HUMMING TOP • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Humming top

... but the case would be very different if the ceiling were covered with ice.' But as it was not, he changed his plan. The true secret, he now discovered, was this: he would consider himself in the light of a humming top; he would make an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a top, upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the vertiginous motion of the human top would overcome the force of gravitation. He should, of course, spin upon his own axis, and ...

— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various