"Combustion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nautis prudentia ventos' has already reached us (from Santo Domingo); the revolutionary storm, now sweeping the globe will be upon us, and happy if we make timely provision to give it an easy passage over our land. From the present state of things in Europe and America, the day which begins our combustion must be near at hand; and only a single spark is wanting to make that day to-morrow. If we had begun sooner, we might probably have been allowed a lengthier operation to clear ourselves, but every day's delay lessens the time we ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... a little hotly, "if Annette is a spitfire, Mrs. Larkins is a lot of combustion. I think of all the women I know, she has the greatest genius for aggravation. I used to board with her, but as I did not wish to be talked to death ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... should never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes! I wish,' whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, taking a chair, and discharging ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... speak, and then bottling it. This little performance was at times very telling in its effect—it spoke volumes: it told of a long training in self-repression which still did not come quite naturally: it told of inward combustion, of a tightly cornered but still independent mind. Ladies-in-waiting had seen the Princess run out of her mother's presence to tabber her feet on the inlaid floor of the corridor, thence to return smooth, sweet-tempered, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... mills, or which causes winds to blow by the unequal rarefaction of the atmosphere. It is from the sun too that the power comes which is liberated in a steam engine. The solar rays enable plants to decompose carbonic acid gas, the product of combustion, and the vegetation thus rendered possible is the source of coal and other combustible bodies. The combustion of coal under a steam boiler therefore merely liberates the power which the sun gave out ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... whiteness, by the light of which colours can be judged as well as they can by daylight. Having its ignition point below that of ordinary gas, it can be ignited by any red-hot carbonaceous matter, such as the brightly glowing end of a cigar. For its complete combustion a volume of acetylene needs approximately twelve volumes of air, forming as products of combustion carbon dioxide and water vapour. When, however, the air is present in much smaller ratio the combustion ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... welding, the process employs the flame produced by the combustion in a suitable blow-pipe of oxygen and acetylene. When a light is applied to the nozzle of the pipe a yellow flame, a foot long, flares up, and in the centre of it, close to the nozzle, appears a very small, ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... be surprised if the house had been set on fire," Archie continued confidentially. "I'm going to have detectives look into it. It must have been either that or spontaneous combustion in ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... feelin's will be too much for me. They be fillin' me faster 'n I can dispose of 'em; and if you don't leave that 'ere coachman and smile on me, I shall either go up like a baloon, or else there'll be a case of combustion.' I went on in that 'ere style, yer know, thinkin' she'd melt like a h'yster in a fryin'-pan, but she didn't; and the next thing I hears wus that the coachman wur at the willage alehouse readin' my letter. Since then I've guv up the tender passion ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... has not forgotten, it was said, during the long conversation of the counsellor and the burgomaster, that the lighting of the town was to be achieved, not by the combustion of common carburetted hydrogen, produced by distilling coal, but by the use of a more modern and twenty-fold more brilliant gas, oxyhydric gas, produced ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... or, as she would have preferred to write it, Albert and Victoria. The fiery little spurt of revolt in Canada, called rather ambitiously, "The Canadian Rebellion," had ended in smoke, and the outburst of Chartism, from the spontaneous combustion of sullen and long-smothered discontent among the working classes, had been extinguished, partly by a fog of misapprehension and misdirection, partly by a process of energetic stamping out. The shameful ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... practice prevalent among the Romans, of decorating a corpse, previous to interment or combustion, with garlands and flowers. Their reprehension extended also to a periodical custom of placing the "first-fruits of Flora" on their graves and tombs. Thus Anchises, in Dryden's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... containing a minute quantity of gas in slow combustion, and projecting the black searchlight, had been built into the plane. In the rack beside him were a number of the black gas bombs, each of which, dropped to earth, would release enough gas to cover a considerable area with darkness. Both Luke and Dick wore respirators ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... none could predict, save that it must be absolutely blasting and deadly. Never before had a man been so charged with electricity as they would charge him. He was to be smitten by the essence of ten thunderbolts. Some prophesied combustion, and some disintegration and disappearance. They were waiting eagerly to settle the question by actual demonstration, and it was just at that moment that Duncan Warner ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one opened a way to a serrated incline leading downward. It was extremely dark, I should say. There was also an extreme smell, quite like that of the outer air, but enormously intensified; one would suspect that there was an incomplete combustion of, perhaps, wood or coal, as well as a certain quantity of general decay. At any rate, we reached the bottom of the incline, and my escort behaved quite badly. One of them said to the other four, in these words: "Them jumpers follow us sure. Yeah, there's much trouble. What's to prime ...
— The Day of the Boomer Dukes • Frederik Pohl
... for a symbol of destroying power. But that is a less frequent use than that in which it stands as a symbol of life. In a very real sense life is warmth and death is cold. Is not respiration a kind of combustion? Do not physiologists tell us that? Is not the centre of the system and the father of all physical life that great blazing sun which radiates heat? And is not this promise, 'I will send fire on the earth,' the assurance that into the midst of our death there shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... joke certainly was on those soldiers. He burned up with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of a celluloid comb. For qualities of instantaneous combustion he must have been the equal of any small-town theater that ever was built—with one exit. He was practically a total loss ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... already buzzing with the name of Champdivers; a day or two more and the mail will have carried it everywhere: so wonderful a machine is this of ours for disseminating intelligence! Think of it! When my father was born——but that is another story. To return: we had here the elements of such a combustion as I dread to think of—your cousin and the journal. Let him but glance an eye upon that column of print, and where were we? It is easy to ask; not so easy to answer, my young friend. And let me tell you, this sheet is the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man whose wants were rather extensive and urgent, the "business" did not seem a very promising one. He glanced up at the houses as he sauntered along, appearing almost to expect that some of them would undergo spontaneous combustion for his special accommodation. Occasionally he paused and gazed at a particular house with rapt intensity, as if he hoped the light which flashed from his own eyes would set it on fire; but the houses being all regular bricks refused to flare up ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... after sufficient air had been breathed into the jar. Clearly, then, he argued, air once breathed is not suitable for respiration, unless much diluted with pure air. He argued from this that if a candle using oxygen for combustion could not burn in expired air, therefore an individual using oxygen for the renewal of the blood could not be properly supplied in a room partially saturated with the ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... sea itself is dead; it is a vast accumulation of the product of complete combustion, hydrogen burnt out. But just as dead worlds, which are the molecules of infinite space, shocking together, burst into spiral nebulae of flame which are the beginnings of live suns and planets and all luxuriant life thereon, so it seems ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... and water be mixed together, these bodies thus capacitated to act on each other, are heated by degrees, and ultimately produce a violent combustion. If flour be wetted with water, and the mixture closed up, it will be found, after some lapse of time, (by the aid of a microscope) to have produced organized beings that enjoy life, of which the water and the flour were believed incapable: it is thus that inanimate matter can pass into life, or ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... over him and put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar. It expressed Frescobaldi's conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in combustion as it issued from the ground. Fulkerson burst into a roar of laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi's personal tribute to Dryfoos. Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained the work of sinking a gas-well, as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... oxygen will support combustion; yet carbon dioxid (CO2), which is made of both these elements, will neither burn nor ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... at a total cost of eighteen shillings two years ago, the result being that a smoky chimney is cured, and that the room is always at a really comfortable temperature, with a smaller consumption of coal than before. The whole of the radiation is into the room, with perfect slow combustion." ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... has been unruly: where we lay, Our chimneys were blown down: and, as they say, Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death; And prophesying, with accents terrible, Of dire combustion, and confused events, New ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... spirits. All these opinions are discussed and commented upon by Galen, who determines the purposes of respiration to be (1) to preserve the animal heat; (2) to evacuate from the blood the products of combustion. ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... missionary, well known in this part of the world, exasperated by the seizure of a few dollars and a claim to the droit d'aubaine, advised the authorities of Aden to threaten the "combustion" of Tajurrah. The measure would have been equally unjust and unwise. A traveller, even a layman, is bound to put up peaceably with such trifles; and to threaten "combustion" without being prepared to carry out the threat is the readiest way to ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... Mrs. Schuyler seeth to the Manufacturing of suitable Cloathing for all her family, all of which is the produce of her plantation in which she is helped by her Mama & Miss Polly and the whole is done with less Combustion & noise than in many Families who have not more than 4 or 5 Persons in ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... ill health is overuse of sugar in concentrated form, candy, etc., especially by the sedentary. One reason why sugar has a high food value is that it is readily utilized for combustion, and if taken between meals greatly increases the calories and may lead ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... by an inferior policy, neither feared nor esteemed by our Government. His secretary, Desaugiers the elder, is our real and confidential firebrand in the North, commissioned to keep burning those materials of combustion which Grouvelle and others of our incendiaries have lighted and illuminated in Holstein, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... universal satisfaction. But the extraordinary circumstance was spread everywhere, with all due amplifications, and thousands flocked to the wharfinger's yard to witness the effects of spontaneous combustion. The proprietor immediately perceived that he could avail himself of the public curiosity to my advantage. A plate, with some silver and gold, was placed at the foot of my poor mother's flock mattress, with, "For the benefit ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... motive power for aerial navigation, they have given to commerce a mighty impetus. To them we are indebted for the continuous production of electricity without batteries or dynamos, of light without combustion or incandescence, and for an unfailing supply of mechanical energy for all ...
— In the Year 2889 • Jules Verne and Michel Verne
... precisely where it was suspected, and we told him "underneath." He scratched his head and announced that he was sent to look for it. His qualifications consisted apparently in his having coal-mined. But he seemed confident of detecting the quicker combustion sort, until he asked for necessary impedimenta. It seems that no good collier can detect an H.E. or any sort of mine without a pail of water, and a hole about 2,000 feet deep, and a pulley, and a rope ladder and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... of this combustion, we are in perils by land and water. It has rained for this month without intermission; there is sea between me and Richmond, and Sunday was se'nnight I was hurried down to Isleworth in the ferry-boat by the violence of the current, and had great difficulty to get to shore. Our roads are so infested ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... Golding, an elderly lady, seemed suddenly to become animated, shifted their places, flew through the room, and were broken to pieces. The particulars of this commotion were as curious as the loss and damage occasioned in this extraordinary manner were alarming and intolerable. Amidst this combustion, a young woman, Mrs. Golding's maid, named Anne Robinson, was walking backwards and forwards, nor could she be prevailed on to sit down for a moment excepting while the family were at prayers, during which time no disturbance happened. This Anne ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... pine is preferred. Accordingly, when the logs took fire, oh! how the cake began to stir beneath that awful heat, to glow and sparkle in a blaze! At the same time I kept stirring up the channels, and sent men upon the roof to stop the conflagration, which had gathered force from the increased combustion in the furnace; also I caused boards, carpets, and other hangings to be set up against the garden, in order to protect us from ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... forces of Nature had been at work for ages, were thoroughly flooded. Of course convulsion after convulsion of the most violent nature followed. But in the course of about two hundred days, the internal combustion was overmastered for lack of fuel; the chemical combinations, which might have gone on for ages causing weak but incessant outbreaks, were completed and ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... expended less of his vital energy in trying to brew forty storms in one tea pot he would live longer. "Easy does it" is a phrase plucked from the plebeian lexicon of life, which we recommend for his consideration. If he doesn't attend to it we shall have a case of spontaneous combustion to record; and we want to avoid that if possible. There is not a more sincere man, not a man more anxious to do good in Preston than Mr. Lee, only he piles Ossa upon Olympus too stiffly, and that was a job which the gods ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... a start before we detected it was a mystery. With the shack walls already burning hot and the strong wind, it had been like spontaneous combustion. Ma Wagor was baking bread on an old oil stove. Perhaps a draft from the open window had fanned the fire. But ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... may be said to be annihilated in the sense that it is impossible to reconstitute it by repeating the same process of burning, the reason is not so much that we cannot get the same flames as that we cannot burn the same fuel twice. But so long as there is continuous combustion in the same fireplace or pile of fuel, we speak of the same fire although neither the flame nor the fuel remains the same. When combustion ceases, the fire goes out in popular language. To what quarter ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and the derivation of energy can have taken place before chlorophyl had come into existence; and he very pertinently points to the prototrophic bacteria as probably representing "the survival of a primordial stage of life chemistry." Thus a "primitive feeder," the bacterium Nitrosomonas, "for combustion ... takes in oxygen directly through the intermediate action of iron, phosphorus or manganese, each of the single cells being a powerful little chemical laboratory which contains oxidising catalysers, the activity of which is accelerated by the presence of iron and manganese. ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... third turning to the right off the grand arcade in Kingdom-come, where the night-porter has to wear wet petticoats, like a Highland chief, to make short work of the sparks flying about, otherwise this world and many another would not have to wait long for combustion.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this statement she adds: "Holy inspiration has created states of mind which are able to nullify the action of the flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion." That is, if mortal mind worked hard enough, we could burn our fingers without any fire, or we could produce the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... it in the office, as Mrs. Harmon called his little booth. He remained there reading every night after the house quieted down after dinner, until it was time to lock up for the night; and several times Mr. Evans stopped and looked in at him where he sat in the bad combustion of the gas that was taking the country tan out of his cheeks. One night when he came in late, and Lemuel put his book down to take him up in the elevator, he said, "Don't disturb yourself; I'm going to walk up," but he lingered at the door looking in with the queer smile that always roused ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the firehose all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that... Now, you're talking straight, Mr Crimmins. You know why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look at that. And ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... will keep it from burning up with its own heat. If you can obtain no such ingredients, have it turned over and exposed to the air so often that it will decay without passing through a process approaching combustion. When it has become so thoroughly decomposed as to resemble a fine black powder, you have a fertilizer superior to any high-priced patent compound that can be bought. Further on I will show how it can be used both in this ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... oxygen were rapidly absorbed, and in return the atmosphere was loaded with carbonic acid, carbon, nitrogen, and other effluvia, from the lungs and pores of the dense and heated company; this mischievous matter being much increased from the products of the combustion of numerous lamps, ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... they were all in combustion, the strongest preparing once more to run away with the Pinnace; which with the hazzard of his life, with Sakre falcon and musket shot, Smith forced now the third time to ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... similar to slow combustion; the oxygenous part of the atmosphere is received through the moist membranes, which line the air-cells of the lungs, and uniting with the inflammable part of the blood generates an acid, probably ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... generations, and shows us how much we of the present day owe to our predecessors. From the earliest times, as among the native smiths of Africa to-day, the blast of a bellows has been used in working iron to increase the heat of the combustion by a more plentiful supply of oxygen. The blast-furnace is supposed to have been first used in Belgium, and to have been introduced into England in 1558. Next came the use of bituminous coal, urged with a blast of cold air. But it was not until 1829 that Neilson, an Englishman, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... But unfortunately for this brilliant discovery the spectroscope opened windows into the nebulae, and showed very plainly that they were on fire; and fire is a compound; it can not burn without fuel and something to support the combustion; so that settled the alleged simplicity of the nebulae. It is now demonstrated, therefore, that every known substance existing in nature is a compound, and therefore can not be eternal. And the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. No number of finite ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... sped by. An interesting discovery here results. Which is, that lightning, kept to itself, is quiescent; it is the assaulting contact of the thunderbolt that releases it from captivity, ignites its awful fires, and so produces an instantaneous combustion and explosion which spread disaster and desolation far ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the species of poplar is useful for boards, or any other purposes if kept dry. It is much in demand for floor-boards for rooms, it not readily taking fire; a red-hot poker falling on a board, would burn its way through it, without causing more combustion than the ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... proposed, in 1878, to make the bottom plate of glass instead of metal, and provided ingenious arrangements for charging the lamp chamber with an atmosphere of pure nitrogen gas which does not support combustion. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of Granville Sharpe, diligently laboring in his vocation of philanthropy, laying plans for the slow but beneficent amelioration of the condition of his country and the world, and at the same time maintaining, with the zeal of Father Miller himself, that the earth was just on the point of combustion, and that the millennium would render all his benevolent schemes ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... thrown overboard, and another hole having been cut in the deck on the other side, the other pump was rigged, and double the quantity of water poured into the hold; but it was evident to Philip that the combustion increased. The smoke and steam now burst through the interstices of the hatchways and the holes cut in the deck with a violence that proved the extent of the fire which raged below, and Philip thought it advisable to remove all the women and children to ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... by some substance that could be introduced into the best possible of gasoline mixtures, to increase its combustibility by a hundred per cent or more. For that is what thyroid will do to our food. Nor has it only this destructive or combustion side. Withal there is at the same time a constructive action, for the process frees energy to be used for heat, motion or other need. The thyroid, therefore, in addition to its role as an accelerator, acts, too, as the efficient lubricator for ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... traces of frenzied devastation grinned, blackened remains of a wilderness of wires, beams, sacks, broken tools, a disorder that took one's breath away and made one dizzy—all steeped in the suffocating stench of combustion, powder smoke, and the pungent, stinging breath of the ecrasite shells. Wherever one stepped the earth had been lacerated by gigantic explosions, laboriously patched up again, once more ripped open to its very bowels, ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... reason of these fooleries they not only set slight by others, but each different order, men otherwise professing apostolical charity, despise one another, and for the different wearing of a habit, or that 'tis of darker color, they put all things in combustion. And among these there are some so rigidly religious that their upper garment is haircloth, their inner of the finest linen; and, on the contrary, others wear linen without and hair next their skins. Others, again, are ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... Lives of the Poets, as published under Mr. Cibber's name. What became of that manuscript I know not. I should have liked much to examine it. I suppose it was thrown into the fire in that impetuous combustion of papers, which Johnson I think rashly executed, when moribundus.' BOSWELL. Mr. Croker, quoting a letter by Griffiths the publisher, says:—'The question is now decided by this letter in opposition to Dr. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... that if she reported other conflagrations breaking out, he would subdue them in a lump by taking a header in the pond, whose shore they reached at that moment. But Nellie said he was in no danger so far as she could see, of immediate combustion and when she came to examine her own garments they were also free from ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... the root of which burns tolerably well. This precious combustible was carried back to the CASUCHA and heaped up on the hearth. It was a difficult matter to kindle it, though, and still more to keep it alight. The air was so rarefied that there was scarcely oxygen enough in it to support combustion. At least, this was the reason assigned by ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Madame du Maine had done not a little to bring about these fancies, and they continued in secret to do more. Madame du Maine, it may be recollected, had said that she would throw the whole country into combustion, in order not to lose her husband's prerogative. She was as good as her word. Encouraged doubtless by the support they received from this precious pair, the Parliament continued on its mad career of impudent presumption, pride, and arrogance. It assembled ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... beautiful Jacobite air, There'll never be peace till Jamie comes hame. When political combustion ceases to be the object of princes and patriots, it then, you know, becomes the lawful prey of historians ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... again a completely nebulous cleric happens along to perform the necessary function of receiving a moribund neophyte into the Church; otherwise the conversion appears to take place as it were by spontaneous combustion and not as the result of any visible proselytising agency. However the Elstones bear no resemblance to real human beings—you can hardly expect it of people called Ierne and Magali and Ivo and Elvidia and names like that—so perhaps it doesn't ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... needless luxury. Unless, however, we are willing to suck poison into our veins with every breath we draw, slow but sure,—poison expired from our lungs and emanating from our bodies, poisonous gases liberated by the combustion of fuel, poison dust and decay from the waste of inorganic material,—we must have a never-ceasing supply of fresh air around us everywhere and always. Now this incoming fluid, cold as ice, eats fuel like a hungry giant, yet we must receive it with open arms, and, as ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... fortune by his "new movement;" having purchased and patented it: he has found a publisher for his church music, and sold his old opera. Captain de Camp has vanished in smoke—he has exploded of spontaneous combustion,—they find him all deceit, leaving a glass eye and a cork leg. Mr. Latimer gets the Colonial Bishopric of Bushantee, in New Zealand, and cuts Miss Jemima. Mr. Wellesley having gone to India for glory, returns with it,—a hook, and a patch ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... its worst. I fear Dorothea may be injured in the opinion of many by the truth—which, nevertheless, has to be told—that her recovery was helped not a little by sentiment. What? Is a poor lady's heart to be in combustion for a while and then—pf!—the flame expelled at a blast, with all that fed it? That is the heroic cure, no doubt: but either it kills or leaves a room swept and garnished, inviting devils. In short it is the way ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Nature is desirous of, and hinders a due mixture and temperament, till it be cast out and the pores receive what is most proper and convenient for them. Moreover, a fever forces all the moisture downward; and the middle parts being in combustion, it all retires thither, and there is shut up and forcibly detained. And therefore it is usual with a great many to vomit, by reason of the density of the inward parts squeezing out the moisture, and likewise to thirst, by reason of the poor and dry state the rest of the body is in. But ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the outfit that was trying to get your Proto-Aryan Sector fissionables franchise away from you. They operate on this sector already; have the petroleum franchise for the Chuldun country, east of the Caspian Sea. They export to some of these internal-combustion-engine sectors, like Europo-American. You know, most of the wars they've been fighting, lately, on the Europo-American Sector have been, at least in part, motivated by rivalry for oil fields. But now that ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper
... goling, or fireplace of mud and stone, some three feet high, four or five feet long by one and a half wide, with two, three, or more side ventilators and draught-holes. By this ingenious contrivance he manages to increase the combustion of the dried dung, the most trying fuel from which to get a flame. On the top of this stove a suitable place is made to fit the several raksangs (large brass pots and bowls), in which the brick tea, duly pounded first in a stone or wooden mortar, is boiled and stirred with a long brass ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... the public weal became extinct; men's hearts were insensible to all generous sympathy; their minds dead to every elevating impulse—like to those aromatics which, after diffusing both glow and perfume from their ardent brazier, lose by combustion all power of further rekindling, and present nothing else than vile ashes, ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... supplied with water, also to prevent injury by the heat and the gases, and the invention also comprises an arrangement of the furnace calculated to separate and distribute the gases and effect the most perfect combustion. ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... trial of the process on a small scale, and is confident that it will prove equally successful on a large one. Sturtevant was not very specific as to his process; but it incidentally appears to have been his purpose to reduce the coal by an imperfect combustion to the condition of coke, thereby ridding it of "those malignant proprieties which are averse to the nature of metallique substances." The subject was treated by him, as was customary in those days, as a great mystery, made still more mysterious by the multitude of learned words under which he ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... the true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but exalted nature, from the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing with a morbid state of the body, that it is no wonder they are often confounded. And thus many good women are suffered to perish by that form of spontaneous combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and night with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek whitens, and, as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes. The more they over-work themselves, the more exacting becomes the sense of duty,—as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... use tinder made by burning linen rags, as our forefathers used to do. This will not flame, but merely smoulders until the breath blows it into a glow. The tinder is made by charring linen rags, that is, burning them to a crisp, but stopping the combustion before they are ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... no counting on her, by God! And hitherto I have had my own way without, and keep the lover in reserve. And I say, Anna,' he added with severity, 'you must break yourself of this new fit, my girl; there must be no combustion. I keep the creature under the belief that I adore her; and if she caught a breath of you and me, she is such a fool, prude, and dog in the manger, that she is capable of ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... supped, and send M'Barak with an invitation to the headman and his sons. The blessed one makes his way to the headman's hut, while Salam clears up the debris of the meal, and the Maalem, conscious that no more work will be expected of him, devotes his leisure to the combustion of hemp, openly and unashamed. With many compliments the headman arrives, and I stand up to greet and bid him welcome—an effort that makes heavy call upon my scanty store of Arabic. The visitors remove their slippers and ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... wholly of oxygen; and the different kinds of objects which compose, and are found upon, the globe, to remain what they are; the world would run through its stages of decay, renovation, and final destruction, in a rapid cycle. Combustion, once excited, would proceed with ungovernable violence; the globe, during its short existence, would be in a continual conflagration, until its ashes would be its only remains: animals would live with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... our projectiles that with less weight of material we can throw larger shot to a greater distance and with more accuracy. A long course of mathematical experiment and calculation has determined the exact pressure of a charge of powder at all points in the bore of a cannon during its combustion and evolution into gas. These experiments have proved that strength is principally required near the breech, and that a cannon need not be of so great length as was formerly supposed to be necessary. We are thus able ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... computers, silicon chips, data processing, cybernetics, and all the other innovations of the dawning high technology age are as mystifying as the workings of the combustion engine must have been when that first Model T rattled down Main Street, U.S.A. But as surely as America's pioneer spirit made us the industrial giant of the 20th century, the same pioneer spirit today ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... her, fastened one of the sheep in the ground and burnt it, except the feet, which were under the earth. The next morning Grace Pett was found burnt to a cinder, except her feet. Her fate is recorded in the Philosophical Transactions as a case of spontaneous combustion."[755] ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... foreign particles. The air, however, is also mixed with another elastic substance resembling air, which differs from it in numerous properties, and is, with good reason, called aerial acid by Professor Bergman. It owes its presence to organised bodies, destroyed by putrefaction or combustion. ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... level heads. The result, after years of thought and experiment, was the Bessemer process of making steel cheaply, which has revolutionized the iron industry throughout the world. His method consists simply in forcing hot air from below into several tons of melted pig-iron, so as to produce intense combustion; and then adding enough spiegel-eisen (looking-glass iron), an ore rich in carbon, to change the whole mass to steel. He discovered this simple process only after trying in vain much more ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... because of the energy locked up in a compressed spring or elevated weight. The gun projects the bullet because of the sudden chemical union of carbon with saltpeter and sulphur. The steam engine takes its energy from the steam secured by combustion of coal ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... nourishment, supplied through the digestive organs. But the first food we take, after we have set up for ourselves, is air, and the last food we take is air also. We are all chameleons in our diet, as we are all salamanders in our habitats, inasmuch as we live always in the fire of our own smouldering combustion; a gentle but constant flame, fanned every day by the same forty hogsheads of air which furnish us not with our daily bread, which we can live more than a day without touching, but with our momentary, and oftener than ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... remembered that in Stephenson's first Killingworth engines he invented and applied the ingenious method of stimulating combustion in the furnace, by throwing the waste steam into the chimney after performing its office in the cylinders, thus accelerating the ascent of the current of air, greatly increasing the draught, and consequently the temperature of the ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... Eugenio Alonso, who was endeavouring to form a coal-mining syndicate. The Revista Minera (a Madrid mining journal) referred in 1886 to the coal of the Alpaco Mountain, in the district of Naga (Cebu Is.) as being pure, dry, of easy combustion, carrying a strong flame, and almost free from sulphur pyrites. Cebu coal is said to be of better quality and cleaner than the Labuan and Australian products, but its heating powers being less, it is less serviceable for ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... have sent the discoverer's to the flames. The liquefaction of oxygen; the existence of radium, of helium, of polonium, of argon; the different powers of Roentgen and Cathode and Bequerel rays. And as we may finally prove that there are different kinds and qualities of light, so we may find that combustion may have its own powers of differentiation; that there are qualities in some flames non-existent in others. It may be that some of the essential conditions of substance are continuous, even in the destruction of their bases. Last night I was thinking of this, ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... of Greenwich Village; in the saloons of ships. But the Club would give a false impression of its mind and heart if it allowed any one to suppose that Food is the chief object of its quest. It is true that Man, bitterly examined, is merely a vehicle for units of nourishing combustion; but on those occasions when the Club feels most truly Itself it rises ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... erosion from overgrazing and poor cultivation methods (including slash-and-burn agriculture); desertification; loss of biodiversity; industrial pollution of water supplies used for drinking and irrigation natural hazards: cold, thin air of high plateau is obstacle to efficient fuel combustion, as well as to physical activity by those unaccustomed to it from birth; flooding in the northeast (March to April) international agreements: party to - Biodiversity, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Nuclear Test Ban, Tropical Timber 83, Wetlands; signed, but not ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... description of the Denayrouse burner, the industrial application of which has but just begun. This burner has been constructed in view of the best possible utilization of the gas, in approaching a complete theoretical combustion. In order that it may give its entire illuminating power, gas, as we know, must be burned in five and a half times its volume of air. In the Denayrouse burner the gas burns in four and four-tenths its volume of air. The result reached is, consequently, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... dressing several gores with this, he rolled them up and left them through a night in a drying loft, with the result that the next day they were disintegrated and on the point of bursting into flame by spontaneous combustion. Fresh silk and other varnish were then tried, but with indifferent success. Next he endeavoured to dispense with sewing, and united the gores of yet another balloon by the mere adhesiveness of the varnish ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... is to subject to the action of fire, or of intense heat so as to effect either partial change or complete combustion; as, to burn wood in the fire; to burn one's hand on a hot stove; the sun burns the face. One brands with a hot iron, but cauterizes with some corrosive substance, as silver nitrate. Cremate is now used specifically for consuming a dead body by ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... for the man who would become an airplane mechanic, is a thorough knowledge of gasolene-engines. This should include not only a knowledge of such fundamentals as the theory of the internal-combustion engine, carburetion, compression, ignition, and explosion, but also a keen insight into the whims of the human, and terribly inhuman, thing—the gasolene-motor. Nothing can be sweeter when it is sweet, and nothing more devilish when it is ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... Engineers, estimated the heat extracted annually from the Comstock by means of the water pumped out and cold air forced in, as equal to that generated by the combustion of 55,560 tons of anthracite coal or 97,700 cords of wood. Observations were then given upon temperature at every 100 feet in the Forman shaft of the Overman mine, running from 53 degrees at a depth of 100 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... fuel and water to obtain from them the energy necessary to do its work. So, we consume within our bodies certain nutritious substances to obtain from them the energy necessary for our activities. Just as the energy for the working of the engine is obtained from steam by the combustion of fuel, so the energy possessed by our bodies results from the combustion or oxidation within us of the food we eat. Unless this energy is provided for the body it will have but little power of doing work, and like an engine without steam, ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... a simple affair, being merely a lamp screwed on to a wire gauze cylinder, and fitted to it by a tight ring. His idea was to admit the fire-damp into the lamp gradually by narrow tubes, so that it would be consumed by combustion. The Safety-Lamp was in truth the greatest triumph ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... balloons descended in a few minutes. Instead of varnishing the paper to prevent the escape of the gas, and supposing, erroneously, that the fault lay in the latter, they sought about for a new gas more suitable to the paper. This they found, as they supposed, in the gas which resulted from the combustion of wet straw and wool, which had an upward tendency, they thought, on account of its electrical properties, which caused it to be repelled from the ground. It is scarcely necessary now to point out that the true ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... money-bags; three hundred new banks, as many railways, were about to be established; old things were about to fleet and disappear; all things were becoming new; and the serpent entered Charlemont, and made his way among the people thereof, without any signs of combustion, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... camp and collection of stores on Mount Biort were thus threatened for several days, and only saved by great exertions. Serious apprehensions were entertained lest the return of the parties in the field might be obstructed by the spreading of their own fires. The smoke of this vast extent of combustion obscured the heavens and rendered astronomic observations difficult or prevented it altogether. Finally, a season of unprecedented drought was closed on the 24th of September by the setting in of the equinoctial ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... trapped inside IC packages that enables them to function (also called 'blue smoke'; this is similar to the archaic 'phlogiston' hypothesis about combustion). Its existence is demonstrated by what happens when a chip burns up — the magic smoke gets let out, so it doesn't work any more. See {smoke test}, {let ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... was sure it was nothing else—was not that sort of thing. Making motors explode.... Motors don't explode. One couldn't put bombs in them. There wasn't room. The explosions Joe had seen looked as if they'd centered in the fire basket—technically the combustion area—behind the compressor and before the drive vanes. A jet motor whirled. Its front vanes compressed air, and a flame burned furiously in the compressed air, which swelled enormously and poured out past ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster |
