"Gradient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them, the superior morale of his men would outweigh it. A short delay was necessary while the cavalry climbed the hill, exposed to the enemy's fire. But when the fight began, the Treviri tumbled headlong down the hill like a house falling. Some of our cavalry, who had ridden round by an easier gradient, captured several Belgic chieftains, ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... in the evening of the following day, having passed the time pleasantly in Paris, the train bore them swiftly beyond Pontarlier and down the steep gradient of the Gorges de l'Areuse towards Neuchatel. The Val de Travers, through which the railway slips across the wooded Jura into Switzerland, is like a winding corridor cleft deep between savage and precipitous walls. There ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... by the police':—a tacit confession of failure which this high-hearted, if contrarious couple were by no means minded to arrive at, now or ever. But there is no warning sign-post at the turn of the road; and already their feet were nearing it, without knowledge that its easy gradient slips into the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... the christener's ear: and, even as he spoke, the voice of a noising arose and droned from Spezzia, its hills, its villages, and its sea; the Boodah, only half-liberated, strained in travail; crashed from her bands; slipped down the greased gradient—plunged—and, gathering momentous way, went wading deep, deeper—like Behemoth run mad—amid a wrath of froths and a brawling of ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... averages twenty-one feet. In difficult places, such as along ravines, or where the road had to be cut into the rock, it is naturally less wide, but nowhere under fourteen feet. The gradient averages 1—20 to 1—24. At a very few points, however, it is as steep as 1 in 15. If the hill portion of the road is excepted, where, being in zig-zag, it has very sharp angles, a light railway could be laid upon it in a surprisingly short time and at no considerable ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... erection. The working speed of this line was restricted by the Board of Trade to ten miles an hour, which was readily obtained, although the gradients of the line were decidedly unfavorable, including an incline of two miles in length at a gradient of 1 in 38. It was intended to extend the line six miles beyond Bush Mills, in order to join it at Dervock station with the north of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... task growing heavier as they progressed, for the gradient became steeper, and they halted from time to time for a rest, the plan of using the bayonets being kept for a last resource. But there were compensations to make up for the severity of the toil, one of which was expressed by the travellers at one of ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... great advantage of accessibility to leaks and defects gained by building unenclosed aqueducts appealed strongly to the ancient Romans. They did not fully understand the technical difficulties involved in the "hydraulic mean gradient." No machinery was used to pump the water or raise it to an artificial level. A strip of land 15 ft. wide was left on either side of the aqueducts, and this land was defined at intervals by boundary stones. No trees were grown near the aqueduct, to avoid the risk of injuring the foundations, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... numbered over 200, was unable to travel with us and had to follow by a later train. In its early stages the journey, though similar to most of the kind, produced one formidable incident, for at the top of the steep gradient between Candas and Doullens the train snapped in half; its hind portion was left poised in a cutting for an hour, until two locomotives arrived to push it on to Doullens, whither the forward half, in gay ignorance, ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... the village of Harley brought the car within sight of a very steep hill, up which the road wound like a silver thread against the black slope. This was Harley Bank, one of the steepest of many stiff Shropshire hills, its gradient averaging ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... and more able, to order the whole of the soil. So then, as I followed it, it seemed to me to bear in itself, and in its contrast with untamed surroundings, the history and the character of this one nation out of the many which live by the tradition of Europe. As I followed it and saw its exact gradient, its hard and even surface, its square border stones, and, every hundred yards, its carved mark of the distance done, these elaborations, standing quite new among the tumbled rocks of a vague upland, made one certain ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... over the breast of the hill, and you have a delightful landscape picture, comprising almost everything which an artist would deem desirable for an effective painting, and a little to spare. There, nearly at the bottom of the gradient, stands the handsome old village church, with its tower and pinnacles, reaching up among the tall trees; and around it, a consecrated enclosure, guarding the monuments of the dead, which are mingled with melancholy shrubs, planted there by hands of mourners whose memories of the departed ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... the forest road, nearing our destination by a mile in each three minutes, we came to the only hill on the entire route which was considerable, both in extent and in degree of gradient. Doctor Castleton allowed the gait of his horses to slacken into a slow walk; and—ever nervous, ever active—he reached into the side pocket of his linen duster, and drew forth a small book, apparently ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... reconstruction of a whole district, formerly either squalid, over-blocked, and dilapidated in some parts, or oversteep and dangerous to traffic in others. But a short time before that same Holborn Valley was one of the most heartbreaking impediments to horse traffic in London, with a gradient on one side of one in eighteen, while opposite it was one in twenty. Thus everything on wheels, and every foot-passenger entering the City by the Holborn route, had to descend twenty-six feet to the Valley of the Fleet, and then ascend a ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... the Square again, frowning hard, his teeth set, and actually managed to swerve into King Street. Constance, in the parlour, saw an incomprehensible winged thing fly past the window. The cousins Povey sounded an alarm and protest and ran in pursuit; for the gradient of King Street is, in the strict sense, steep. Half-way down King Street Dick was travelling at twenty miles an hour, and heading straight for the church, as though he meant to disestablish it and perish. The main gate of the churchyard was ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... often attending a digression into byroads not listed in the road-book, for England is a country of many hilly sections. I had read only a few days before of the wreck of a large car in Derbyshire where the driver lost control of his machine on a gradient of one in three. The car dashed over the embankment, demolishing many yards of stone wall and coming to rest in a valley hundreds of feet beneath. And this was only one of several similar cases. Fortunately, ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... crytears cos fren Padney was took off in black bag? Of all de darkies Massa Pat was verra best. I never see the like since I was born. Tiens, tiens, but it is well sad, that, my faith, yes. O, get, rev on a gradient one in nine. Live axle drives are souped. Lay you two to one Jenatzy licks him ruddy well hollow. Jappies? High angle fire, inyah! Sunk by war specials. Be worse for him, says he, nor any Rooshian. Time all. There's eleven of them. Get ye gone. Forward, woozy wobblers! Night. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... remarkable, being a mere collection of dwellings for the accommodation of the miners and the employes; but the scenery in the neighbourhood is simply magnificent. In approaching Petroseny the railway rises one foot in forty, no inconsiderable gradient. ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... and Pastura had a theoretical capacity of 84 000 gal. per day. It delivers only 65,000 gal. per day. There are 5 miles of bored pipe on the upper end of this section. Pressure gaugings show a hydraulic gradient in excess of the theoretical on the bored pipe, whereas the stave pipe on the lower end carries the 65,000 gal. on a flatter gradient ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell
... reports that he has observed it under jack while it was not apparent on the coffee under other kinds of shade trees. But on hot westerly and southerly slopes, and especially where the soil is a bad retainer of moisture, and where the gradient is rather steep, jack may be used with advantage, as in such situations the heat is great and the light strong. I am therefore taking steps to remove jack by degrees from all but southerly and westerly exposures. I may add ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... grandest of lunar objects), has a deeply sunken floor, fringed with mountains rising some 12,000 feet above it, though they scarcely stand a fourth of this height above the plain on the west, which ascends with a very gentle gradient to the summit of the wall. Hence the contrast between the shadows of the peaks of the western wall on the floor at sunrise, and of the same peaks on the region west of the border at sunset is very marked. In Gassendi, Phocylides, and Wargentin we have ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... a long time the gradient ends, the avenue flattens out like a river, and widens as it pierces the town. Through the latticed boughs of the old plane trees—still naked on this last day of March—one glimpses the workmen's houses, ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... and that meant that all the old way had to be taken up and an entirely new one laid down. One thing I did envy this simple-minded enemy of ours, and that was the pleasure he must have experienced in doing one bit of damage. Towards one culvert the line sloped down in a long gradient, and on this a couple of trucks and a van had evidently been placed and allowed to run down to the culvert, where, the bridge being gone, they plunged into the gap. Think of the glorious smash! The trucks must have got up considerable speed. And picture the crowd waiting expectantly for ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... same map from memory. Measure the heights of a tree, telegraph pole and church steeple, describing method adopted. Measure width of a river, and distance apart of two objects a known distance away and unapproachable. Be able to measure a gradient, contours, conventional signs of ordnance survey ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... may still be called, comparatively, the narrow seas. The hundred-fathom line lies far beyond them; these waters, though thoroughly oceanic in character, are not oceanic in depth. We may regard the islands as the last upward thrust of the granitic backbone that runs, at a diminishing gradient, from Dartmoor to Land's End, while the submarine plateau follows a similar gradient. Structurally, therefore, these isles are a continuation of Land's End, but the granite has become less consistent and more ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... two miles to the top, but such a two miles to take a horse dray over. The gradient was not only very steep and rough, but it was covered with six to eighteen inches of snow, except in some few exposed parts where it had drifted off and left the surface nearly bare. There was no track to guide us beyond ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... set of rails—the distant, the home, and the starting. Their respective positions will be gathered from Fig. 92, which shows a station on a double line. Between the distant and the home an interval is allowed of 800 yards on the level, 1,000 yards on a falling gradient, and 600 yards on a rising gradient. The home stands near the approach end of the station, and the starting at the departure end of the platform. The last is sometimes reinforced by an "advance starting" signal some distance ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... bowlders and stony heaps whose unexpected existence would often imperil his balance, he managed to climb considerably higher. But his progress was necessarily slow. He kept as near as possible to the rocky ridge which had sheltered him; for on his other hand the ground sloped downwards in a steep gradient, and the treacherous snow might well conceal many a ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... ordinary wheels would be sufficient for all tractive purposes, I thought it better to avoid the complication involved in employing a large central wheel with a broad surface specially designed for hilly districts, and with which I had mounted a gradient of one ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... at the foremost carriage in alarm, so nearly was it upset in one of the ruts of the ill-kept road; but the rate at which they were going saved it, and they thundered along without accident to where the gradient grew ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... reached this spot, a marked change had come over her. Her pretty, even brows were slightly drawn together in an odd, thoughtful pucker. Her usually merry eyes were watchful and sober. It may have been the gradient of the hills, but somehow her gait had lost something of its buoyancy. Her steps were lagging, even hesitating, and, when she finally halted, it was almost ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... boilers, where their heat is absorbed and utilized. Forced draught, or in many cases, hot blast, is supplied from fans through a conduit commanding the whole of the cells. An inclined roadway, of as easy gradient as circumstances will admit, is provided for the conveyance of the refuse to the tipping platform, from which it is fed through feed-holes into the furnaces. In the installation of a destructor, the choice ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... station at Modder River, and that he started from there, with a guard of six men on his road to Cape Town. During the night as they drew near De Aar, his guards fell asleep, and our brave Commandant prepared to leave the train. He seized a favourable opportunity when the engine was climbing a steep gradient and jumped off. But the pace was fast enough to throw him to the ground, though fortunately he only sustained slight injury. When daylight came he hid himself. Having made out his bearings he began to make his way back on the following night. ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... call a "funicular railway" hauls you up a gradient of 1 in 1 3/4 from the station on the shore in ten minutes. At first the sensation on looking down is queer, but you soon think nothing of it. The air is very fine, the weather lovely, the feeding unexceptionable, and the only drawback consists in the "javelins," as old ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... constant could be varied at will by a simple electric field normal to the applied voltage gradient—a field which could be generated by a couple of dry cells if need be—and ranged from a hundred thousand to about three billion. For all practical purposes, here was ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... would suggest an explanation for the layer of Warp (an alluvial deposit of turbid lake waters) which partially covers the delta. The fierce torrents that poured into Lake Pickering down the steep gradient of this canon would require an exit of equal proportions, and it seems reasonable to suppose that the gorge at Kirkham Abbey was chiefly worn at the same time ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... of all, however, in many respects, was the revelation of the amazingly complete system of drainage with which the palace was provided. The gradient of the hill which underlay the domestic quarter of the building enabled the architect to arrange for a drainage system on a scale of completeness which is not only unparalleled in ancient times, but which it would be hard to match in Europe until a period as late as the ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... in other words, when an abrupt change of the field-conditions, that is, a sudden leap from light to dark or from dark to light, is introduced within this realm. In this case, clearly, the effect of the transverse field-gradient on such a leap will be different, depending on the relation between the directions of the two (see small arrows in Fig. i). Our eyes witness to this difference by seeing the colours of the blue pole of the colour-scale appear when the field-gradient is ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... the man behind me, when he had no more breath in his body, that saved us from being whirled round and carried back. Before one gets used to it, the sensation of struggling up a river where it descends a rocky channel at a rather steep gradient is a little bewildering. The flash of the water dazzles, and its rapid movement makes one giddy. There is no excitement, however, so exhilarating as that which comes of a hard battle with one of the forces of nature, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... on, relieved. Mechanically, my feet worked to and fro on the pedals. It was a gentle down-gradient now towards the town. I had no ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... answer, but urged the shrowk's flight upward, at such a steep gradient that they retained their seats with difficulty. The floor of the canyon, upheaved by some mighty subterranean force, could be heard, and almost felt, coming up after them, like a gigantic landslip in the wrong direction. The cliffs ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... Komaticks were racing and tearing down the gradient of the land to our camp, and all of us were out to see the finish. Kudlooktoo and Arkeo an even distance apart; and, heads up, tails up, a full five sledge-lengths ahead, with snowdust spinning free, the dog-team of the ever victorious Peary in the lead. The caravan came to ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... name of Acton's home, was situated just within the borders of Yorkshire. A single line of rails takes you from Lowbay Junction up the Westmoreland hills to the top of the heaviest gradient in the kingdom, and then hurtles you down into the little wayside station of Lansdale, the station ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... could not determine with any certainty, but he judged it to be a vehicle of some sort, a slow moving vehicle; and if so, it was of necessity travelling over a road, and that road, although it was indistinguishable from where Dick stood, was one of very easy gradient, judging from the movements of the object upon it. Satisfied now that he had made an important discovery, the lad carefully noted his surroundings, noted with equal care a number of objects which would enable him to fix the position of the road, and closing his glasses, walked briskly ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... for anything beyond a long cool drink. Here I rested for an hour or so, amused by the bustle at the small wayside station we had just built, and idly watching our tiny construction engine forging its way, with a great deal of clanking and puffing, up a steep gradient just across the river. It was touch-and-go whether it would manage to get its heavy load of rails and sleepers to the top of the incline or not, and I became so interested in the contest between steam and friction and gravity, that I did not notice that a visitor ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... scores of shells hurrying all together through the air. Every five minutes or so a certain howitzer, tucked into some hiding-place, vents its periodical growl, and we can hear the huge projectile climbing slowly, up his steep gradient with a hiss like that of water from a fire-hose. There is some other heavy shell which passes us also, somewhere in the middle of his flight. We cannot distinguish the report of the gun, and we do not hear the shell burst; but at regular intervals we can quite distinctly hear ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... with the river on the north side round the immense curve which the Rio Grande describes in that particular section. We passed Sacramento (elev. 1,850 ft.), and, in numerous curves, the railway rose by a gradient of 31/2 per cent among hills seemingly worn out by torrential rains into rounded shapes with huge gaps between. We left the Rio Grande, there about 100 yards wide with thickly wooded banks and islands. At Conquista ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... 25 some experiments were made before the Society of Civil Engineers with the tricycle above described, and on that occasion it traversed the Rue Girardon and the Rue de Norvino to Montmartre (streets in which the gradient rises to 15 centimeters per meter) with a velocity of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... from the house to the main road sloped obliquely along the face of the hill, descending by a tolerably easy gradient for a distance of about a mile before it joined the road at a depth of some three hundred feet below the level of the house. Upon reaching the road, which, be it remembered, completely encircled the lake, Escombe had yet another opportunity ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... foot of the hill the road zigzags, making a fairly easy gradient to the summit, on which stands a house whose owner kindly allows visitors to walk about his grounds and participate in the view. When riding, we followed the road that continues on the right for several miles, ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... weather. In the shade the persisting night-frost told of the great height of the marvellous amphitheatre which lay before us. The valley by which we had mounted the previous night abruptly abandons its steep gradient and gorge-like character, and widens into a flat, boulder-strewn plain, a little over a mile in diameter, surrounded, except for the narrow gap by which we had entered, by the steep, rocky sides of huge mountains. At the far end of the plain, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... the cushions and glanced at me with a quizzical smile. The big, up-to-date car which Colonel Menendez had placed at our disposal was surmounting a steep Surrey lane as though no gradient ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... engineer's skill. About midway up the mountains the builders came to a solid mass of rock, which presented a barrier that to a surface road was impassable. They determined to tunnel it, and, after an enormous expenditure of labor, finished an inclined tunnel 225 feet in length, of the same gradient as the road. A gorge in the side of the mountain where a small stream, the Schnurtobel, had cut itself a passage also hindered their way, and was crossed by a bridge of lattice girder work in three spans, each 85 feet long. The entire roadbed, from beginning to end, was cut ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various |
