"Zero" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lose the use of their limbs, which shrink and shrivel away. The agony of their cramped position is beyond the power of words to describe. Even in winter, when the temperature drops, as it sometimes does, to sixty degrees below zero, they are given only a single sheepskin for covering. How it is possible to live in indescribable filth, half-fed, well-nigh frozen in winter, and suffering the tortures of the damned, is beyond my ken—only a ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... energy. The moon was in her second quarter, slightly filmed with very high thin clouds, that disappeared as night advanced, leaving the sky and stars in all their lustre. A sharp frost, sinking to three degrees above zero Fahrenheit, with a fine pure wind, such wind as here they call 'the mountain breath.' We drove to Wolfgang in a two-horse sledge, four of us inside, and our two Christians on the box. Up there, where the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... tinsel, smudge of toy candle, crackle of wrapping paper, that my particular brand of brain and ink can conjure up on a single keyboard! And very large-sized dogs shall romp through every page! And the mercury shiver perpetually in the vicinity of zero! And every foot of earth be crusty-brown and bare with no white snow at all till the very last moment when you'd just about given up hope! And all the heart of the ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... hours. When the snow finally ceased falling the cold increased until Neale guessed the temperature might be forty degrees below zero. The trapper claimed sixty. It was necessary to stay ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... rained for a week down at Shrimpton; 'Tis zero or less in the shade; You can paddle your feet in the principal street And bathe on the stony parade; But still on our holiday pleasures No thoughts of discomfort intrude, As we whisper, "This sight is a bit of all right," For the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... cold that the trees about the fort froze hard to their centres. In cutting firewood the axes splintered as against stone. In the officers' room the thermometer, sixteen feet from the log fire, marked as low as fifteen degrees below zero in the day and forty below at night. For food the party lived on deer's meat with a little fish, tea twice a day (without sugar), and on Sunday a cup of chocolate as the luxury of the week to every man. But, undismayed by cold and hardship, ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... and women may contract to marry is difficult to determine. But if we are, as far as possible, to put women on an equality with men, if we are to insist upon a universally educated population, and if we are seeking to reduce the infantile death-rate to zero, it must be much higher than it is in any terrestrial State. The woman should be at least one-and-twenty; ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... filled the station of the Brest railroad. Threatened by police convoy and transportation prison and having failed to obtain a reprieve, they had made up their mind to leave, despite a temperature of thirty degrees below zero. Fate, it would seem, wanted to play a practical joke on them. At the representations of the police commissioner-in-chief, the governor-general of Moscow had ordered to stop the expulsions until the great colds had passed, but ... the order was not published until the expulsion ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... taken passage in the swift-sailing caravel, in order to be able to reach Lima before the vessel containing the prisoners. Ned had, in confidence, in his talks with him, informed him that he still hoped, although his hopes had now fallen almost to zero from the long tarrying of the fleet, that the English admiral would arrive; and that he should be able to go on board, and so rejoin his countrymen. This expectation, indeed, it was which had prevented Ned and Tom making their escape, when they could have done so, and taking to the mountains; ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... closed up like an iron trap, and before they knew it they were caught in the jam of ice and fighting for their lives. They landed on a wooded island after a desperate struggle and went into camp with the thermometer thirty below zero. But what of that? They were now in the gold belt. After six months of incessant toil, of hope deferred, they were at last on the spot ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... symbolising and teaching the most marvellous facts in religion, sociology, and astronomy. It is not a tomb, nor granary, nor temple, but a pillar and witness unto the Lord of hosts. Think of a few facts. 1. Its location, the centre of the land surface of the whole earth. Hence the best zero point on earth for meridianal and latitudinal calculations. Central to clime—here is no rust, moss, nor frosts to destroy, nor earthquake—a well-chosen spot for such a pillar. 2. Its form and size—symbolising the earth ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... is one big zero, for according to my way of thinking there is nothing that can make wholly unhappy an individual ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... she inquired. "Just now I heard the flaxen-haired croupier call out 'zero!' And why does he keep raking in all the money that is on the table? To think that he should grab the whole pile for himself! ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... railroad had been repaired up to Knoxville and out east to Strawberry Plains. I went by rail therefore to Knoxville, where I remained for several days. General John G. Foster was then commanding the Department of the Ohio. It was an intensely cold winter, the thermometer being down as low as zero every morning for more than a week while I was at Knoxville and on my way from there on horseback to Lexington, Kentucky, the first point where I could reach rail to carry me back to my ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... High northern cattle country with purple sage deep blanketed in snow, with rarefied air below the zero mark, with sky the purest, most crystalline deep sapphire, and Lost Chief Valley, high perched in the ranges, silently awaiting ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... the summer surplus to keep the winter storeroom well supplied like a squirrel's. Such thrift is the more necessary when a clamorous, hungry family of young jays must be reared while the thermometer is often as low as thirty degrees below zero at the end of March. How eggs are ever hatched at all in a temperature calculated to freeze any sitting bird stiff, is one of the mysteries of the woods. And yet four or five fluffy little jays, that look as if they were dressed ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... that the degree of fertility, both of first crosses and of hybrids, graduates from zero to perfect fertility. It is surprising in how many curious ways this gradation can be shown to exist; but only the barest outline of the facts can here be given. When pollen from a plant of one family is placed on the stigma of ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... is zero?" she inquired. "Just now I heard the flaxen-haired croupier call out 'zero!' And why does he keep raking in all the money that is on the table? To think that he should grab the whole pile for ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... scientific kite-flying is. Many men of distinction have devoted years of their best energies to experiments with kites. Mr. Eddy himself is a scientist first, last, and always; for the sake of a new observation he will send up a tandem of kites when the thermometer is below zero, or stand half a night at his reeling apparatus, ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... home ... house on a sunny hill ... Gone like a flickered page: Time soon now ... zero ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... down. But they heated the blankets and that made my bed snug and soon I was in the land of dreams. During the night I awoke. The wind had lulled. The canopy above was clear, cold, starry, beautiful. When we rolled out the mercury showed ten above zero. Perhaps looking at the thermometer made us feel colder, but in any event we would have had to move about to keep warm. I built a fire and my hands were blocks of ice when ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... be taken under Articles 28, 29, 30, 32, 33 and 51, the votes in the Governing Council shall be weighted according to the national central banks' shares in the subscribed capital of the ECB. The weight of the votes of the members of the Executive Board shall be zero. A decision requiring a qualified majority shall be adopted if the votes cast in favour represent at least two thirds of the subscribed capital of the ECB and represent at least half of the shareholders. If a Governor ...
— The Treaty of the European Union, Maastricht Treaty, 7th February, 1992 • European Union
... steady. I acted promptly. I called a cab and told the driver to run his hoss at a friteful rate of speed to my lodgins, but it wasn't of no avale. I had orful cramps, and my appytite left me, and my pults went down to 10 degrees below zero. But by careful nussin I shall no doubt recover speedy, if the present sparklin ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 5 • Charles Farrar Browne
... snow six inches deep, and from rain and sleet and thaw and freeze, has formed a hard crust, so as to make bad traveling—in the roads icy and slippery. To-day cloudy, damp and cool. A few days ago the mercury reached 8 degrees below zero, the lowest of the season. It is very hard on stock, and many of the cattle are without shelter, as usual. Accept New Year greetings for all THE ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... true, supposing it to be true, he makes a misstatement, but he does not lie; or, again, if he speaks an untruth playfully where no deception is wrought or intended, as by saying, when the mercury is below zero, that it is "good summer weather," there is no ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... whole nation, he did nothing of what his position involved. On the contrary, he plundered the whole nation for his own individual advantage. In the patriarchal relation that hypocritically concealed the slavery of the worker, the latter must have remained an intellectual zero, totally ignorant of his own interest, a mere private individual. Only when estranged from his employer, when convinced that the sole bond between employer and employe is the bond of pecuniary profit, when the sentimental bond between them, which stood not ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... chlorine in its odor, but is more offensive. At common temperatures it is a very volatile liquid, of a deep red color, and with a specific gravity of 3, being one of the heaviest fluids known. Sulphuric acid floats on its surface, and is used to prevent its escape. At zero it freezes into a brittle solid. A few drops in a large flask will fill the whole vessel when slightly warmed, with blood red vapors, which have a density of nearly 6.00, air being one. It is a non-conductor of electricity, and suffers no change of properties from heat, or any ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... "Zero hour is 5.10 A.M.," he began, "and here is the part of your orders that has gone astray. I can't give you this copy. Will you take the ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... he whispered. "It is against usage to use these whistles for anything but the command to go over the top at 'zero.' Necessity, however, ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... "Oh, there's a wind like a knife—and look at my shoe—in I went, right through the ice! Oh, Aunt Kate, let me stay here!" and locking both slender arms about the older woman's neck, she dropped her dark, shining head upon her breast like a storm-blown bird. "It's four below zero in Broadway this minute," she added, looking sidewise under her ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... rights, and privileges and opportunities enjoyed by the lowest of the favored race. They were denied equality in the public school. The principle of popular education had no application to a class which was not of the people, a class which the common sentiment of a Christian nation had placed at the zero point of political values, and meant to keep forever at that point. Entrance to the trades were barred to the blacks. What did they want with such things where there was no white trash so forgetful of his superiority as to consent to work by their side. Nowhere were they allowed the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... chickadee is never so lively as in clear, cold weather;—not that he is absolutely insensible to cold; for on those days, rare in this neighborhood, when the mercury falls to fifteen degrees or more below zero, the chickadee shows by his behavior that he, too, feels it to be an exceptional state of things. Of such a morning I have seen a small flock of them collected on the sunny side of a thick hemlock, rather silent and quiet, with ruffled plumage, like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... tide against them, shipped a sea every moment, which the wind threw against the carcass of the corporal, who was now quite exhausted with more than four hours' exposure to a wintry night, the temperature being nearly down to zero. All the corporal's stoicism was gone; he talked wildly, crouched and gibbered in his fear, when he was suddenly roused by a heavy shock. He raised his head, which had sunk upon his chest, and beheld ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... trouble is that a D-H reactor tries. Mathematically, it was assumed that the resulting nucleus did exist—for an infinitesimal instant of time. Literally, mathematically, infinitesimal—so close to zero that it would be utterly impossible to measure it. Someone had dubbed the hypothetical stuff ...
— The Bramble Bush • Gordon Randall Garrett
... correlation is a number intended to indicate the degree of similarity between two things, or the extent to which one moves with the other. If this coefficient is unity, or 1, it indicates that the two things are similar in all respects, while if it be zero, or 0, it indicates that there is no resemblance between them. The study of correlation is a first step to the study of causation, because, until we know to what extent two things move together, it ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... neighborhood also, except a detachment at New Market, and another small one at the signal-station on Three Top Mountain. The winter was a most severe one, snow falling frequently to the depth of several inches, and the mercury often sinking below zero. The rigor of the season was very much against the success of any mounted operations, but General Grant being very desirous to have the railroads broken up about Gordonsville and Charlottesville, on the 19th of December I started the cavalry ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... to me at table, the famous General Changarnier, who my other neighbor said had one foot in the grave and the other dans le plat. He was so old and thin and bony that if his uniform had not kept him up he would have crumbled together before my eyes, and have become a zero instead of a hero. However, he kept together while dinner lasted, for which I was thankful, and I returned him safely to posterity and to ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... children and you are almost never at home.' She left me before I could reply, almost before I could think what to reply. I was just home from helping a pastor in Wisconsin, it was thirty-six degrees below zero the day I left, and I had another engagement in Maine for the next week. I was very little at home, and my children did need a mother. I had not thought whether I needed a wife or not; I was ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... situation worsened in 2001 with the widening of spreads on Argentine bonds, massive withdrawals from the banks, and a further decline in consumer and investor confidence. Government efforts to achieve a "zero deficit," to stabilize the banking system, and to restore economic growth proved inadequate in the face of the mounting economic problems. The peso's peg to the dollar was abandoned in January 2002, and the peso was floated in February; ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the care of a wife whom he lately married, and who does not care for him, and he will die before his marble palace is finished. There are no prettinesses, flowers, &c., about these fine houses, perhaps accounted for by the forty or fifty degrees below zero which they sometimes enjoy at Chicago. After six miles driving we got to the Piggery, &c., and the least said about that the better; it is certainly wonderful, but disgusting—the most interesting parts were the ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... the most rugged passes of the north Asiatic mountains; they floated in skin canoes down the great rivers of the north; slept in the smoky pologs of the Siberian Chukchis (chook'-chees); and camped out upon desolate northern plains in temperatures of 50 deg. and 60 deg. below zero. The poles which they erected and the houses which they built now stand alone in an encircling wilderness,—the only results of their three years' labour and suffering, and the only monuments of an ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... it has been shining continuously for more than two hundred hours. On the other hand, the coldest parts of the moon's surface, when the sun has only just risen after a night of three hundred and forty hours, must have a temperature more than a hundred degrees below zero. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... much in strength and vigor, and weighed 175 pounds for the first and only time in my life. November was windy, stormy and cold, but in December the weather was settled and pleasant. During the winter the mercury a few times went below zero; otherwise the climate was delightful. The warm sunshine of the last half of April melted the snow, thawed the ground and brought a supply of water for the mill, even before the big ditch began to run. We soon began crushing the piles of quartz that ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... rashers of real homefed on the fire-none of your foreign-suggested a genial refreshment and resistance to antagonistic elements. Nor was it, granting health, granting a sharp night—the temperature at least fifteen below zero—an excessive boast for a man to say he could go on eating ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... northerly gale had given place to light westerly breezes on the 6th. The pack seemed to be more solid than ever. It stretched almost unbroken to the horizon in every direction, and the situation was made worse by very low temperatures in succeeding days. The temperature was down to zero on the night of the 7th and was two degrees below zero on the 8th. This cold spell in midsummer was most unfortunate from our point of view, since it cemented the pack and tightened the grip of the ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... index of sense is at zero, Use words that run smoothly, whatever they mean; Leander and Lilian and Lillibullero Are much the same ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... important. It is conceivable that, if British influence had been powerful at Berlin, a spirited declaration would have had some effect at that Court. Unfortunately our influence had sunk to zero since the Oczakoff fiasco of 1791. Moreover, the Prussian Government had by that time decided to break with France. Her envoys were dismissed from Berlin in the first week of June, and it is probable that Pitt and Grenville by 18th June knew ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... same diameter throughout. A graduated scale passes along the whole length of the tube, and the height of the barometer is ascertained by taking the difference of the readings of the upper and lower limbs respectively. This instrument may also be read by bringing the zero-point of the graduated scale to the level of the surface of the lower limb by means of a screw, and reading off the height at once from the surface of the upper limb. This barometer requires no correction ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... stiff clay. The Wimmera. Difficult passage of its five branches. Ascend Mount Zero. Circular lake, brackish water. The Wimmera in a united channel. Lose this river. Ascend Mount Arapiles. Mr. Stapylton's excursion northward. Salt lakes. Green Hill lake. Mitre lake. Relinquish the pursuit of the Wimmera. The party travels to the south-west. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... Rebecca, considering these things, that their position was but a precarious one, and that, even although they paid scarcely anybody, their little capital would end one day by dwindling into zero. "Gambling," she would say, "dear, is good to help your income, but not as an income itself. Some day people may be tired of play, and then where are we?" Rawdon acquiesced in the justice of her opinion; ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... much light as enabled them to read small print, when held towards the south, and to walk comfortably for two hours. Excessive cold, as indicated by the thermometer, took place in January: it then sunk from 30 deg. to 40 deg. below Zero: on the 11th of this month it was at 49 deg.; yet no disease, or even pain or inconvenience was felt in consequence of this most excessive cold, provided the proper precautions were used; nor did any complaint arise from the extreme and rapid ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... womanly quarrels. These disputes chiefly occurred when Ormond distributed gifts of calico, beads, tobacco, pipes and looking-glasses. If the slightest preference or inequality was shown, adieu to order. Unga-golah descended below zero! The favorite wife, outraged by her neglected authority, became furious; and, for a season, pandemonium ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... many of the events planned for the second inauguration to be abandoned. The thermometer did not rise much above zero all day, persuading many to avoid the ceremony on the East Portico of the Capitol. The oath of office was administered by Chief Justice Salmon Chase. A parade and a display of fireworks were featured later that day, as well as a ball in a temporary wooden structure on Judiciary ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... later. Bruce Gordon stood in the motley crowd inside the barnlike room where Fats ran a bar along one wall, and filled the rest of the space with assorted tables—all worn. Gordon was sweating slightly as he stood at the roulette table, where both zero and double-zero ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... point," explained the Doctor, "they have about eight months of winter with a thermometer that drops far below zero. It may well be considered a part of the Arctic. Yet, as you see, they have tigers there; indeed, I am told they are not at all uncommon. So why not up here?" No one had a ready answer, and at last the ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... became excessively cold, the mercury often going thirty-two degrees below zero. Notwithstanding this, however, the Indians kept up their outdoor sports, one favorite game of which resembled billiards. But instead of a table, the players had an open flooring, about fifty yards long, and the balls were rings of stone, shot along the flooring by means of sticks like billiard-cues. ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... to our forests. Perhaps it is not generally known that the persimmon, so well remembered by old campaigners in Virginia, will grow readily in this latitude. There are forests of this tree around Paterson, N. J., and it has been known to endure twenty- seven degrees below zero. It is a handsome tree at any season, and its fruit in November caused much straggling from our line of march in the South. Then there is our clean-boled, graceful beech, whose smooth white bark has received so many tender ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... by n 1, n 2, n 3, etc. males, the sum of m n remaining constant, but one of the sexes being partly permuted into the other. The ultimate conclusion even cannot be disregarded: we must admit a set of eggs represented by m - m, or zero, females and of n m males, one of the sexes being completely replaced by the other. Conversely, it must be possible for the feminine series to be augmented from the masculine series to the extent of absorbing it entirely. It was to solve ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... emptiness they could be. Either they'd be safe or they would not. But the only way to get a space ship a safe enough distance from Earth was to make a Space Platform as a starting point. Then a ship could shoot away from Earth with effectively zero gravity and full fuel tanks. The Platform should be built so civilization could ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... frequent—the reader's fainting spirits are repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... congenial in regions in which the plant thrives without the aid of man. A few varieties of native grapes fare badly in the winter's cold of northern grape regions, and the tender Vinifera vine is at the mercy of the winter wherever the mercury goes below zero. In cold climates, therefore, care must be exercised in selecting hardy varieties and in following careful cultural methods with the tender sorts. If other climatic conditions are favorable, however, winter-killing is not an unsurmountable difficulty, since the grape ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... And granted, as you imagined, a whole composed of a thousand points, if we divide any part of this quantity of a thousand, we can very well say that this part shall equal its whole; and this we can prove by zero, or naught, that is, the tenth figure of arithmetic, which is represented by a cipher as being nothing, and placed after unity it will signify 10, and if two ciphers are placed after unity it will signify 100, and thus the number will go on increasing by ten to infinity whenever a cipher ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... a full cold bath every morning before she went to her work, even though the water was chiefly broken ice; and we did the same whenever we could be resolute enough. It required both nerve and will to do this at five o'clock on a zero morning, in a room without a fire; but it helped us to harden ourselves, while we formed a good habit. The working-day in winter began at the very earliest daylight, and ended at half-past ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... down the chimney, our stockings were pinned on a broomstick, laid across two chairs in front of the fireplace. We retired on Christmas Eve with the most pleasing anticipations of what would be in our stockings next morning. The thermometer in that latitude was often twenty degrees below zero, yet, bright and early, we would run downstairs in our bare feet over the cold floors to carry stockings, broom, etc., to the nursery. The gorgeous presents that St. Nicholas now distributes show that he, too, has been growing up with the country. The ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... perhaps, point out that, in all announcements of the results of drawings, the '0' or 'zero,' which for some reason invariably precedes the number of ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... the Boys' Race arrived, a day clear, and beautiful, and only a degree or two below zero, it seemed as if all of Nome had decided to celebrate the momentous occasion; going in crowds to the starting place, which was a broad, open thoroughfare on the outskirts of town. Those especially interested in the individual teams gathered at the various kennels ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... party, shivered as he looked up from his notebook. "I'd just as soon spend it in a liquid air tank!" he averred. "These eighty-below zero summer nights are plenty ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... said because the statements of the writer have already been questioned in one or two details. He says that the party experienced such cold weather as was almost without precedent in Arctic travel, the temperature falling to seventy-one degrees below zero. He says that the party killed more than five hundred reindeer, besides musk-oxen, bears, walrus, and seal, in regions where Rae and McClintock could scarcely find game at all, and where the crews of the 'Erebus' ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... come too and she said of course Bobby can come, Bobby's a nice dog, so we went in to eat lunch. Mommy was talking real fast about what fun it was to play in the barn and was I sure I wasn't too cold because it was below zero outside and the radio said a snowstorm was coming, but she didn't say anything about Bobby and me being out in the barn. She was talking so fast I couldn't hear what she was thinking except for little bits while she set my lunch on the ...
— My Friend Bobby • Alan Edward Nourse
... becomes an enormous sphere, it is still necessary that the starting-point shall not have been NIL. The big ball implies the little ball, as small as you please. Now, in harking back to the origin of these acquired habits, if I interrogate the possibilities I obtain zero as the only answer. If the animal does not know its trade thoroughly, if it has to acquire something, all the more if it has to acquire everything, it perishes: that is inevitable; without the little snow-ball the big snow-ball cannot be rolled. If it has nothing to ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... to retire upon. His children cannot be sent to school; for before their bones are hardened they must get to work lest they starve. The man, strong and able-bodied, works for a shilling or two a day, and the woman shivering over her little pan of coals, when the mercury drops far below zero, after her hungry children have wailed themselves to sleep, sews by the dim light of her lonely candle, for a bare pittance, selling her life to him who bargained only for ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... to the object aimed at. I remember a man of success who meant to break up housekeeping and go to Europe on a matter of business. This was the first of January. The fact that the weather suddenly turned cold to the extent of thirty degrees below zero did not seem to attract his attention. He was absent-minded on that question! When it came to going out to hire an expressman to haul his effects to a storehouse he found no one would venture out with his horse until the thermometer should rise, and his astonishment ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... that shall succeed the highest curve of development; of life ending where it began in the depths of the sea, as the initial energy of the solar system is dissipated and the material of it returns to rest at the temperature of the absolute zero. And the picture is made more horrible to the imaginative by the wonder whether the summit of the evolutionary curve has not already been reached—or it may be passed in the days of the ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... the buzz and hum and clink; By night one cannot sleep a wink, There is no time to stop or think, One half forgets to eat or drink, One's brains are knotted in a kink, One always lives upon the brink Of "happenings" that strike one pink. One day the dollars gaily chink, The next your funds to zero shrink. And yet I'm such a perfect ninc- Ompoop I cannot break the link That binds me to the Street ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... flashing snow, with here and there trees sticking out of it, and strange red morning lights in the sky behind it, and sweeping winds across it, and in the sunset the white hillsides slowly changed to a mauve pink. It was a scene of wonderful beauty. But the temperature was ten degrees below zero one day at noon, and the next day twenty-four below zero at 9 a.m. and nine above ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... to sustain her spirits so far, dropped to zero at this bad news. There she was, penniless, in a strange town; and how could she get through all the long, weary hours until the evening? Gulping down a lump in her throat, she asked the sailor if the cargo vessel were ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... Iceland is 39° F., in the central district 36° F., while in the north it is rarely above freezing point. During the winter of '80 and '81, when we were having what we thought great cold in England, the thermometer in Iceland was standing at 25° below zero, and polar bears were enjoying their gambols on its northern shores, having drifted thither on ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... silently, with many thoughts in common, but without the interchange of a spoken word. The stern, forbidding aspect of that iron coast increased the gloom which had settled on my brain. Its ramparts of lonely sea-drenched crags depressed me below the mental zero that was now habitual with me. The sun went down in a red glare, which moved me not. The short twilight passed quickly, but I noticed nothing. Then night came. The restless sea disappeared in darkness. The grand march past of the silent ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... and only the dog's heavy breathing, the snap of the fire, or the crack of a timber in the deadly frost broke the silence. Inside it was warm and bright and homelike; outside it was twenty degrees below zero, and like some vast tomb where life itself was congealed, and only the white stars, low, twinkling, and quizzical, lived—a life of ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... said Cousin Betty in the girl's ear, without seeming at all offended at the way in which the Baroness had dismissed them, counting her almost as zero. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the first step, and it would be impossible here to speak of the succeeding lessons in zero, in tens and in other arithmetical processes—for the development of which my larger works must be consulted. The didactic material itself, however, can give some idea. In the box containing the pegs there is one ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... grew wiser; some were lights from those of our boats that were fortunate enough to have lanterns, but these were generally easily detected, as they rose and fell in the near distance. Once they raised our hopes, only to sink them to zero again. Near what seemed to be the horizon on the port quarter we saw two lights close together, and thought this must be our double light; but as we gazed across the miles that separated us, the lights ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... said Radway, "it won't be so bad after all. A couple of days of zero weather, with all this water lying around, would fix things up in pretty good shape. If she only freezes tight, we'll have a good solid bottom to build on, and that'll be quite a good rig ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... environment. Our air is getting cleaner, our water is getting purer, and our agriculture, which was depressed, is prospering. Farm income is up 70 percent, farm production is setting all-time records, and the billions of dollars the taxpayers were paying in subsidies has been cut to nearly zero. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of the hydrogen thermometer towards the temperature -240 deg. C, and add 0.05 deg. to 1000 deg. to equate them with the thermodynamic scale. Of course, the difference would also become still more noticeable on getting nearer to the absolute zero; for as hydrogen gets more and more cooled, it gradually exhibits in a lesser degree the characteristics ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one fifty. He opened the steel locker and began ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... heredity on crime. The student will remember that, according to the modern theory of heredity, acquired characters, or characteristics, are not transmissible. Accordingly, when we find crime running in a family for generations, as in the Jukes or Zero families, we must assume either that the criminal tendency is transmitted by the social environment or that it is due to some congenital variation in some ancestor. In other words, if a person is a criminal ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... stairs: U is the Uncle who 'thought we'd be going': V is the Voice which his niece replied 'No' in: W is the Waiter, who sat up till eight: X is his Exit, not rigidly straight: Y is a Yawning fit caused by the Ball: Z stands for Zero, or nothing ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, in every month of the year, in the lakes of Norway, Sweden and Denmark as well as in the North Sea, in all kinds of weather—once in the Red River at Grand Forks, N. Dakota, in a snow storm in zero weather, and I have never yet heard of one person having taken cold from being baptized, but on the other ...
— Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag • S. O. Susag
... equal quantity of water at one and the same normal temperature. A cap or cover, having a suitable length of thermometer tube attached to it, was then screwed down, and the water of the index tube was adjusted to the zero point of the scale attached to it, the whole being at say 50deg of heat, as the normal temperature in each case. The apparatus was then heated up to say 200deg by immersion in water at that temperature. The expansion of the enclosed bar of metal or other solid substance under experiment ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... condition of the atmosphere is damp all precautions possible should be taken to avoid an entirely dry condition in winter, such as that given by steam or furnace heat. In all cases should the air in the home contain moisture enough to permit a heavy frost on the windows in zero weather. The absence of frost under such conditions is positive proof of an entirely dry atmosphere, and this is a piano's most dangerous enemy, causing the sounding board to crack, shrinking up the bridges, and consequently putting the piano seriously out ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed for the entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A young man of Elgin would walk up and down in the snow for a quarter of an hour with the thermometer at zero to escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would have so walked. Our young man was potentially capable of not minding, by next morning he didn't mind; but immediately he was fast tied in the cobwebs of the common prescription, and he made his way to each of the points of the compass of the Milburns' ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... identical with All, make annihilating deprivation equivalent to universal bestowment, regard negation as affirmation, and, in the last synthesis of contradictions, see the abysmal Vacuum as a Plenum of fruition. As Oken says, "The ideal zero is absolute unity; not a singularity, as the number one, but an indivisibility, a numberlessness, a homogeneity, a translucency, a pure identity. It is neither great nor small, quiescent nor moved; but it is, and it ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... on the main floor, well toward the rear. She could barely see the professor's head, but he was coming irrevocably. She did not have to see very clearly to know that. The girl before her answered wildly; the professor frowned, and, looking down at his roll-book, slowly and deliberately made a zero. ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... baby, I do love to weep. Oh, if we only had a blizzard, I'd take you out in your nightie. But wait, sweetheart, wait till it goes below zero. Then you shall go out with ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... and whirled the snow into drifts. The soldiers curled down behind the stumps and fallen trees. They built great fires. They walked, ran, thumped their feet upon the frozen ground, beat their fingers till the blood seemed starting from beneath the nails. The thermometer sank almost to zero. It was a night of horror, not only outside, but inside the Rebel lines. The Southern soldiers were kept in the intrenchments, in the rifle-pits, and ditches, to be in readiness to repel an assault. They could not keep up great, roaring fires, for fear of inviting a night attack. ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... to be sprayed. The northern limit of tea is Niigata, where the bushes must be protected from the snow, which may fall in that prefecture to a great depth. The region in which tea cannot be grown is that in which the temperature falls below zero for two months. Tea is not grown, as in India and Ceylon, by tea planters, but in small areas and as a side-line at that. I never saw a plantation of more than five acres. Most areas are much smaller. The chief ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the ground! It is a veritable fleece, beneath which the shivering earth ("the frozen hills ached with pain," says one of our young poets) is restored to warmth. When the temperature of the air is at zero, the thermometer, placed at the surface of the ground beneath a foot and a half of snow, would probably indicate but a few degrees below freezing; the snow is rendered such a perfect non-conductor ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... fish with red gills; Naught disturbs us, our blood is at zero: We are buoyant because of our bags, Being many, each fish is a hero. We care not what is it, this life That we follow, this phantom unknown: To swim, it's exceedingly pleasant,— So swim away, making a foam. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... cousin, but also against all the proprieties of life. "The idea of such a wedding taking place in my rooms and with my husband's sanction!" she had said with concentrated bitterness. Then had followed what he was accustomed to characterize as a spell of "zero weather." He discreetly said nothing. "It didn't seem such a bad idea to me," he thought, "but then I suppose women folks know best about ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... chair before the grate, and with a book in his hand, seat himself comfortably and begin to make himself entirely "at home." The prospect was, that he would thus remain "at home," for at least the next half hour, if not longer. What was she to do? The thermometer was almost down to zero, and she was dressed for a temperature ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... so much a thousand, never deceive the postman, though the recipient often opens them with pleasurable sensations, which immediately sink to zero. And the love-letters! The carrier is a veritable Sherlock Holmes when it ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... Riding over the fourteen miles from the railroad to Hesperia with Governor Warner and D. E. McClure, we tried to make the latter believe that the crowd would not be forthcoming on that first night of the fourteenth annual "big meeting." It was zero weather and mighty breezy. For such a movement to succeed two years is creditable, to hold out for five is wonderful, to last ten is marvelous, but to grow bigger and better for fourteen years is a little short of miraculous. McClure is recognized as the father of the ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... that 0 0, or double zero; but to Simon it was more lucky than to the rest of the world. The ball went spinning round—in "its predestined circle rolled," as Shelley has it, after Goethe—and plumped down at last in the double zero. One hundred ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Whether from born antipathy, as some dislike a cat, I never yet could bear the kind, from Meux's giant steeds Down to those little bearish cubs of Shetland's shaggy breeds;— As for a warhorse, he that can bestride one is a hero, Merely to look at such a sight my courage sinks to zero. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... in a glass of water at zero degrees Celsius exhibits certain properties and performs certain actions at its surface. Some of the molecules drift away, to become one with the liquid. Other molecules from the liquid become attached to the crystalline ice. But, the ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett
... induced to try and make it appear that he was still l'homme de l'Empereur: this he did by inditing a letter to Marie Louise, in which he inveighed against the treatment of Napoleon at the hands of the Government and Sir H. Lowe, which being duly published, Gourgaud fell to zero in the opinion of all ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... me at our New England farm—with the younger part of the family—in my annual "retreat." Last year at this time I was here, with the thermometer a dozen degrees below zero; now it is milder, but cold, bleak, snowy. Yesterday we were fishing for pickerel through the ice at Hayes's Pond—in a wilderness where fox abound—and where bear and deer make rare appearances—all within a few miles of Lenox and Stockbridge. The ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the street a few steps beside Clay. The little puncher followed them dejectedly. His confidence had gone down to chill zero. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... waiting followed—a sort of zero hour effect—until finally the word was received from some source, unknown to Tom and Jack, to proceed. The night was black, and there was a mist over everything which did not augur for ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... Christmas holidays and continued until the snow was three feet deep on level ground. Then came a cold rain, freezing as it fell, until a thick crust of ice gathered over the snow. The weather became intensely cold, the mercury sinking to twelve degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, and remaining there for two weeks. The storm came on with such suddenness that all who were abroad had great trouble in reaching their homes, and many perished. One man relates that he and a friend or two were out in ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... of the execution broke clear and cold. The thermometer was down to twenty-five below zero, and a chill wind was blowing which drove the frost through clothes and flesh to the bones. For the first time in many weeks Dennin stood upon his feet. His muscles had remained inactive so long, and he was so out of practice in maintaining an erect position, that ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... again all right-poor fellow, he was reserved for a worse fate, and his long journey was near its end! A clear cold day followed the day of snow, and for the first time the thermometer fell below zero. ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... one drag God from heaven they would not stir a finger, provided the Pope preserved his vice-divinity or rather super-divinity. Bellarmino clearly states that to restrict the Papal authority to spiritual affairs is the same as to annihilate it; showing that they value the spiritual at just zero.'[150] Sarpi saw that the ultra-papalists of his day, by subordinating the State, the family and the individual to the worldly interests of Rome, by repressing knowledge and liberty of conscience, preaching immoral and anti-social doctrines, encouraging superstition and emasculating education, for ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Idealist in the sense in which we apply the term to Berkeley. In fact, the cardinal defect of their speculations lies in their oversight of the considerations which lead to Idealism. If many of them regarded the material world as a negation, it was an active negation; not zero, but ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... she bid me. By this time, I was not wholly unprepared for the result she anticipated. My belief in Sebastian had sunk to zero, and was rapidly ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... all that he has and give it to the poor, he will inform us that such an operation is impossible. If he sells his shares and his lands, their purchaser will continue all those activities which oppress the poor. If all the rich men take the advice simultaneously the shares will fall to zero and the lands be unsaleable. If one man sells out and throws the money into the slums, the only result will be to add himself and his dependents to the list of the poor, and to do no good to the poor beyond giving a chance few of them a drunken spree. We must therefore bear in mind that whereas, ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the professor. One of the dials was simply a very sensitive and accurate pressure gauge; the other was an instrument for registering the weight of the ship, or the pressure with which she bore upon the ground. The index hands of both dials were travelling backwards towards zero along their respective graduated arcs; and simultaneously with the registration by the pressure gauge of a pressure of six pounds—which indicated the air-pressure in the air-chambers of the ship—the other dial registered zero, thus indicating that the ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... requested him to place against each name (as far as he knew) the annual income of the different appointments held by that person. In the mean time, I performed the same operation on his list, against some names of which I was obliged to place a ZERO. The result of the comparison was an average of nearly 1200L. per annum for the six French SAVANS whom I had named. Of the average amount of the sums received by the English, I only remember that ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... the heavens with the radiance of eternal day. The disappearance of the sun only adds to their beauty; they alone seem to know no night. As we travelled round under the shadow of these giants the temperature fell many degrees below zero, and the cold from the water penetrated the carriages, necessitating fires and warm furs, in ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... more often than not went into one ear and out of the other. To-day he selected the girl, and gave her the lead-chair. He motioned the young man to the rear chair, because at that hour the youth appeared to be a quantity close to zero. Being a Chinaman in blood and instinct, he despised all spinsters; they were parasites. A woman was born to have children, particularly ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... soldier was a great story-teller, and made the time pass quickly. I met here a telegraph operator named Stanton, who took me to his boarding-house, the most cheerless I have ever been in. Nobody got enough to eat; the bedclothes were too short and too thin; it was 28 degrees below zero, and the wash-water was frozen solid. The board was cheap, being ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Dutch were defeated, and the mercury of Parliamentarian pride rose. In the next combat Van Tromp, the veteran Dutch admiral, drove Blake with a shattered fleet into the Thames. Van Tromp swept the Channel in triumph, with a broom at his mast-head. The hopes of the members went down to zero. They agreed to disband in November. Cromwell promised to reduce the army. But Blake put to sea again, fought Van Tromp in a four days' running fight, and won the honors of the combat. Up again went the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... raise the right hand end of the beam, and the connecting piece, J H, also tending to fall to the left, tends to lower the left hand end of E and the piece, J. The moments of the structure, E C H, and A B D being equal, and one tending to raise J and the other to lower it, the effect will be zero, and J will ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... sledges through the interminable forest of pines, the piercing cold lashing our faces like a whip, and the stars blazing in the great expanse of dull-polished steel above us with that hard diamond-like radiance they only assume when the thermometer is down below zero. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... prepared a little instrument with a scale and dial upon which rested an indicator resembling a watch hand, something like the new horizontal clocks which have only one hand to register seconds, minutes, and hours. In them, like a thermometer held sidewise, the hand moves along from zero to twenty-four. In this instrument a little needle did the same thing. Pairs of little wire-like ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... it grew desperately cold during the night. The mercury soon left the zero point so far above that it threatened to be lost for ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... closed, to-day, in honor of Washington's birth-day. But it is a fast day; meal selling for $40 per bushel. Money will not be so abundant a month hence! All my turnip-greens were killed by the frost. The mercury was, on Friday, 5 deg. above zero; to-day it is 40 deg.. Sowed a small bed of curled Savoy cabbage; and saved the early York in my half barrel hot-bed by bringing it into the ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... has then been built up through hundreds of thousands of years by gradual accretions and laborious accumulations. Man started at a cultural zero and had to find out everything for himself; or rather a very small number of peculiarly restless and adventurous spirits did the work. The great mass of humanity has never had anything to do with the increase ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... acknowledging my poor sonnet.... Alas for sonnetting,'tis as the nerves are; all the summer I was dawdling among green lanes, and verses came as thick as fancies. I am sunk winterly below prose and zero." ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was bright overhead, but low down around the horizon it looked wild. The air was frightfully cold—far below zero—and the wind had been blowing almost every day for a week, and was still strong. The snow was sliding fitfully along the sod with a stealthy, menacing motion, and far off in the west and north a dense, shining ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... Truth, finds expression in the following song, composed, not by a theologian or a man of letters, but by one who belongs to that ninety per cent of the population of British India whose education has been far less than elementary, in fact almost below zero: ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... platter, that is to be scrubbed out every morning before breakfast, even if the thermometer be at zero, and every sailor goes barefooted through the flood with the chilblains? And all the while the ship carries a doctor, well aware of Boerhaave's great maxim "keep the feet dry." He has plenty of pills to give you when you are down with ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... down there by the Fresh Air place. I really believe this is a colder night than the first one I spent in the lake, and that day was supposed to be a record breaker, I remember. Twenty-six below zero, if I'm not mistaken. By George, I'm warming up nicely in here. I feel like stretching ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... conduct. And this we must admit, that the judgment of those who would very much lower the lofty eulogies of the advantages which reason gives us in regard to the happiness and satisfaction of life, or who would even reduce them below zero, is by no means morose or ungrateful to the goodness with which the world is governed, but that there lies at the root of these judgments the idea that our existence has a different and far nobler end, for which, and not for happiness, reason is properly intended, and which must, therefore, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... it was difficult to keep warm. The water in the drinking pail, four feet from the stove, was one mass of ice. Outside, that terrible night, the thermometer in Montreal, I heard afterwards, fell to 23 degrees below zero. With us there was no thermometer to mark the temperature, but it must have ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... git le fameux Chamillard De son Roy le pronotaire Qui fut un heros au billard Un zero dans le Ministere." ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... hydrogen gas at room temperature is moving at about seven miles a second, when the molecules of the confined gas in our car, or the molecules of the metal bar are slowed down to but a few hundred miles an hour, their temperature drops to some hundreds of degrees below zero, and they absorb energy very rapidly, for the greater the difference in temperature, the greater the ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... The bleak vastness stretched away on every side to the horizon. The snow, which was really frost, flung its mantle over the land and buried everything in the silence of death. For days it was clear and cold, the thermometer steadily recording forty to fifty degrees below zero. Then a change came over the face of things. What little moisture had oozed into the atmosphere gathered into dull grey, formless clouds; it became quite warm, the thermometer rising to twenty below; and the moisture fell out of the sky in hard frost-granules that hissed like ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... confounded if these ships bore the original system of successive numbering and were mixed up with those of later classes which it was known would be produced as soon as the designs were completed. Each of these ships was accordingly numbered in its own class, S.S., S.S.P., S.S. Zero, Coastal, C Star and North Sea, from 1 onwards as they ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... benefit. These excursions are real fetes of manly labour. On the banks of Lake Leman part of the work required to keep up the terraces of the vineyards is still done in common; and in the spring, when the thermometer threatens to fall below zero before sunrise, the watchman wakes up all householders, who light fires of straw and dung and protect their vine-trees from the frost by an artificial cloud. In nearly all cantons the village communities possess so-called. Burgernutzen—that is, they hold in common a number of cows, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... negative head-shake revived my drooping spirits, his words afterwards sent them to zero once more. I hardly knew whether to feel relieved or otherwise. It would have been far better had the soldier curbed his tongue, because his final words kept us on ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... a communication from the Secretary of State, dated the 16th instant, respecting the approaching international conference at Washington, D.C., for the purpose of fixing upon a meridian proper to be employed as a common zero of longitude and standard of time reckoning throughout the globe, and recommend that the sum of $10,000 be appropriated to enable the Secretary of State to meet the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... each other good-night. There was no constraint on her part, and no familiarity. She talked fluently and naturally, just as one first-class lady traveller might do to a fellow-passenger. Yet, if not here in contact with the zero of peasant property, we are considering its most ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of the tardy but perfect justification of the first stumbling-block, this statement may be worth following out, "to see what it means," and how "absurd" it can be. An etheric globe; cold as absolute zero, dark as Erebus, with here and there small pencils of light and heat from the sun to the planets —just rays, and nothing more—is a very different one from the fiery furnace at absolute zero of the ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... have been comparatively cheerful in waiting; they would have felt that they were somewhere on the road to Cupid's garden. But, with a possibility of a shorter probation, they had not as yet any prospect of the beginning; the zero of hope had yet to be reached. Mr. Swancourt would have to revoke his formidable words before the waiting for marriage could even set in. And this ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... their resembling in some respect the prison in Glasgow, and at the sight of these formidable fortresses with their lofty walls and flanking towers, their moats and vigilant sentries, his hopes fell to zero. It would, he saw at once, be absolutely impossible to open communication with a prisoner of whose whereabouts he was wholly ignorant and of whose very existence he was doubtful. The narrow slits which lighted the cell in which he was confined might look into an inner court, or the cell itself ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... phase of the Somme battle was 6.20 a.m. on the 15th September. The 149th and 150th Infantry Brigades were then in the front line between High Wood and Martinpuich with the 151st Brigade in reserve. At zero the Battalion moved from Shelter Wood by way of Sausage Valley to an old German trench at the south-west corner of Mametz Wood. About noon a further forward move was made, Y and Z Companies to the northern edge of the wood, and W and ...
— The Story of the 6th Battalion, The Durham Light Infantry - France, April 1915-November 1918 • Unknown
... face gravely, and issued in a monotonous voice, but with the precision of a machine:—"One million, eighty-two thousand, nine hundred and forty-three, in Canada, by the census of 1870; one million, one hundred and ten thousand, in Canada, by the computation of the Abbe Zero; four hundred and thirty-five thousand in the United States by the computation of ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... very great cold came. Will reckoned that the mercury must be at least forty degrees below zero, and, for a week, the people scarcely stirred from their lodges. Then occurred the terrible invasion of the mountain wolves, the like of which the oldest man could not recall. Will and Inmutanka were awakened at dawn by a distant ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... a satisfactory determination of the surface temperature of the moon. From his experiments he inferred that the maximum temperature attained, at or near the equator, about three days after full moon, does not exceed 200 deg. C., while the minimum is not much under zero C. Subsequent experiments, however, both by himself and Professor Langley, render these results more than doubtful, without it is admitted that the moon has an atmospheric covering. Langley's results make it probable that the temperature never rises above the freezing-point of water, ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... slipped on over the magnet (or over its armature) to any desired position. The armature of the magnet is placed gently upon the poles, and time enough is allowed to elapse for the galvanometer needle to settle to zero. The armature is then suddenly detached. The first swing measures the change, due to removing the armature, in the number of magnetic lines that pass through the coil in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... us went out for a week's sledging on March 16, but the temperatures were now becoming too low to be pleasant and touching 40 degrees or so below zero. What tried us more than anything else was thick weather and the fearfully bad light on days when no landmarks were visible to guide us to the depot. Our sleeping-bags also were frozen and uncomfortable, thick rime collecting on the insides of our tents which every puff of wind would shake down ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... our flights were irregular. The spring of 2070, with both planets close to the Earth, we were making two complete round trips. We had just arrived in Greater New York, one May evening, from Grebhar, Venus Free State. With only five hours in port here, we were departing the same night at the zero hour for Ferrok-Shahn, capital of ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... is physically exhausted, there is a natural craving for stimulant, and the power of resistance is reduced to the lowest point, if not to zero. It will not do for us to forget that the drink habit is often a symptom of exhaustion. Here are a man and a woman who receive such low wages that they are driven into unhealthy quarters. They ought to have four ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... carefully noted and preserved. Where, however, this is impracticable, the comparison should be effected by means either of some other standard previously so compared, or of an intermediate portable barometer, the zero point of which has been well determined. Suspend the portable barometer as near as convenient to the ship's barometer, and after at least an hour's quiet exposure, take as many readings of both instruments as may be necessary to reduce the probable error ...
— The Hurricane Guide - Being An Attempt To Connect The Rotary Gale Or Revolving - Storm With Atmospheric Waves. • William Radcliff Birt
... and climbed up toward the hidden summits of the peaks, to emerge above the clouds into bright, warm sunshine. Another day, at an altitude of twelve thousand feet, I found it only twelve below freezing, while, at the same time, as I learned later, it was twenty-four degrees below zero at Fort Collins, a town forty miles away on the plains. Strange freak of weather! The explanation lay in the difference between the winds that blew over the respective sections, a blizzardly north wind was sweeping over the low, exposed plains, while up on the peak-encircled ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... hills densely clothed in a green lighter and more dainty than that of the parent hill, throwing graceful curtsies to the murmuring river at the foot. As I write here, bathed in the beauty of spring sunlight, it is difficult to believe that a few hours since the thermometer was at zero. Little spots of habitation, with foodstuffs growing alongside, looking most lonely in their patches of green in the forest, added a human and sentimental picturesqueness to ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... believed it was not. Miss Fonblanque was a lady, and it was doubtless possible for a lady to wander from the truth; but how was a gentleman to tell her so? His spirits for some time had been sinking, but they now fell to zero; and long after her voice had died away he still sat with a troubled and averted countenance, and could find no form of words to thank her for her narrative. His mind, indeed, was empty of everything beyond a dull longing for escape. From this pause, which ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... snow and ice, me without snowshoes and it thirty below zero. Yes, sir!" went on Walky, beginning to stuff the tobacco into his own pipe from Mr. Day's proffered sack. "That was some job! Miz Bob Kittridge, the old lady's darter-in-law, give me the dollar and the job; and ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... Unsubstantiality. — N. unsubstantiality[obs3], insubstantiality; nothingness, nihility[obs3]; no degree, no part, no quantity, no thing. nothing, naught, nil, nullity, zero, cipher, no one, nobody; never a one, ne'er a one[contr]; no such thing, none in the world; nothing whatever, nothing at all, nothing on earth; not a particle &c. (smallness) 32; all talk, moonshine, stuff ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... attended with any fatal consequences. The snow completely disappeared within a day or two; and even while it lasted the song sparrows, fox sparrows, and linnets could be heard singing with all cheerfulness. On the coldest day, when the mercury settled to within twelve degrees of zero, I observed that the song sparrows, as they fed in the road, had a trick of crouching till their feathers all but touched the ground, so protecting their legs against the ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... that chanted from the bare flat pasture rocks; the chickadees that came into the orchard and about the great loose farm woodpile, in February, with their odd little minor refrain of cic-a-da-da-da-da, mere feathery mites of ceaseless activity that somehow did not freeze, at 20 deg. below zero. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... thick robe, which he bought last week at the county seat, paying a half month's wages for it. He shields her from the least cold, when perhaps that very morning she has hung out a wash in her mother's yard with the temperature about zero. ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... came home to the finest of our people first. It has not reached them all yet, but it is working in, like the frost into the cellars when the thermometer shows forty degrees below zero. Many a cellar can stand a week of this—but look out for the second! Every day it ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... a cool retreat, smelling faintly of tobacco juice deposited by some of its clients, the mercury was swelling toward ninety. It was April Fools' day, and unless Miss Tennant was cool, nobody was. She looked cool. If the temperature had been 40 deg. below zero she would have looked warm; but she ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... perceptibly shorter with each sunset, and the nights were getting chilly. On the night of August twenty-fifth, the thermometer registered a minimum temperature of twenty-five degrees above zero, and on the twenty-sixth of August, forty-eight degrees ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace |
