"Machine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... took the hint, expatiated largely; it was always well to be careful—one couldn't, in fact, be too careful. The human body at best, more especially the—ah—feminine human body, was a delicate machine, not to be abused without inviting serious consequences. He was even a ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... would make a good figure in courts, and distinguish themselves in the shining parts of life; 'Sapere est principium et fons'. A man who, without a good fund of knowledge and parts, adopts a court life, makes the most ridiculous figure imaginable. He is a machine, little superior to the court clock; and, as this points out the hours, he points out the frivolous employment of them. He is, at most, a comment upon the clock; and according to the hours that it strikes, tells you now it is levee, now dinner, now supper time, etc. The end which I propose by ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... to the throne in 1498, resolved to cross the Alps in his turn, and on his solemn entry into Paris after his coronation an elaborate machine was contrived to delicately flatter his pretensions to Genoa and Milan, and appear in the royal procession. This consisted of an apparatus mounted on wheels, in the form of a terrace, on which was seen a porcupine, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... the iambics of Seneca are impressive: taken collectively they are monotonous in the extreme. The ear suffers a continual series of stabs, which are not the less unpleasant because none of them go deep. The verse seems formed, one might almost say punched out, by a relentless machine. It is never modified by circumstances; it is the same in narrative and dialogue, the same in passion and in calm, if indeed Seneca can ever be said to be either passionate or calm. Its pauses come with monotonous regularity at the end of the line, diversified only by an ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... A tinny machine, in need of paint, short of oil, braked squeakingly as a horn squawked and the auto halted by the porch steps. Young Ed Bailey slung one leg over another disproportionate limb, glanced at the windows, rolled a cigarette and lit it. His aunt, tall, gaunt, clad in starched dress ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... with the talk of lumber. A brisk man with a red mustache was exhibiting a model of a machine to cut certain parts of machinery out of "two by fours." Another was describing a new shingle-mill he had ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... sing at a party. Last night, at the Simpsons', a worthy young man, who was staying there, sang some Schubert songs in a perfectly correct, weak, inexpressive voice, accompanying himself in a wooden and inanimate fashion—the whole thing might have been turned out by a machine. I was, I suppose, in a fretful mood. "Good God!" I thought to myself, "what is the meaning of this woeful performance?—a party of absurd dressed-up people, who have eaten and drunk too much, sitting ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... continually floated down to join them from Tuvvy's bench, where he was planing a piece of wood for Dennis; they were exactly like the flaxen hair of Maisie's favourite doll. Her serious gaze wandered on to the end of the barn, which was almost filled up by a great machine something like a gigantic grasshopper. It looked terribly strong with its iron limbs, although it was at rest, and she felt half afraid of it, though she had often seen it before. What was it, ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... fell dead in that costly battle. Stanley, who tried me in the Prefects' Room, took seven machine-gun bullets in his body, and died in a lighter as it approached the beach. Lancaster, who in less grand years would undoubtedly have bowled for Oxford and England, lay down on W. Beach and died. And White, the gentle giant—Moles ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... that, Frank," interposed Mr. Brewster, "because, for two reasons; in the first place, them Catholics are poor benighted heathen, and she wouldn't get out if she could—for she is a veiled nun; and the next place you'd get your neck into a certain machine called a garrote, or else make your cousin's place ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... hum of the helicopter over their heads continued. The little flying-machine was motionless. The air was still. There was no other ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the turrets fore and aft of her capacious funnel showed the muzzles of two big guns. I could see by my glass a whole wealth of armament in the foretop of her short mast forward; and high points in her fo'castle marked the spot where many other machine guns were ready for action. At her towering and lofty prow there was indicated clearly the curve of the ram which now ploughed the dark water and curdled it into the fountains of foam which fell upon her decks; while ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... "sportsmen." But the use of vigorous language brought them back to recognition of the seriousness of the work before them, and the discharge of the cargo proceeded hour after hour with the utmost rapidity and with the regularity of a well-oiled machine. The cars drew up beside the Mountjoy in an endless queue; each received its quota of bales according to its carrying capacity, and was despatched on its homeward journey ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... it's somewhat of a strain on my mind to imagine anyone building a robot-controlled machine as good as all that, and then giving the drive such poor protection that he can fall ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... in the wind. The small prayer-wheels, revolved by hand, are of two different kinds, and are made either of silver or copper. Those for home use are cylinders about six inches high. Inside these revolve on pivots the rolls of prayers which, by means of a projecting knob above the machine, the worshipper sets in motion. The prayers can be seen revolving inside through a square opening in the cylinder. The prayer-wheel in every-day use in Tibet is usually constructed of copper, sometimes of brass, and frequently entirely, or partly, of silver. The cylinder has two movable lids, ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... "But you're describing what happened. I asked you how the Twenties originated. How could any single man take a barbarian planet, lightly inhabited by half-mad hunters and alcoholic farmers, and turn it into a smooth-running social machine built around the artificial structure of the Twenties? It just couldn't ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... weather, a good word, a praise, a caress, draws me from a profound sadness from which I could not draw myself by any effort of meditation. What a machine is my soul, what an abyss of misery ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... however,' he said. 'Der salt water has spoiled them; but mine camera merely needs to dry out; und mine telescope, und mine static machine und Leyden jars—why, der water did not ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... at that!" returned Wingfold. "That would be scanned!—You would conceive the world as a sort of machine that goes for certain purposes—like a clock, for instance, whose duty it is to tell the time of the day?—Do ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... legions, with the accumulated vices of all the nations of the earth, which they had been learning for four hundred years. Society must needs resolve itself into its original elements when men would not make sacrifices, and so few belonged to their country. The machine was sure to break up at the first great shock. No state could stand with such an accumulation of wrongs, with such complicated and fatal diseases eating out the vitals of the empire. The house was built upon the sands. The army may have rallied under able generals, in ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Family" the divergence among our rulers is most marked. While both extremes cling like shipwrecked mariners to the water-logged theory of private ownership in the means of production, the one extreme, represented by the Roman Catholic church-machine, is seen to recede ever further back within the shell of orthodoxy, and the other extreme, represented by the pseudo-Darwinians, is seen to fly into ever wilder flights of heterodoxy on the matter of "Marriage and Divorce." ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... which the Roman always tended to play with the pawns of his business game, even when they were freemen and fellow-citizens. A man like Cato, who had sense and honesty enough to look after his own business, elaborated a machine-like system for governing his household, the aim of which was the maximum of profit with the minimum amount of humanity which is consistent with the attainment of such an end. The element of humanity is, however, accidental. There is no conscious appeal ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... animals lay down in the middle of the morning, he was often tired too, and then he would seat himself upon the head of one of the big bullocks, and hold on to the points of its horns; and while the animal lay chewing with a gentle vibration like a machine, he sat upon its head and shouted at the top of his voice songs about blighted affections ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... attempts, inventing a profusion of declensions and conjugations, but the language of man, with, as it seemed to me, its endless mass of grammatical forms, its hundreds of thousands of words and ponderous dictionaries, appeared to be such a colossal, and yet tricky, machine that many a time I exclaimed—'Away with dreams! this labour is beyond human powers!' But, in spite of all, I always returned ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 5 • Various
... from top to bottom, he rubbed his hands, a broad smile overspread his features, and he said joyfully, "This is just what I wanted! Ah, we shall get on together, Mr. Fogg and I! What a domestic and regular gentleman! A real machine; well, I don't mind serving ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... weak men had been left to hold the rear, and those remaining were not only well men, but strong and hardy, so that he had sixty thousand as good soldiers as ever trod the earth; better than any European soldiers, because they not only worked like a machine but the machine thought. European armies know very little what they are fighting for, and care less. Included in these sixty thousand troops, there were two small divisions of cavalry, numbering altogether about four thousand men. Hood had about thirty-five to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... the surplus nutriment. It is clear, then, that an animal of a lymphatic temperament, an indolent disposition, a low degree of nervous power, and a tendency to rapid growth, is the beau ideal of a "meat-manufacturing machine." Now, as the larger the lungs of an animal are, the greater is its capacity for "burning," or consuming its tissues, one might suppose that small lungs would be a desideratum in an ox, or other animal ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... and were more complex than a dozen clocks like that of Strasburgh. The external of the chariot was adorned with banners, and a superb festoon of laurel that formerly shaded me on horseback. And now, having given you a very concise description of my machine for travelling into Africa, which you must allow to be far superior to the apparatus of Monsieur Vaillant, I shall proceed to relate the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... very nicely now. She had learned to knit lace, and do some fancy work that was then called lap stitching. You pulled out some threads one way of the cloth, then took three and just lapped them over the next three, drawing your needle and thread through. Now a machine does it beautifully. ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... now in hospital and some of them are expected to die. The surgeons have examined some of the food left over from that supper and report finding ground glass in some pieces of the apple pie served as dessert. Later the captain of our machine-gun company, which has only one machine gun so far, had the piece taken into the company mess-room to demonstrate the mechanism to his lieutenants so that they might instruct the men. He found the mechanism of the piece so badly jammed that the machine gun refused to work. I have inspected ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... civilised blacks a racecourse is an earthly paradise; a jockey, a sort of demi-god. A lady shut up her house one race day, leaving "Zebra" in charge. Returning, she was amazed to find one of the big rooms open, and to hear the buzz of a sewing machine. Zebra, trouserless, scarcely took the trouble to look round as he informed her—"Me make 'em trouser all a same Yarraman (horse)." His desire for tight riding breeches was not restrained, and the consequence was in ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... down there. In the first place, I cannot protect you, and I don't think it is safe. In the second place, you are so well known and popular among our people that I am afraid you will produce an impression, and if you get away with it that will hurt our machine." ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... approached from both shores to reconnoitre, and the Ark had passed within fifty feet of one of them without its being discovered; the men it held lying at their length on the logs, so as to blend themselves and their slow moving machine with the water. When these two sets of adventurers drew near the castle they encountered each other, and after communicating their respective observations, they unhesitatingly approached the building. As had been expected, it was found empty. The rafts were immediately ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the nex' thing," said Bacon, as he shoved back his chair and glared around from under his bushy eyebrows. "We can't do too much this afternoon. That seeder's got t' be set up an' a lot o' seed-wheat cleaned up. You unload the machine while ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... mother, the unavoidable inference was that she was either a clumsy or a wicked girl, or both. She indeed felt dimly that she was a little of both. But she did not mind. Sitting there in the small, familiar room, close to the sewing-machine, the steel fender, the tarnished chandelier, and all the other daily objects which she at once detested and loved, sitting close to her silly mother who angered her, and yet in whom she recognized a quality that was mysteriously precious and admirable, staring through ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Surrey, and was taking it home to Laindon, dropped a log off his lorry, and I smashed into it and burst a tyre and broke half a dozen spokes in my front wheel, so I had to hunt round till I found a garage, and when I did I had to spend hours tinkering the machine up. The man who owned the place came down in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown and sat talking about his wife. She hadn't wanted to let him come down because it was so late. 'Is that a woman who'll help ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... car—a luxurious 40 h.p. machine, upholstered in green; there was Clem Sypher, pink and strong, appealing to her with his quick eyes; there was the sunshine and the breathless blue of the sky; and there was Septimus Dix, a faithful bodyguard. She wavered ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... Canada, and talked with them. What he thought of first for them was brooms, and basket-weaving and chair- caning, same as everybody does. But he found they had a perfect horror of those things. They said nobody bought such things except out of pity—they'd rather have the machine-made kind. And these men didn't want things bought of them out of pity. You see, they were big, well, strong, young fellows, like John McGuire here; and they were groping around, trying to find a way to live all those long years of darkness that they knew were ahead of them. They didn't have ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... may observe the surface of the ground to work very irregularly, although extensively, when the dateram begins to stir. On the other hand, the friction of the grains of sand tends to increase the difficulty of movement. The arrangement shown in the diagram, of a spring weighing-machine tied to the end of a lever, is that which I have used in testing the strain the dateram will resist, under different circumstances. The size of the dateram is not of much importance, it would be of still less importance in the theoretical case. Anything that is more than 4 inches long seems ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... indeed, difficult to avoid one, call it what you will, and quite as difficult to find a more absurd name than that adopted, unless, indeed, (why the machine goes but five miles an hour,) it is called a diligence from not being diligent, as the speaker of our House of Commons may be so designated from not speaking. It consists of three bodies, carries eighteen inside, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... allowed himself to degenerate into a mere machine. His proclamations were provided by those who employed him, but his soul was his own. Having cried a potato roup he would sometimes add a word of warning, such as, "I wudna advise ye, lads, to hae ony-thing to do wi' thae tatties; ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... Maybe it's an infernal machine. These anarchists are blowing up all the rich men in town nowadays. This may be the end of me. Ah!" He had cut the string with a carving knife and now exposed to view a box of cigars. There was a card attached. With some difficulty he made out: ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... practice brought me work, but no money, I was forced to look out for something else to do. By accident, I saw in a store a coiffure made of silk, in imitation of hair, which I bought; but I found, on examination, that I could not manufacture it, as it was machine-work. I went, therefore, to Mr. G., and proposed to establish a business with him, in which he should manufacture these coiffures, while I would sell them by wholesale to the merchants with whom I was acquainted. Mr. G. had completely ruined himself during the winter ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... beginning of a succession of strange phenomena in the heavens—cylinders, cones, pear-shaped monsters, even at last a thing of aluminium that glittered wonderfully, and that Grubb, through some confusion of ideas about armour plates, was inclined to consider a war machine. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... George?" asked that individual, leaning wearily against the machine; "Did he faint agin, or was he havin' ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... larger than any previously built, and fitted with two motors instead of one. As entirely separate power plants would be used, one motor would naturally run somewhat faster than the other, and it was freely predicted that the machine could not be handled. The first trial, however, proved that it would not only fly, but that after it was once in the air, one motor could be slowed down and even stopped and the machine continue to fly. This machine was the forerunner of the seaplane, used by the American, British ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... Machine Scouring.—Wool-scouring machinery has been brought to a high state of perfection by the successive efforts of many inventors, and by their means wool washing has been much simplified and improved. Wool-washing machinery ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... they were making a passage in a breeze. The course—forty-two miles or so—was very short for a fisherman, for one great thing in a fisherman is her power to stand a long drag. Day and night in and day and night out and driving all the time is the way a fisherman wants it. Any sort of racing machine could be built to stand a little hard going for a while. But that wouldn't be living through a long hard winter's gale on the Banks—one of those blows where wind and sea—and in shoal water at that—have ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... on the sea, we had a burrasca, and the captain had half a mind when half-way to Leghorn to turn back to Genoa. Passengers much frightened, including me, a little. A wretched Neapolitan boat, with a machine 'inclined to go to the devil every time the wind went anywhere,' as I heard a French gentleman on board say afterwards. Altogether we were so done up after eighteen hours of it, that we stayed at Leghorn instead of going on straight to Florence. Still, now I seem ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... plant, we observe how all the parts, the roots, the stem, the bark, and the leaves, are suited to the growth and nutriment of the whole; when we survey all the parts and members of a living animal; or when we examine any of the curious works of art—such as a clock, a ship, or any nice machine; the pleasure which we have in the survey, is wholly founded on this sense of beauty."—Blair's Rhet., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... execution and leave the artist free to think only of his purpose, as befits a real creator. Mr. Reinhart is at the enviable stage of knowing in perfection how; he has arrived at absolute facility and felicity. The machine goes of itself; it is no longer necessary to keep lifting the cover and pouring in the oil of fond encouragement: all the attention may go to the idea and the subject. It may, however, remain very interesting to others to know how the faculty was trained, the pipe was tuned. The ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... Sparta, and son of Agesilaus, when he saw a machine invented for the casting of stones and darts, exclaimed that it was the "grave of valour." The same story has been told of some knights on the first application of gunpowder; but the original anecdote is in Plutarch. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... for an accidental overhauling of the waste journals in his study he might not have known of the event for years. At this moment of reading the Duke had already been dead seven months. Alwyn could now no longer bind himself down to machine-made synecdoche, antithesis, and climax, being full of spontaneous specimens of all these rhetorical forms, which he dared not utter. Who shall wonder that his mind luxuriated in dreams of a sweet possibility now laid open for the first time these many years? for Emmeline was to him ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... insurrection on a great scale; and as the insurgents were white men, and were successful, they were, of course, right. Says Jefferson, in 1814, "What an incomprehensible machine is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty; and the next moment be deaf to all those motives, whose power supported him through his trials, and inflict on his fellow-man a bondage, ...
— An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, • Joshua Coffin
... again against your doing this," Air-Commodore Hargreaves said. "There's simply no sense in it. That bomb can be dropped without your personal supervision aboard, sir, and you're endangering yourself unnecessarily. That infernal-machine hasn't been tested or anything; it might even let go on the catapult when you try to drop it. And we simply can't afford to lose ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... blossom! Here was a young man to whose pleased ears I had rehearsed "Just before the Battle, Mother," at some weekly picnic; and now, in that tense moment of my life, he came (from the machine) to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... division, rule of three, practice, equations, extraction of roots, reduction, involution, evolution, estimation, approximation, interpolation, differentiation, integration. [Instruments] abacus, logometer^, slide rule, slipstick [Coll.], tallies, Napier's bones, calculating machine, difference engine, suan- pan^; adding machine; cash register; electronic calculator, calculator, computer; [people who calculate] arithmetician, calculator, abacist^, algebraist, mathematician; statistician, geometer; programmer; accountant, auditor. V. number, count, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the middle of the room—not like a living woman—like a machine waiting to be set in movement. Finding it useless to speak to her, he touched her (with a strange sensation of shrinking in him as he did it), and pointed to the ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... many a time, staring at his prize and wondering what to do with it. He had to have money. That was flat, final, admitting no argument. At a reasonable estimate, three thousand dollars were tied up in that machine. He could not afford to sell it for any less. Yet there did not seem to be a man in the country willing to pay three thousand dollars for it. It was a curiosity, a thing to come out and stare at, a thing to admire; but not to buy, even though Johnny had as an added inducement offered ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... into the Imperial treasuries. But as the account between the monarch and the subject was perpetually open, and as the renewal of the demand anticipated the perfect discharge of the preceding obligation, the weighty machine of the finances was moved by the same hands round the circle of its yearly revolution. Whatever was honorable or important in the administration of the revenue, was committed to the wisdom of the praefects, and their provincial representatives; the lucrative functions were claimed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... had a very quick passage from Dover to Calais, which we performed in three hours and twenty minutes, all of us extremely seasick, which must necessarily have happened, as my machine to prevent seasickness was not completed. We were glad to leave Dover, because we hated to be imposed upon; so were in high spirits at coming to Calais, where we were told that a little money would go ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... a very far seeing inventor and most ingenious. He made mechanical toys that "worked" when they were wound up. He even devised a miniature flying machine; however, history does not tell us whether it flew or not. He thought out the uses of steam as a motive ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... will enjoy more of it, although their fortune is but moderate than those do who own an exuberance of wealth, are deficient in those; and this utility any one who reflects may easily convince himself of; for whatsoever is external has its boundary, as a machine, and whatsoever is useful in its excess is either necessarily hurtful, or at best useless to the possessor; but every good quality of the soul the higher it is in degree, so much the more useful it is, if it is permitted on this subject to use the word useful as well as noble. It ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... dare to meet him in single combat. But lo! suddenly there came into the garden four wild-men all clad in green ivy bearing on their shoulders a great wooden horse. They placed it on its feet on the ground, and one of the wild-men said, "Let the knight who has heart for it mount this machine." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... old-fashioned Christmas, with Yule-logs and things." Not that I object to Yule-logs. I have some in my own Yule-shed, hand-sawn by myself, though I am not a good hand-sawyer. When I get about halfway through, the saw begins to gnash its teeth and groan at me. It seems to me that what is wanted is a machine for turning the logs round and round while one holds the saw steady. But there is something beautiful in burning the Yule-logs of one's own fashioning that makes one feel like the sculptor when at last the living beauty has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... the fireworks factory. To him, and to the chum who sat beside him on the seat of the electric runabout, it appeared that the blast had actually stopped the progress of the car. But perhaps that was more their imagination than anything else, for the machine swept on down the hill, at the foot of ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... says, "it is a bone that is rudimentary in birds (one might almost add a bone that is held in reserve in birds for this fate) which is destined to form in the centre the principal keel of this new machine" (p. 84). Again, with reference to the homology of the ossicles of the ear with the opercular bones in fish, "employing other resources equally hidden and rudimentary, Nature makes profitable use of the four tiny ossicles lodged in the auditory passage, and, raising them in fish ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... compliments on their culture. My position, you see, is entirely different; my private relations are as they were before, though in a public capacity I am now an active part of the great Imperial machine. If you care to inquire, you will find that my charge is not the least important in the government of Egypt. I control the cause-list, see that trials are properly conducted, keep a record of all proceedings and pleas, exercise censorship over forensic oratory, and edit the Emperor's ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... board. Some of them were so unmanageable that they had to be carried all the way down to the landing place. If English cattle possessed the strength and obstinate fury of these little animals, Copenhagen Fields would have to be removed farther from London, or the entrance swept by machine guns, for a charge of the cattle would clear the streets ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," of a young mulatto, George Harris, inventing a machine, is very solitary. The negroes, like a good many of their owners, are opposed to innovations. They like the good old way. The hot sun under which they were born, and the hotter one that lighted the paths of their ancestors, prejudices ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... fall!" snapped Balfe. "But there are no falls if the machine is built right and the aviator forgets ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... taken a fancy," he went on, "to possess the identical machine with which you accomplished your recent Mount McKinley record. It ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... with etheric sight he sees through that object in a manner similar to the way an x-ray penetrates opaque substances. If he looks at a sewing machine, he will perceive, first an outer casing; then, the works within, and behind both, the casing furthest away ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... saving—one who could do the errands for the shop and the drudgery for the house. There was no thought for, and regard toward the child to be exercised. He was to be to them only an economical little machine, very useful, though somewhat troublesome ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... still a boy, had nearly attained his full stature and weight. He was athletic in his tastes, and given to riding the velocipede of those days, a heavy, bonebreaking machine, moved not by pedals but by thrusting the feet against the ground. This Sumner kept in his room, carrying it painfully up the stairs, and practised on it with the result, his size and energy being so unusual, ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... decently furnished and clean. There was a sewing machine in the corner, and in both the windows hung wreaths of holly. Between the windows was a cleared space, where evidently the tree, ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... wrong in stating that the reinforcing rods can only receive their increments of stress when the concrete is in tension. Generally, the contrary happens. In the ordinary adhesion test, the block of concrete is held by the jaws of the machine and the rod is pulled out; the concrete ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... "Give me four more legs in addition to my own two, or a machine to make time longer than it is, and then I will take new patients-otherwise no! Tell the fellow. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... his partner. Had he not done so he would never have allowed himself to be dragged into business—Tibbetts & Payne, Manufacturers' Agents. Two years of it. Two years from the day on a Western irrigation dam when Payne had installed the cement machine that Tibbetts was selling. Two years—to Payne—of prison. And now his moment of decision ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... up with water,—no salt, no emptins, no nuthin'. 'T's the healthiest thing out o' jail. It's Natur's own food, an' the best eatin' I know. Raael good flavor, git 'em good, besides bein' puffickly harmless an' salubrious. I cal'late I've got enough to run the machine, an' keep it all trig up to concert-pitch, till I git ashore, ef so be th' old tub don't send us to Davy Jones's locker. Here, try one,—I've got a plenty,—an' you'll say they're fust-rate. Leave them 'ere pancakes, an' all that p'is'n truck. Arter you take one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... that the Wongolo ought to be able to put about ten thousand warriors in the field. That number under any sort of leadership, even though they were only armed with spears and swords, should wipe out the three hundred, in spite of the discipline and two or three machine-guns, by sheer weight of numbers. But, from what he had already heard, zu Pfeiffer had evidently caught them unprepared, wiped out a mass and secured a supernatural effect by destroying the idol. He remembered his talk on das Volkliches and his comment that zu Pfeiffer was unusually well informed ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... satisfactory and all were rejected. It is the unanimous opinion of the present Commission that the work can be done better, more cheaply, and more quickly by the Government than by private contractors. Fully 80 per cent of the entire plant needed for construction has been purchased or contracted for; machine shops have been erected and equipped for making all needed repairs to the plant; many thousands of employees have been secured; an effective organization has been perfected; a recruiting system is ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... a Riehle 100,000-lb. machine in the Experimental Engineering Laboratory of Tulane University of Louisiana. The machine is provided with a cast-iron beam for cross-bending tests. The distance between supports was 12 ft. The method of support ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 - Tests of Creosoted Timber, Paper No. 1168 • W. B. Gregory
... that the percentage of loss in units is greater in the unit known as the sacrifice battery than in any other branch of the fighting machine. ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... "You'd have to learn to be ambidextrous, so that you could keep two type-writing machines going at once; and, to be perfectly frank with you, I cannot even conjure up in my fancy a picture of you knocking out a tragedy with the right hand on one machine, while your left hand is fashioning a farce-comedy ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... will be used for the next volley. When the object is enclosed between two volleys, a mean of the elevation will be adopted as the correct range. The range may be obtained from a near-by battery or machine gun. This is the best method when available."—Small Arms ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... of the work of his own hands, establishing his very own identity? By contrast, how much better than working for someone else, furnishing the effort while someone else worked out the plans, losing his identity completely in an economic machine? He could start modestly, pay off as he went, out of the profits. And meantime, he could be living—real life. Only first he must get a little money to make a ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... upon the condition of Mary's clothing and feet. That was a matter of no concern to her. It was a seamstress, not a human being, that was before her—a machine, not thing of sensation. So she conducted her to a room in the third story, fronting east, against the cloudy and misty windows of which the wind and rain were driving. There was a damp, chilly feeling in the air of this room. Mrs. Lowe had a knit shawl drawn around her shoulders; ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... act as clerk, have resolved that their final sittings shall be held here, so that I have now no chance of being in London before spring. This is very unlucky, as Mr. Gifford proposes to wait for my arrival in town to set the great machine a-going. I shall write to him that this is impossible, and that I wish he would, with your assistance and that of his other friends, make up a list of the works which the first number is to contain, and consider what is the extent of the aid he will require from the North. The other circumstance ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... over to the big phonograph; but before the disc started, and while he was winding the machine, he heard her saying: ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... dangerous and imminent became that bloody conspiracy against his life. Force of police arriving, he recognized in them the conspirators, and laid about him hoarsely, fiercely, staringly, convulsively, foamingly. A humble machine, familiar to the conspirators and called by the expressive name of Stretcher, being unavoidably sent for, he was rendered a harmless bundle of torn rags by being strapped down upon it, with voice and consciousness gone out of him, and life fast going. As this machine was borne ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... turn over, dears?" she asked the little boys. This time she was in her usual control of the machine, regulated what she did from the first motion to the last, made her voice casual but not elaborately so, and put one arm around Mark's slim little shoulder with just the right degree of uninterest in those ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... matter, consisting of hundreds of diaphanous sheets of paper, each covered with my daughters' fashionable humpbacked handwriting. Hastings, my stenographer, became very expert at deciphering and transcribing it on the machine for my delectation. ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... volume was called "Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle," and this machine was the means of his becoming acquainted with Mr. Wakefield Damon, the odd gentleman who so often blessed things. On his motor-cycle ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... protective labor legislation for adult women which are not shared by men. There can be none in respect to the social harm of using the vitality, the charm, the strength, the happiness of minors, especially of potential mothers, to carry on the processes of machine-dominated systems of manufacture and business. It takes so little physical strength or mental power to become a cog in these rapidly revolving wheels. It means such a waste to thus use the years of youth, meant for education and development and meant to attract toward ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... are demons in the atmosphere, there are gods in the machine—("Paraschkine even goes so far as to maintain that there are more gods in the machine than have ever been taken from it.") While Peter stood still, pondering the demon's really rather cogent intervention, his eye was caught by something ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... being 25 pounds. Besides possessing several great advantages over other lifebelts, that of Admiral Ward is divided in the middle by a space, where the waistbelt is fastened. This permits of great freedom of action, and the whole machine is remarkably flexible. It is also very strong, forming a species of armour which protects the wearer from severe blows, and, moreover, helps to keep ...
— Battles with the Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... trick of it, is very quickly done—in about one-sixth of the time it would take to do it with the needle. It has the further advantage that it serves equally well for embroidery on a light or on a heavy stuff, and that it is most lasting. The misfortune is that the sewing machine has learnt to do something at once so like it and so mechanically even, as to discredit genuine hand-work, whether tambour work or chain-stitch. For all that, neither is to be despised. If they have often a mechanical appearance ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... steer this machine," murmured Bunny as he took his seat at the wheel. "I could, too, if they'd only let me. I wish ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on an Auto Tour • Laura Lee Hope
... an account of the punishing a woman "who by the violence of her tongue had made her house and neighborhood uncomfortable." She was ducked five times before she repented; "then cried piteously, 'Let me go! let me go! by God's help I'll sin so no more.' They then drew back y^e Machine, untied y^e Ropes, and let her walk home in her wetted Clothes a hopefully penitent woman." In the "American Historical Record," vol. i., will be found a very interesting account of this singular affair, with an engraving of the "ducking-stool." ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... number. At half-past eight o'clock a derrick, or mast of thirty feet in height, was erected and properly supported with guy-ropes, for suspending the block for raising the first principal beam of the beacon; and a winch machine was also bolted down to the rock ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... numberless articles which still remained on board. The most valuable things had already been got out. By the doctor's advice four main-deck tanks were landed, with the smith's forge and other apparatus pertaining to his trade, that the engineers might manufacture a machine for turning salt water into fresh. The sails and ropes were also sent on shore, and indeed every article likely to prove of service which the ship contained. The captain and Desmond, with several ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... really only at night now that he got any time to himself. During the day his time was his paper's, and he was compelled to spend the weary hours reading off results of races and other sporting items on the tape-machine. It was only at 6 p.m. that he could begin to devote himself to ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... purchases and would pitilessly send him to remote parts of France to save a trifle of cost. The shrewdness which all women more or less possess, not being employed in the service of her heart, had drifted into that of speculation. A business to pay for,—that thought was the mainspring which kept the machine going and gave it an ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... we've tried all the arm and foot movements and have been thumped on the back, and on the chest, and even on our heads," responded the young woman. "But I wished for a rowing machine. Rowing is ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... thudding of the artillery was heard above the roar of rifle volleys and the snarling rattle of the machine guns; and when this ceased there was a hurried sound, mingled with wailing, within the walls of the Emir's house; two of the guards passed quickly by the windows of the Hakim's quarters, and the Sheikh's ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... were handed to Jorian and Boris, and they drank as if one machine had been propelling their internal workings, throwing off the liquor with beautiful unanimity and then bringing their cups to the position of salute as if they had been musketoons at the new French drill. After which each of them, having finished, gave the little cough of ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... wheezy old hand-organ behind them began a familiar melody, and Peace beheld the player, a bent, white-haired, blind man, sitting in the shadow of a lamp-post on the edge of the curbing, slowly, patiently turning the crank of the little machine. She was at his side in an instant, staring into the sightless face with her great, brown, pitying eyes. His clothes were very shabby, his cheeks were pinched and pale; his cup, she noticed, stood empty on the top of the organ; his hands were terribly thin, and trembled as he played, so that ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... magnificent system of public instruction, the glory of the world, to turn out merely a vast machine for grinding down Young America, just as the system of middle-men, similarly organized, has ground down the Irish peasantry? Look at it! as now arranged, committees are responsible to the public, teachers to committees, pupils to teachers,—all pledged to extract a maximum crop ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... we saw it rock dangerously. In the middle of the road, ten feet from the culvert, the old woman struggled frantically to get her cart out of the way. The howl of the siren frightened her perhaps, for she lost her head and went to the wrong side. Then the shriek of the machine drowned the human scream ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... with a head for business could make it work. You've got to know how to manage your machine before you can make it go, of course. But that's not saying you have to drive it somewhere you don't want to get to. I don't say that that workman back there who was making such a beautiful job of polishing that maple could make it go. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... pioneer pastoralists ran bravely in the old days. An Australian drought can never be as disastrous in the twentieth century as it was in 1866; and South Australia, the Central State, has from the first been a pioneer in development as well as in exploration. The hum of the reaping machine first awoke the echoes in our wheatfields. The stump-jumping plough and the mullenicer which beats down the scrub or low bush so that it can be burnt, were South Australian inventions, copied elsewhere, which have turned land accounted worthless ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... England." Germany appealed to God to punish England, of course, because Germany herself could not. Both the appeal and the hatred are reactions of fear and a sense of impotence. Germany hated England because England was secure behind her navy, upon her island, beyond the reach of the war machine which is Germany's symbol of power and the compensation for her sense of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... who was now Senator, was based upon Tammany Hall and those elements in the New York Democracy that reformers were constantly attacking. He was believed to have defeated Cleveland in 1888 by entering into a deal with the Republican machine by which Harrison received the electoral and he the gubernatorial vote of New York. Early in 1892, as interest in Cleveland revived, Hill called a "snap" convention and secured the indorsement of New York for his own candidacy. ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... and there was a pause, while Dr. Spencer and the foreman advanced to the machine and adjusted it. The two youths then led forward the little girl, her innocent face and large blue eyes wearing a look of childish obedient solemnity, only half understanding what she did, yet knowing ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... coal, machine building, armaments, textiles and apparel, petroleum, cement, chemical fertilizers, footwear, toys, food processing, automobiles, consumer ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the time occupied by the shot in moving over the portion of the bore between two successive plugs. By the aid of a vernier, readings are made to thousandths of an inch, and the peripheral velocity of the disks being 1100 in. a second, the machine indicates portions of time rather less than one-millionth of a second; it is, in fact, practically correct to hundred-thousandths of a second (Phil. Trans., ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... awoke ill; furious neuralgia bored his temples like a gimlet; he tried to stop it with antipyrine, but this medicine in a large dose put his stomach out of order without abating the strokes of the machine which penetrated his skull. He wandered about his rooms, changing from one seat to another, coiling himself up in an arm-chair, getting up to lie down again, jumping from his bed in fits of sickness, upsetting his ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... of splintering and crunching began everywhere. A cloud of soot spilled down the chimney and across the hearth. A furrow ploughed across the floor, lifting a splinter as long and even as if it had been grooved out by a machine. ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... experiments on laboratory animals and by such discreet vivisections as are possible under our laws, there is no biological necessity for the superior acumen and circumspection of women. That is to say, it does not lie in any anatomical or physiological advantage. The essential feminine machine is no better than the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to the maladroitness of a much over-praised Creator. Women, it would seem, actually have smaller brains than men, though perhaps not in proportion to weight. Their nervous responses, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... like Miss Ransome, though I respect, admire, and fear her. Her emotions are carbolized, her heart is sterilized, her personality has the mathematical perfection of something turned out by a super-machine: like, say, the last word in machine-guns. None of the divine imperfection of your hand-wrought, artist-stuff there! I forgive her for existing, because she is intelligent and useful, two things that, without ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... length, and may be bought at all tackle shops, at the rate of a 1d., 1-1/2d. and 2d. per yard, according to quality; at so cheap a rate, it is scarcely worth while to make your own line, which you may do by the purchase of a little machine for twisting, or you may use goose quills, which is however but ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... other textual features and use algorithms to determine whether a text belongs to a certain category. These algorithms sometimes make reference to the position of a word within a text or its relative proximity to other words. The weights are usually determined by machine learning methods (often described as "artificial intelligence"). In this procedure, which resembles an automated form of trial and error, a system is given a "training set" consisting of documents preclassified into two or more groups, along with a set of features ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... stand it, and still have a nice little sum for Gusty," she added, and patting her future son-in-law upon the back she bade him "keep cool and let her run the machine." ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... excessive and unseasonable work. I most emphatically record my protest against the custom of public exhibitions, and the unnatural excitement which is oftentimes kept up to stimulate the susceptible thought-machine of the child and youth into abnormal activity. But these evils are not inseparable from mixed schools, nor do they belong exclusively to them. I have now in mind a school of girls, directed by women exclusively, where the girls have been for ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... apples, pears, figs, peaches, apricots, grapes, olives, gooseberries, currants, hops, gorse for fences, and English oaks; also many kinds of flowers. Around the farmyard there were stables, a thrashing-barn with its winnowing machine, a blacksmith's forge, and on the ground ploughshares and other tools: in the middle was that happy mixture of pigs and poultry, lying comfortably together, as in every English farmyard. At the distance of a few hundred yards, where the water of a little ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... as he did so, its smooth speed changed to a series of jarring jumps, each more emphatic than the last. It slowed down, then came to a halt. There was a thud, as the chauffeur jumped down. John heard him fumbling in the tool box. Presently the body of the machine was raised slightly as he got to work with the jack. John's muscles relaxed. He leaned back. Surely something could be made of this new development. But the hand that held the revolver never wavered. ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... golf or run automobiles whilst they were doing it; but with a condition of life where a few men have it all and the rest can only live if they have the work to do, why no one can do it for us; we have got to do it ourselves. We can't even allow a machine to do it, for every time we get the machine to do the work it takes the place of a man or two, or more, and they go out to beg or tramp or starve, as ...
— Industrial Conspiracies • Clarence S. Darrow
... those of the southern Indians, having a greater curvature on the outside of each shoe, one advantage of which is that when the foot rises the over-balanced side descends and throws off the snow. All the superiority of European art has been unable to improve the native contrivance of this useful machine. ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... me. "I do not know if I can explain. It is not quite clear to me. The robot knows. He is a reasoning machine. Wait...." She turned to the sphere. Its cilia fluttered in ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner |
