons who do not understand its use, but if there is a competent electrician in the group putting on the play, use electric lighting by all means. No other form of light is so easily controlled or begins to give such ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... was fading into a sudden darkness—a storm was coming; black, copper-dashed clouds were rolling on rapidly, full of noise and electricity; in a short time they would break over the city—but Joan danced on ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... is able to live for months without nourishment, restoring directly, in the form of movement, "the effluvia emanating from the sun or from other ambient energies—heat, electricity, light—which are the soul ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... to know something about science; but I know nothing except the mathematics it involves. I can make calculations for engineers, electricians, insurance companies, and so on; but I know next to nothing about engineering or electricity or insurance. I don't even know arithmetic well. Outside mathematics, lawn-tennis, eating, sleeping, cycling, and walking, I'm a more ignorant barbarian than any woman could possibly be who hadn't gone ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... wondering whether it would be possible to use wireless telephony in Alaska. But I'm such a dub at electricity. Do you know—— What would be the cost of installing a wireless telephone plant with a ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... attraction of mass, of its effects at great distances, and so on? Newton's theory of gravitation is regarded as the most important and certain theory of physics, and yet gravitation itself is a hypothesis. Then, as to the other branches of physics—electricity and magnetism. The whole scheme of these important sciences rests on the hypothesis of "electric fluidity," or of imponderable matter of which the existence is nothing less than proved. Or optics? Optics certainly appertain ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... in mechanics, I have been told by experts, were very important for the times and deserved greater success. Among them was a coach moved by electricity. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the true philosopher—this betokens the genuine son of science. As well might we demand of Watt, or Fulton, or Davy, or Brewster, or Faraday, in pursuing their inquiries into the nature and laws of steam, electricity, galvanism, or light, to be careful that their discoveries impinge not on the teachings of religion or the creed of orthodoxy, as to demand of Lyell to investigate the antiquity of man in humble deference to the well-established belief of the whole Christian ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... William Sturgeon, celebrated for his scientific learning, his voluminous productions on electricity, and various branches of natural science. He had been originally a shoemaker, afterwards a soldier, subsequently scientific lecturer at Addiscombe College, and in his old age suffered much from poverty. Lord John Russell obtained him a grant of L50 per year from the Civil List, so paltry ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... effecting the brush adjustment; the patent should be classified in the subclass of Dash-pots. If the classifier finds the disclosed organization of dash-pots and planer or dash-pot and generator more than a conventional illustration of an obvious use, he should note a cross-reference to Planers or Electricity, Generation. A patent discloses an internal-combustion engine associated with a specific form of carbureter; the claims relate to the engine parts only; the class of Internal-Combustion Engines should receive the patent, and a cross-reference ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... combine to prevent it growing? Is not that a one-sided statement of facts? Did not all the powers of the universe also combine to make it grow, if only it had valour and worth wherewith to grow? Did not the rains feed it, the very mortar in the wall give lime to its roots? Were not electricity, gravitation, and I know not what of chemical and mechanical forces, busy about the little plant, and every cell of it, kindly and patiently ready to help it if it would only help itself? Surely this is true; true of every organic thing, animal and vegetable, and mineral too, for ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... says the modern astronomer, they were condensed, and to fire-mist, by collisions or otherwise, they will return. What the particular stages may be, what the significance of the nebula;, what the cosmic functions of electricity, and other like problems—may be, and will be, matter for keen debate. But the grand generalisation remains—from fire-mist back again to fire-mist. How modern, also, the grand unity which such a theory gives to existence as a whole. Physics, psychology, sociology, even spiritual facts, ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... affected by the electricity with which the air was charged, started to relieve his feelings by barking stormily. The nervous outburst of reproof which greeted his eloquence was so unexpectedly menacing that he retired precipitately beneath the ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... have—many a time," Mr. Kendrick insisted. "And great times we had. Boys and girls needed no electricity to keep them comfortable on the coldest of nights. It's my grandson Richard who feels this sort of thing a necessity. Until he came home a carriage and pair had been all the equipage ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... remarkable weapon is the electric battery of certain Eels, of the Electric Cat Fish, and the Torpedoes, one of which is said to be able to discharge an amount of electricity sufficient to ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... things. And I am quite sure that there are also natural laws designed to govern man in his social and economic relationships, and when those laws have been discovered the impossibilities of to-day will become the common practice of to-morrow, just as steam and electricity have made the impossibilities of yesterday the common practice of to-day. The first need is to find the law, and to what more worthy purpose could a man devote himself? When I landed here yesterday—when I walked again through these old streets—I was a being without purpose; ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... Long-run improvements in government fiscal arrangements, literacy, and the legal framework are needed if the country is to move out of poverty. Investor confidence has been sapped by rampant corruption, a lack of electricity and other infrastructure, a lack of skilled workers, and the political uncertainty due to the failing health of President Lansana CONTE. Guinea is trying to reengage with the IMF and World Bank, which cut ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... have intervened since this book was published, we have all been impressed by the brilliant achievements of science in every department of practical life. But whereas the application of chemistry and electricity and biology might, perhaps, be safely left to the specialists, it seems to me that in a democracy it is essential for every single person to have a practical understanding of the workings of his own mind, and of his neighbor's. The understanding of human ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... might have been an excuse in those days, Uncle Joe, for using a hand-power grindstone, but there certainly is none in these days, with water power, electricity and gasoline," he added, between breaths, as he began tugging away again ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... country?" I replied that we had, every now and then. "How do you bring it? Are you a rainmaker?" I told him that no one believed in rainmakers in our country, but that we understood how to bottle lightning (meaning electricity). "I don't keep mine in bottles, but I have a houseful of thunder and lightning," he most coolly replied; "but if you can bottle lightning you ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... for looking upon physical life as a mode of frequency, akin to Light, Electricity, Magnetism, Chemical Action, the Vibration of a Tuning Fork, or the Swing of a Pendulum, and therefore a transient phenomenon having to do only with the Race; Life can under these conditions only be looked upon as a reality in the same sense in which all other forms ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... estimation of his fellow-townsmen, and enabled him to take a forward part in all the affairs of his province. In England, and indeed all Europe, he became celebrated by his experiments and discoveries in electricity. These may deserve the greater credit when we recollect both their practical utility and their unassisted progress,—how much the pointed rods which he introduced have tended to avert the dangers of lightning, and how far removed was ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... these visionaries are occupied with electricity. They intend to make the lightning a domestic slave in every house, and to turn Ariel into a common carrier. But, from the aspect of Winter's den in Paterson's Rents, it was easy to read that his heart was set on a more ancient foible. The white deal book-shelves, ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... from drowning, carried him to his grave very promptly. His successors enlarged and beautified the place, which first became famous during the reign of Katherine II. At the present day, its broad macadamized streets are lighted by electricity; its Gostinny Dvor (bazaar) is like that of a provincial city; many of its sidewalks, after the same provincial pattern, have made people prefer the middle of the street for their promenades. Naturally, only the lower classes were expected to walk ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... Organ. Grand orchestra of 150. Full military band, drum corps of the city militia, 50 anvils, 100 firemen, city fire bells and cannon to be fired from the stand of the leader by use of electricity. ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... in my brain was an instrument for detecting the presence of gold similar to the instrument called a compass. In this instance electricity had nothing to do with ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... mysterious anticipation. 'We'll ask the spirits for help and guidance,' she said to herself, lest the boy should overhear. For Zizi often helped them with their amateur planchette, only they told him it was electricity: le magnetisme, le fluide, was the term they generally made use of. Its vagueness covered all possible explanations with just the needed touch of confusion and suggestion ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... is a woman still. This very life of hers, dreadful though it be, tightens and braces her woman's energy, her womanly electricity. Hence, you may see her endowed with two gifts. One is the inspiration of lucid frenzy, which in its several degrees, becomes poesy, second-sight, depth of insight, cunning simplicity of speech, the power especially of believing in yourself through all ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... the County of Sussex, on the 4th of August, 1792. His most characteristic childish amusement seems to have been the making of chemical experiments; and his brothers and sisters were often terrified at the experiments in electricity which he tried upon them. He was also fond of making the children personate spirits or fiends, while he burned ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... fair chance. For the formation of real proficiency in the art, friends should meet often, sit long, and be thoroughly at ease. A modern audience generally breaks up before it is well warmed through, and includes enough strangers to break the magic circle of social electricity. The clubs in which Johnson delighted were excellently adapted to foster his peculiar talent. There a man could "fold his legs and have his talk out"—a pleasure hardly to be enjoyed now. And there a set of friends meeting regularly, and meeting ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the latter gentleman in Port Louis. What he considered to be the grand sources of rotatory storms—winds charged with opposite kinds of electricity and blowing in opposite directions—appeared to account satisfactorily for the occurrence of hurricanes in the Pacific, where there are no continents or chains of mountains to produce them ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... that were committed after the earthquake: I could have filled more paper with such relations, If I had not feared tiring you. We have swarmed with sermons, essays, relations, poems, and exhortations On that subject. One Stukely, a parson, has accounted for it, and I think prettily, by electricity—but that is the fashionable cause, and every thing is resolved into electrical appearances, as formerly every thing was accounted for by Descartes's vortices, and Sir Isaac's gravitation. But they all take care, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... monstrosities of steam navigation. I think we are passing through a sort of saurian epoch in this age of steam. When we have outgrown this clumsy, noisy, perilous agent, and have adjusted ourselves to electricity or some still more subtile and commodious force, we may be able to restore somewhat of the graces of form and motion. And we shall then look back upon the hideous and awkward craft of this day very much as we now gaze upon a reproduction of the misshapen and unwieldy monsters of the palaeozoic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... going down to his office at about nine in the morning, working until noon as though driven by steam and electricity; then lunching with a party of Native Sons, all filled with jocund japeful joshing Native Son humor which brims over in showers of Native Son wit. I imagine him returning to an afternoon of brief but concentrated strenuous labor, then going for a run in the Park, or tennis, ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... also observed, in the case of Dr. Bilden; when a degree of light, so slight as not to affect the experimenter, was directed to the lids of this somnambulist, it caused a shock equal to that of electricity, and induced him to exclaim, "Why do you wish to shoot me in the eyes?" These are exceptions; as a general rule, the eye during somnambulism is insensible, and the pupil will not contract, though the most vivid flash of light be directed upon it. It also should be observed that although ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... felt drawn to him by that attraction of the moral nature which men of science are happily unable to analyze; they would detect in it some phenomenon of galvanism, or the current of I know not what fluid, and express our sentiments in a formula of ratios of oxygen and electricity. ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... to reader them magnetic - a theory promptly exploded by chemical analysis. Others supposed that the resinous character of the leaves made them susceptible to magnetic influence; but as rosin is a non-conductor of electricity, of course this hypothesis likewise proved untenable. At last Dr. Asa Gray brought forward the only sensible explanation: inasmuch as both surfaces of the rosin-weed leaf are essentially alike, there being very nearly as many stomata on the upper side as ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford. "Is that a humbug, too? Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... couriers could not go fast enough, nor far enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses, bad roads in spring, snow-drifts in winter, heat in summer, could not get the horses out of a walk. But we found out that the air and earth were full of electricity; and always going our way,—just the way we wanted to send. Would he take a message? Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do; would carry it in no time. Only one doubt occurred, one staggering objection,—he had no carpet bag, no visible pockets, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... to explain the nature and origin of these remarkable appearances. When electricity began to be understood, this was thought to afford a satisfactory explanation, and the shooting stars were regarded by Beccaria and Vassali as merely electrical sparks. When the inflammable nature of the gases became known, Lavosier and Volta supposed an ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... do, sir? There will be needed provisions, and the delivery drivers are on strike. And the electricity is shut off—I ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, molecular force, and even life itself, are only so many manifestations or expressions, they claim, of one and the same force in the universe—Motion, With the exception of matter, it ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... for a light. The same laborious investigation that had landed us where we were, revealed that the house was lighted by electricity, and that the plant was not in operation. By accident I stumbled across a tabouret with smoking materials, and found a half dozen matches. The first one showed us the magnitude of the room we stood in, and revealed also a brass candle-stick by the open fireplace, a candle-stick almost four ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... is a wedding or a funeral, the people had criticized John for being a gloomy ascetic, and found fault with Jesus for his shocking cheerfulness. There was no way of suiting them, and no way of making them take the call of God to heart. Long before electricity was invented, human nature knew all about interposing nonconductors between ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... treasures,—the rose and violet colored sugars of Alexandria, sweet almonds, and sharp-toothed ginger. We pardon his puns, indeed we believe them to be inevitable, the flash of the percussion cap, the sparks of electricity, St. Elmo's stars, phosphorescent gleams, playing over the restless ocean of his fruitful imagination. And we are persuaded that if the venerable Democritus (who was uncanonized only because the Holy ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... lighted by flickering gas and carpeted in worn strips of brown carpet. And once inside the apartments one might have found, sometimes, cheerfulness, beauty of line and colour, and a certain spaciousness which the modern apartment house, with its rooms like closets, its startling electricity, and its more hygienic conditions of living, could not provide. It was because she could find space there that Gabriella, guided by Miss ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... the prairie to the uses of agriculture was, and it is not of importance now. The buffalo has long since gone. Even the ox and the Norman horse, so long in use there, have been largely supplanted by that mysterious force, electricity, which Franklin was discovering on the other side of the Alleghany Mountains at the very time that this suggestion was being made to the minister of Louis XV. It is known, however, that the king took thought of the little Illinois colony, for the fort of wood was ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... the springs of Xochimilco, as the present amount per capita of 137 litres is not sufficient. The new works will ensure a per capita supply of 400 litres, for a population of 550,000 inhabitants. The lighting of the city and suburbs is by electricity, and is efficiently performed, giving the capital the reputation of being an excellently illumined community. A Canadian Company, the Mexican Light and Power Company, holds the contract for this work. The drainage and sewerage of the capital form a fine modern ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... lightning, of thunder and terrific rain. It was one of those days that strike the timid with alarm and terror: sometimes it was dark as twilight; sometimes a sudden ghastly brightness was produced by the lightning. That the air was charged with electricity to a most unusual extent was felt by everybody. Those who had an intimate knowledge of the various potato blights from '45 said, "This is the beginning of the blight." So it was. It is well known that after the blight of '45 ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... him except sweating him in their sweat houses and giving him a plenty of the tea of the horsemint which we shewed them. and that this would probably nos succeed as he had been so long in his present situation. I am confident that this would be an excellent subject for electricity and much regret that I have it not in my power to supply it.- Drewyer Labuish and Cruzatte set out this morning to hunt towards the quawmash grounds if they can possibly pass Collins's Creek. Joseph and ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... leasing," and that Congress has no power "to give or authorize leases." The Court sustained the leases, saying "the disposal must be left to the discretion of Congress."[253] Nearly a century later this power to dispose of public property was relied upon to uphold the generation and sale of electricity by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The reasoning of the Court ran thus: the potential electrical energy made available by the construction of a dam in the exercise of its constitutional powers is property which the United States is entitled to reduce to possession; to that ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... upon the still air, coupled with the beauty of the scene, so wrought upon his feelings that he forthwith wrote her a love letter by the flickering light of a bougie. This little incident dates back to the more romantic if less comfortable days before electricity came to light our ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... in the past to produce. This increase in the productivity of human effort is, of course, due to many causes, besides the increase in the personal dexterity of the man. It is due to the discovery of steam and electricity, to the introduction of machinery, to inventions, great and small, and to the progress in science and education. But from whatever cause this increase in productivity has come, it is to the greater productivity of each individual that the whole ...
— The Principles of Scientific Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... over being the recipient of your gift, which strikes me as not being so 'little' as you seem to think it. After all, this matter of giving and taking should be very simple; don't you see? The surcharged cloud pours its electricity into the empty one, and both are equalized. But has the full cloud any more to boast of than ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... appeared in the Irish Times (Dublin, 1884): "It is not generally known that the country people along the line of the electric railway make strange uses of the insulated rails, which are the medium of electricity on this tramway, in connection with one of which an extraordinary and very remarkable occurrence is reported. People have no objection to touch the rail and receive a smart shock, which is, however, harmless, at least so far. On Thursday evening a ploughman, returning from work, stood upon this ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... "has explained that he came here to these wilds to continue his study of electricity alone and undisturbed. He took means to keep other people from bothering him. This canoe, which contains a lower compartment and a hidden propeller, driven by electricity, was his invention. He has arrangements whereby he can use a powerful search-light ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... quarry. He glanced westward. It was yet an hour lacking of sundown, but since mid-morning Dozier had been able to send his messages so far and so wide. Andrew set his teeth. What did cunning of head and speed of horse count against the law when the law had electricity ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... agree, sounds incredible, but really it is hardly any more so than the wonders of radioactivity, of the Hertzian waves, of photography, electricity or hypnotism, or of generation, which condenses into a single particle all the physical, moral and intellectual past and future of thousands of creatures. Our life would be reduced to something very small indeed if we deliberately dismissed from it all that our understanding ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... seconds' duration, the rivals stand vis-a-vis, neither venturing to advance. Around them is a nimbus of angry electricity, that needs but a spark to kindle it into furious flame. A single word will do it. This word spoken, and two of the four may never enter Don Gregorio's gate—at least ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... case with subaqueous lines. The employment of submarine, as well as of subterranean conductors, occasions a small retardation in the velocity of the transmitted electricity. This retardation is not due to the length of the path which the electric current has to traverse, since it does not take place with a conductor equally long, insulated in the air. It arises, as Faraday has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... like Mark Twain's hero, suddenly transported back to King Arthur's Court is landed in a surprising and unknown world. But one of King Arthur's knights brought to life at the court of the present German Emperor aside from steam, electricity, gun powder, telegraph and telephones would find the system as despotic as in the days when the enchanter, Merlin, wove his spells and the sword Excalibur appeared from the depths of the magic lake. But while the ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... goods, the bank note is new goods. Even metallic money has only a credit-value, inasmuch as it can be used only to effect exchanges. To the - of the creditor may correspond a of the debtor; but the latter is negative only in the sense that we speak of negative electricity, a negative thermometrical degree. When an estate is leased, the owner has, in his demand for rent, a vendible plus; but the lessee no corresponding minus. (Not so. To the same extent that the proprietor has his future payments on the lease discounted, the present sale-value of his estate ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... for the harmonious concurrence of motions and processes that distinguish living animals, a MATTER OF LIFE has been supposed, and its nature conjectured to be some modification[2] of electricity or galvanism, and which being unsupported, is not deserving of further comment. Another sect of physiologists has conceived that life is the immediate result of a particular organization; but they are unable to demonstrate that any arrangement of parts is consequently ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... degeneracy of the cells which nobody yet can understand. We know the effect, but we cannot, up to the present, combat it. There are yet many things in human life of which the medical men are in as complete ignorance as those who study electricity and radio-frequencies. We try to do our best to the extent of our knowledge, my dear monsieur. And if you will bring Mademoiselle to me to-morrow at three o'clock I will ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... and what would be left of them? The vibratory quality which most thrills our souls in the strains of Christian literature is due to the Bible material in it. The Bible holds stored the ethical electricity on which Christendom has drawn, through ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... Arcot was on his way to the control room. The first shock was but a forerunner of the storm. Suddenly the ship was hurled violently about; the air was shot through with great burning sparks; the snapping hiss of electricity was everywhere, and every pointed metal object was throwing streamers of blue electric flame into the air! The ship rocked, heaved, and cavorted wildly, as though caught in the play of ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... while she was sitting in her peignoir during her morning toilette, she commanded her hair to be combed.... And what do you think? The lady-in-waiting passed the comb through, and sparks of electricity simply showered out! Then she summoned to her presence the court physician Rogerson, who happened to be in waiting at the court, and said to him: 'I am, I know, censured for certain actions; but do you see this electricity? ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... dove grey and rose pink, a room in which everything harmonised delightfully. The small casement window, set in a wall three or four feet thick, admitted little light, but that fault was remedied by the fact that the room, like the great hall below, was softly lighted by electricity. ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... could play the piano. None the less, he said, he meant to peg away until every peasant on the estate should, as he walked behind the plough, indulge in a regular course of reading Franklin's Notes on Electricity, Virgil's Georgics, or some work on the chemical ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... to attempt to describe the hours until morning of this annual artistic orgy. As the morning light comes in through the windows, it is strange to see the effect of diffused daylight, electricity, and gas—the bluish light of early morning reflected on the flesh tones—upon nearly three thousand girls and students in costumes one might expect to see in a bacchanalian feast, just before the fall of Rome. Now they form a huge circle, the front row sitting on the floor, the ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... miles in extent; and when, to borrow and debase an image, all the evening street-lamps burst together into song! Such is the spectacle of the future, preluded the other day by the experiment in Pall Mall. Star-rise by electricity, the most romantic flight of civilisation; the compensatory benefit for an innumerable array of factories and bankers' clerks. To the artistic spirit exercised about Thirlmere, here is a crumb of consolation; ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forms of matter, as commonly known, are the imponderables—light, heat, magnetism, and electricity. I had concluded that these were manifestations of some still subtler form, and that this was life, beyond which lay the ethereal elements (called principles) of mind and soul—soul being ultimate and eternal. To demonstrate ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... eighteenth century the industrial-financial revolution began. Within the space of an hundred years came all the revelations of the potential inherent in thermo-dynamics and electricity, and the invention of the machines that have changed the world. During the Renaissance and Reformation the old social and economic systems, so laboriously built up on the ruins of Roman tyranny, had been destroyed; autocracy had abolished liberty, licentiousness had wrecked ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... an example of the action of electricity," he said in French, addressing the lady. "Every man has in his skin microscopic glands which contain currents of electricity. If you meet with a person whose currents are parallel with your ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... I on the way to the city of centralization, to paint by electricity the closing scenes of the conspirators, and, as I pass the Pennsylvania line, the recollection of those frequent pilgrimages—pray God this be the last!—comes upon me like ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... sound about such a phrase, and it is sure to satisfy. Two sittings a week, at two dollars a sitting, will pay. In many cases the patient gets well while you are electrifying him. Whether or not the electricity cured him is a thing I shall never know. If, however, he began to show signs of impatience, I advised him that he would require a year's treatment, and suggested that it would be economical for him to buy a battery and use it at home. Thus advised, he pays you twenty dollars ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... trenches was the dugout in the chalk-pit, which I have just described, and I often wish I could be suddenly transported there and revive old memories. We were planning at this time to make a big gas-attack along the Canadian Corps front. Three thousand gas-cylinders were to be fired by electricity upon the enemy. As I wanted to see this, I made my way to the chalk-pit. The time fixed for the event was five minutes to eleven at night. If the attack was to come off, the word "Japan" was to come through on the wires; if, owing to the wind being in the wrong direction, the ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... and the very convenient accommodations for them; 6th. The superior accommodations for strangers. Heard two lectures at the university, one on mineralogy; lecture good; specimens numerous—the other on electricity; ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... once asked, "What is the use of your discovery of atmospheric electricity?" The philosopher answered the question by another, "What is the ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... got over the attack. The only effect was that the paregoric or the electricity, or something, turned his hair all the wrong way, and he looks the queerest you ever saw. Oh yes; it did seem to affect his appetite, too. He appeared to be always hungry. He ate up the hay-rack and two sets of harness. And one ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... distinguishes living from dead matter, we can investigate the laws by which dead matter acts on living bodies through this medium. We know not what magnetic attraction is, and yet we can investigate its laws; the same holds good with regard to electricity; if we ever should attain a knowledge of the nature of this property, it would make no alteration in the laws which we ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... playfully at all this show and splendour. His good humour was of the elephantine order, and belied the drawn anxiety of his eyes. Luxurious and peaceful as the scene was, there seemed to Chris to be a touch of electricity in the air, the suggestion of something about to happen. Littimer glanced at her admiringly. She was dressed in white satin, and she had in her hair a single diamond star ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... burner which swung low from the ceiling at the end of a goosenecked iron pipe, finding with the fingers of that hand the wall switch which controlled the battery of electric lights roundabout, and with a long-drawn sigh of happy deliverance he turned off both gas and electricity simultaneously and sank his head ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... activity, though she had fortified her face with a mask of horsehair, and thrust her hands into the thickest gloves. "I was seated in a corner," she says, "wrapped up in my coverings; I lift the window-sash of one of the doors; the air is close and warm, the night dark; black clouds, charged with electricity, roll above me, and the wind brings to me the marsh-odours acrid and yet flat.... Gradually I fall asleep; I have kept on my mask, but the window-pane remains open.... A keen sensation of cold and of intolerable itchings in the hands and face awakens me; day has dawned, and the marshes ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... last analysis we reach the circle of infinity—that final limit to which in every domain of thought man's reason arrives if it is not playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat, heat produces electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... in each man's eyes suggested that his hospitality was not entirely disinterested. They were inclined to bristle at each other. Clearly a dangerous amount of electricity was being stored within the little shack. Only Sam was as self-contained in his way as the ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... with rigid intensity on the temple portico. Thus he continued to remain motionless, as if what he saw had petrified him where he stood, when the clouds, which had been closing in deeper and deeper blackness as the morning advanced, and which, still charged with electricity, were gathering to revive the storm of the past night, burst abruptly into a loud peal of thunder over ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... on the warm, short grass by the carp-pond, and studied therein the ponderous manoeuvres of an ancient fish, believed by the people thereabouts to be something over two hundred years old. Carp had a great charm for Lord Kingsmead; so had electricity; so had toads; so had buns, and stable-boys, and pianolas, and armour, and curates, ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... the big knotted hand that was carrying his cup to his lips, trembled in the air and then sank slowly back to the table. His usually dull and indifferent gaze became suddenly piercing as if it were charged with electricity. ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... seem trivial. For the fact has at last come home to the nations of the world that ultimately the English-speaking peoples will dominate it—dominate it, because they are the practical peoples. They have given to the world all its great practical inventions—the railroad, the steamship, electricity, the telegraph and cable—all of them; they are the great civilizing forces, rounding the world up to new moral understanding, for what England has done in Africa and India we have done in a smaller way in the Philippines and Cuba and Porto Rico; they are the great commercial peoples, ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... Morse conceived the idea of communicating between distant points by means of electricity, he was not able to carry out experiments for himself, and having made the acquaintance of Alfred Vail, son of the proprietor of the Iron Works at Speedwell, he gave up his business as a portrait painter and went ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... subtle electricity had carried the tale over all the wires of the continent and under the sea; and in all villages and towns of the Union, from the Atlantic to the territories, and away up and down the Pacific slope, ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... holding the important office of Secretary to the Committee for Foreign Affairs. Paine afterwards settled for a time at Philadelphia, where he occupied himself with the study of mechanical philosophy, electricity, mineralogy, and the use of iron in bridge-building. In 1787, when a bridge over the Schnylkill was proposed, without any river piers, as the stream was apt to be choked with ice in the spring freshets, Paine boldly offered to build an iron ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... his corn, and to water his land; Providence may have placed all things under his feet, but he takes long to discover their use and the means to use them. In the commercial and industrial stages he employs the wind and water, steam and electricity, for transport, communications, and manufactures. But he can only develop this mastery by the interdependent processes of specialization, co-operation, and expansion. A lonely shepherd can live on his flocks without help; ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... other by the homogeneous ether which extends throughout all space. This extremely light and attenuated (if not imponderable) ether causes, by its vibrations, all the phenomena of light and heat, electricity and magnetism. We can imagine it either as a continuous substance occupying the space between the mass-atoms, or as composed of separate particles; in the latter case we might perhaps attribute to these ether-atoms an inherent power ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... freshman was used worse than ever. He was tossed in a blanket, given a powerful shock of electricity, deafened by the horns, pounded with the stuffed clubs, and hustled till there was scarcely any breath left ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... the temples began throbbing heavily. Brenton could see the skin about them tighten to the pulse-beat. Between them, the keen eyes gleamed like balls of polished metal surcharged with electricity. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... during a recitation in geography, a teacher was endeavoring to explain the subject of electricity in the lesson on "Thunder and lightning." It had been stated that when a flash of lightning darts to the earth it is said to strike. A precocious lad of twelve summers (winters included), raised his hand and upon recognition said: "Do people ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 5, May, 1889 • Various
... author's spiritual nature. She herself declared, "I love it very much," and it reveals the fact on every page. Aside from its indubitable worth as a picture of English middle-class country life in an earlier nineteenth century than we know—the easy-going days before electricity—it has its highest claim to our regard as a reading in life, not conveyed by word of mouth didactically, but carried in scene and character. The author's tenderness over Hetty, without even sentimentalizing her as, for example, Dumas sentimentalizes his Camille, suggests the mood of the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... by the flashes, which broke the Egyptian darkness with a brightness which seemed almost malignant; while the thunder rolled in peals, the concussion of which appeared to shake the very ocean. A ship is not often injured by lightning, for the electricity is separated by the great number of points she presents, and the quantity of iron which she has scattered in various parts. The electric fluid ran over our anchors, top-sail sheets and ties; yet no harm was done to us. We went below at four o'clock, leaving things in the same state. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... be kept in school for a series of years. It is true that a little mental improvement may work wonders for a person in some circumstances, and it should lead us to inquire, if a little will accomplish so much, what will greater advantages do for him? A very little knowledge of electricity once saved the life of Benjamin Russell in his youth. He was an eminent citizen of Boston, born in the year 1761, and in his younger years he had learned from the writings of Franklin, who had become a philosopher, that it was dangerous to take shelter, during ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... once upon the old-time steel-railed highways; how a child's hand on the crank of a machine-gun might hurl invisible death among a regiment of men and put even an army to flight. Steam and gunpowder and electricity, what wonderful ideas were connoted in the words! The very names thrilled him with ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... clock, and the others heard a sound as of a strong spring being wound. Then he stood erect: there were two sharp ticks; then a long white snap of electricity; two ticks and another snap; two ticks and ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... after that, on the 30th of July, 1844, the same destroying spirit Joe Smith was allowed to attack me directly, to show how he would be able to kill a man in a minute, if he would be permitted. But he was seized by my guardian and cast into a combustible matter which was by his infernal electricity instantly kindled. George Karle was permitted to be drowned, because the time for establishing our centre had not yet arrived, and Karle had an important mission in the spirit world, and in that great mission he continues ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... that wishes to be a Deist: but I fear, every fair, unprejudiced inquirer must in some degree be a sceptic. It is not that there are any very staggering arguments against the immortality of man; but like electricity, phlogiston, &c., the subject is so involved in darkness, that we want data to go upon. One thing frightens me much: that we are to live for ever, seems too good news to be true. That we are to enter into a new scene of existence, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... wisest thing," he said slowly at last, "would be for you to go into hospital as an ordinary patient. I could get you a bed in one of my own wards, where I could look after you myself, in consultation with the first men in town. You could have massage, electricity, radium, heat baths, every appliance that could possibly be of use, and you could stay on long enough to give them a chance. It would be an ordinary ward, remember, an ordinary bed in an ordinary ward, and your neighbours would not be up to Newnham standard! You would ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hours of work, the wireless was in shape to send and receive messages. Tom pulled over the lever, and a crackling sound was heard, as the electricity leaped from the transmitters into space. Then he clamped the ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... Lord Kelvin says the animal motor more closely resembles an electro-magnetic engine than a heat engine, but very probably the chemical forces in animals produce the external mechanical effects through electricity and do not act as ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... Hints on Watch Repairing," "Practical Treatise on Balance Spring," "Electricity and Magnetism ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... Mathematics, History, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Civics are almost universally offered on the cultural side of the curriculum. In addition, girls may take dress designing, sewing, millinery and home economics; boys may take wood-working, forge work, machine-tool work, electricity, printing, and house designing; and both boys and girls have an opportunity to elect art, arts and crafts ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... preaching freedom to deaf ears at the court of Philip the Second, and drove a sword through the king's body—and Prometheus rose from his rock and overthrew Olympus, and Faust, who had knelt abjectly before the Earth-Spirit, took possession of his earth, and subdued it by means of steam, and electricity, and methodical investigation. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various |
