"Cycloid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... isochronous; that is, compelled it to make its oscillations of equal duration, whatever might be the arc described, by suspending the pendulum between two metallic curves c c', each one formed by an arc of a cycloid and against which the suspending cord must lie upon each forward or backward oscillation. We show this device in Fig. 151. In great oscillations, and by that we mean oscillations under a greater impulse, the pendulum would thus be shortened and the ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... simple law from a circle, which has played an important part at various epochs in the intellectual history of our race. A spot on the tire of a wheel running on a straight, level road, will describe in the air a series of peculiar arches, called the cycloid. The law of its formation is simple; the law of its curvature is also simple. The path in which the spot moves curves exactly in proportion to its nearness to the lowest point of the wheel. By the simplicity of its law, it ought, according to the canon, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time. Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... opposite the sun. And it should be known that it is none other than that curve which is described by the point E on the circumference of the circle EB, when that circle is made to roll within another whose semi-diameter is ED and whose centre is D. So that it is a kind of Cycloid, of which, however, the points can ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... curves; and passing lightly by the Conic Sections, the mathematicians of that day busied themselves in finding the areas, solids of revolution, tangents, etc., of all imaginable curves,—some of them remarkable enough. Such is the cycloid, first conceived by Galileo, and a stumbling-block and cause of contention among geometers long after he had left it, together with his system of the universe, undetermined. Descartes, Roberval, Pascal, became successively challengers or challenged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
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