"Steam engine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... done if I have to work like a steam engine!" she exclaimed to Grace, thrusting in and drawing out her needle with a rapidity ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... gathered upon deck. There was no wind, but the yacht had a steam engine and used her sails only on occasions when they could be of service. Stars shone brightly in the sky overhead, but their light was not sufficient to give an extended view on land or water, and as all were weary with the excitement ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... come together, however, at last, and then follows the excitement of the trial. There is nothing more striking in the history of the construction of a steam engine than this, that there can be no partial or private tests of the work by the workmen in the course of its progress—but every thing remains in suspense until all is complete, and the ship and the machinery are actually ready for sea. The immense and ponderous ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... encouraged to ask his on. Thus in undertaking the examination of a given topic—say, the Battle of Hastings (SS69-75), the issue of the Great Charter (SS195-202), or "The Industrial Revolution" and Watt's invention of an improved Steam Engine (S563)—there are five inquiries which naturally arise and which ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... materialism, argumentation, logic; the quotation, (referred to a motto "in the Swiss gardens"), "Speech is silvern, silence is golden," and a loud assertion that all great things are silent. The age is commended for Watt's steam engine, Arkwright's spinning jenny, and Whitfield's preaching, but its policy and theories are alike belittled. The summaries of the leading writers are interesting, some curious, and a few absurd. On the threshold of the age Dryden is noted "as a great poet born in the worst of times": Addison ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... itself is deeply involved. As Mill says: "A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam engine has a character." ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... these sheets a length sufficient to make a gun barrel is cut off by a pair of steam-moved shears, of which the lower jaw is stationary and the upper weighs a ton, of which plenty of examples may be seen in every steam engine factory. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... any good for us!" exclaimed Russ. "I was thinking maybe there'd be a toy steam engine ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... were such that a man could travel only a short distance in a day. He must go either by a vehicle drawn by horses or oxen, or afoot; and when he would cross the sea he must go in a sailboat that made little progress. In 1831 the first locomotive steam engine was invented. Such wonderful progress has been made in this regard that now one can travel through almost any part of the earth at a rapid rate upon a railway train. Later came the electric engines ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... the night mail and was rather dishevelled when she arrived, hair a bit tousled, a smut on the end of her nose and a general look of crinklyness about her clothes. Hilda has been in floods of tears and sobbing like a steam engine all morning." ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... be made to see that they cannot forever keep what they have created. If a man invents a steam engine worth to the world at large ten thousand billions, he is allowed to keep his property only seventeen years, under our patent laws. Shall we allow a clever highway robber of a commercial organizer to keep the proceeds of his energy ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... purpose to see Watt and Boulton's manufactory of steam engines at Soho. Mr. Boulton showed us everything. The engines, some in action, although beautifully smooth, showed a power that was almost fearful. Since these early forms of the steam engine I have lived to see this all but omnipotent instrument change the locomotion of the whole civilized world by sea ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... that is, the syrup being exposed to a vacuum, the water evaporates quickly, with no greater heat than that of a little steam, which is introduced round the boiler. The air-pump is of course of large dimensions, and is worked by a steam engine. A great saving is thus obtained, and a striking instance afforded of the power of science in ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... . . . Byron is a steam engine producing a rebellious energy; a lord who was dissatisfied in England and dissatisfied in Venice with Suiciolla, for although he had a warm climate and money he was bored. He is a rebel-individualist, a strong, passionate monster; a lord who is always seething with fury and using ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... the deep grunt of a bull two or three times in quick succession. The effect was tremendous. From the summit of the ridge, not two hundred yards above where I stood, the angry challenge of a bull was hurled down upon me out of the woods. Then it seemed as if a steam engine were crashing full speed through the underbrush. In fewer seconds than it takes to write it the canoe was well out into deep water, lying motionless with the bow inshore. A moment later a huge bull plunged through the fringe of alders onto the open bank, gritting his teeth, grunting, stamping ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... I've seen industry revolutionized—leaving the homes of the people, and herding into the great factories. I've seen steam revolutionize the daily habits of men, and distort their thoughts; one man can't run a steam engine; it takes more than one man to own one. So have I seen capital rise in the world until it is greater than kings, greater than courts, greater than governments—greater than God himself as matters stand, Cap—I'm ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... now are the Hengsts and Alarics of our still-glowing, still-expanding Europe; who, when their home is grown too narrow, will enlist, and, like Fire-pillars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable living Valor; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and war-chariot, but with the steam engine and ploughshare? Where are ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... him far more than has been recognized.[20] This thesis may further cast some light on other technological questions. The connection between the urgency of the problem of mine drainage in England, and the invention of the steam engine, has often been suggested.[21] Perhaps the "backwardness" of Germany in steam-engine experimentation, and later in the introduction of the Newcomen engine, was to some extent due to the adequacy of existing machinery to meet the problem ...
— Mine Pumping in Agricola's Time and Later • Robert P. Multhauf
... was," came the answer. "I saw you just in time. 'Tisn't often that an auto has to come to the help of a steam engine, but it happened this time," he ...
— The Curlytops and Their Playmates - or Jolly Times Through the Holidays • Howard R. Garis
... according to simple necessities, he could not select, make, and use, with certainty, any tool, from the club with which he defends himself against his enemies or cracks the shells of fruit, up to the finest instruments of optics and chemistry, and even to the telegraph and steam engine. The conformity to law, with which the forces of nature act, far from being an impediment to his appointing and reaching his ends is much more the indispensable means by which he is enabled in general to reach them. Now, if we thus find, in the only action striving towards an end ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... provincial China to the metropolitan government was therefore in the last analysis finance and nothing but finance; and if the system broke down in 1911 it was because financial reform—to discount the new forces of which the steam engine was the symbol—had been attempted, like military reform, both too late and in the wrong way, and instead of strengthening, had vastly weakened ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... is a set of six volumes written by the great scientists themselves, explaining the wonders of the telegraph, the camera, the steam engine, modern medicine, astronomy and natural laws. A vast scientific library condensed for the ...
— Wholesale Price List of Newspapers and Periodicals • D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency
... which he had no previous acquaintance, yet he had the chain of reasoning, founded upon principles of political economy, perfect in his memory; and his facts, so far as I could judge, were correct; at least, he stated them with great precision. The principles of the steam engine, too, he was very familiar with, having been several months on board of a steamboat, and made himself master of its secrets. He knew every lunar star in both hemispheres, and was a perfect master of his quadrant and sextant. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... her, the thrifty aunt was shocked to find her nephew engaged in so profitless an occupation, and soundly scolded him for what she called his trifling. The good lady little dreamed that James Watt was even then unconsciously studying the germ of the science by which he "transformed the steam engine from a mere toy into the most wonderful instrument which human industry has ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... sailing ship and the lumbering wagon dragging slowly over all but impassable roads, for one country to derive any considerable profit from another, it had, practically, to administer it politically. But the compound steam engine, the railway, the telegraph, have profoundly modified the elements of the whole problem. In the modern world political dominion is playing a more and more effaced role as a factor in commerce; the non-political factors have in practise ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... iron, travelling proudly over the shirt-collar, for it thought it was a steam engine and ought to be ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... the Second. In consideration of these services he was created a baronet of Sulhamstead Banister, Berks, after the Restoration. He was an ingenious mechanic, supposed by some persons to have invented the Steam Engine, and lived to an advanced age.] In the afternoon a council of war, only to acquaint them that the Harp must be taken out of all their flags, it being very offensive to the King. Late at night we writ letters to the King of the ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... science and philosophy, which have been largely built up by colleges and college-trained men. Bacon, Newton and Locke were sons of the English universities. Watt and Fulton associated with college men, and "derived from them the principles of science which they applied in the development of the steam engine and steam navigation. Professor Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, was not only a college graduate and professor, but made his great experiments within the walls of a university." Likewise, many other scientists, ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... System. The domestic period was in turn crowded out of existence by the factory system. A factory is a place where goods are produced by power for commercial use. The factory system first came into prominence after the invention of the steam engine. No record has been found showing its existence ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... a hint when he and I was out here just now. Old Pat was asleep way in back there and snorin' like a steam engine. And Georgie said he never slept there unless 'twas a storm, rainin' same as 'tis now. And every time you heard the—ho! ho!—the ghost, 'twas on a stormy night. It stormed the night you got here, and when Becky Timpson ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... All honor to the men who do not fear obstacles, but push them aside and press on. Stephenson was explaining his idea that a locomotive steam engine could run along a track and draw cars after it. "But suppose a cow gets on the track," some one objected. "So much the worse," said ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... Victoria the 'industrial revolution,' the vast development of manufacturing made possible in the latter part of the eighteenth century by the introduction of coal and the steam engine, had rendered England the richest nation in the world, and the movement continued with steadily accelerating momentum throughout the period. Hand in hand with it went the increase of population from less than ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... few minutes he ordered Michel to take the helm, and himself seized the oar, which he plied with such vigour that, as Michel afterwards averred, the rudder had to be kept nearly hard a-port all the time to prevent the boat being pulled round even though Le Rue was working like a steam engine ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... or stewing it gently, saves all its goodness. After the pot once boils you cannot make its contents cook any faster if you have fire enough under it to run a steam engine; so save your fuel, and add it to the fire, little by little, only enough at a time to keep the pot boiling. Remember, if you boil meat hard and fast it will be tough and tasteless, and most of its goodness will go up the chimney, or out of the window, with the steam. Boil the ...
— Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six • Juliet Corson
... theoretical and practical aeronauts. One of the earliest machines deserving of special mention was designed by M. Giffard, and consisted of an elongated balloon, 104 feet in length and 39 feet in greatest diameter, furnished with a triangular rudder, and a steam engine operating a screw. The fire of the engine, which burned coke, was skilfully protected, and the fuel and water required were taken into calculation as so much ballast to be gradually expended. In this vessel, inflated only with coal gas, and somewhat unmanageable and difficult to balance, ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... sun; the ground is all hot, soon becoming insupportable. In places a little jet of steam and smoke rises fiercely from a hole in the hills, while in others boiling water rushes out as if forced from a steam engine. The ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... There are many ways how your steam engine might stop working. You might ask Dicky. He knows one of them. I think it is the way ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... potential or otherwise, in exact proportion to the artist's wisdom and dynamic mentality, and is useless in the hands of the idiotic or weak-minded. A Magic Wand requires brains and vigorous mental force to make it effective, just as the steam engine requires an apparatus for generating the steam, that moves it. With a determined will, and a mental conception of one's inward power, any man or woman can, by means of this sensitive Wand, defy all the legionaries of Hell, and quickly disperse ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... is performed through the medium of a small steam engine and sixteen hydrants, so posted and supplied with hose as to reach every square foot of the 170 acres. The water used for this purpose is mostly, if not entirely, supplied from the draining pipes, even ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... occasional relaxation, as much as the steam engine does the application of oil to its divers springs; and, after a bon fide slumber, we rise with a freshness equal to that of flowers in the best regulated flower-pots. But dozing must not be confounded with legitimate sleep, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... mechanical production of electric currents. Every one knows now that electric lights are produced from powerful currents of electricity generated in a machine containing magnets and coils of wire, and driven by a steam engine, or gas engine, or water-wheel. But of the thousands who have heard that a steam engine can thus provide us with electric currents, how many are there who comprehend the action of the generator or dynamo-electric ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... literature, they were quite innocent of the herculean labors they proposed. On the first attempt to frame a resolution; to crowd a complete thought, clearly and concisely, into three lines; they felt as helpless and hopeless as if they had been suddenly asked to construct a steam engine. And the humiliating fact may as well now be recorded that before taking the initiative step, those ladies resigned themselves to a faithful perusal of various masculine productions. The reports of Peace, Temperance, and Anti-Slavery ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the first practical steam engine about 1710. It was of about five and a half horse power, and was used for pumping water from coal mines. Savery had described such an engine in 1702, but Newcomen improved upon ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... at his home in this city Dec. 6, 1867, at the age of 67. A long and eminently useful although unobtrusive life entitles his memory to respect. He commenced his career as a mechanic in the steam engine establishment of James P. Allaire, soon after the application of steam for the propulsion of boats and long before its application to ships for the purposes of commerce or war. For fifty-two years, with the exception ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... What impression could this have made on Lenin? Could he not have felt: "Perhaps Napoleon's logic was good at that time but now with electricity, the steam engine and modern industrialism it will be possible to do without the efficiency of capitalism and hence with its inequalities and egoism? If so then we can recreate the equality dreamt of by Babeuf, Robespierre, Saint Just and the other ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... applications of the steam engine were most ably enforced in the speeches made at a public meeting held (June 1824) for the purpose of proposing the erection of a monument to the memory of James Watt; these were ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... had half a chance to develop the finer qualities of his nature—and he knew it. He was a tremendous worker and as an aggressive editor, an ambitious politician and an ardent reformer, driven like a steam engine, he could give little heed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but he was sensitive as a girl to rebuffs bringing to mind what might have been. Among friends with whom he felt at home and in really congenial company, he was a different ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... was produced until a much later date, when in 1885 M. Wolf constructed an envelope of 26,500 cubic feet. An engine and propeller were fixed in a triangular framework in front of the airship, supported by the steam pipe of a steam engine fixed under the body of the envelope. The framework lacked rigidity, and the envelope tore during inflation and the ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... technical vocabulary of engineering, and the term has brought with it a very refreshing sense of accuracy and practicality. It suggests blueprints and T-squares and mathematical formulae. A faint and rather pleasant odor of lubricating oil and cotton waste seems to hover about it. The efficiency of a steam engine or a dynamo is a definitely determinable and measurable factor, and when we use the term "efficiency" in popular speech we convey through the word somewhat of this quality ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... steam engine, which Watt had just finally improved, removed the first difficulty, and the second was soon to disappear, thanks to a projected canal. An iron foundry was then established there under the patronage of Louis XIV., while ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... I never shall be anything else; and so there's the end of it. It's my business to stay here and do my duty in the kitchen. I suppose an industrious, cheerful tea-kettle is just as useful in its place as a steam engine; yes, and just as happy, too. And if I must stay in this kitchen among the pots the rest of my days, I mean to do my share to make it the cheerfulest kitchen in ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... We have all been to tea to-night at the Russians' villa. Tea was made out of a samovar, which is something like a small steam engine, and whose principal advantage is that it burns the fingers of all who lay their profane touch upon it. After tea Madame Z. played Russian airs, very plaintive and pretty; so the evening was Muscovite from beginning to end. Madame G.'s daughter danced ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... two). You saw Duke, the Hawaiian world champion swimmer, come in on a surf-board, standing straight and slim and naked like a god of bronze, balancing miraculously on a plank carried in on the crest of a wave with the velocity of a steam engine. You saw Japanese women in tight kimonos and funny little stilted flapping footgear running to catch a street car; and you laughed at the incongruity of it. You made the three-day trip to the living volcano at Hilo and sat at the crater's brink watching the molten lava lake tossing, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... seemin'ly all wrought of white marble, with statutes, and colonnades, and towers, and everything else for its comfort, and inside wuz every machine that wuz ever made or thought on, from a sassage-cutter and apple-parer to a steam engine in ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... A steam engine in which the connecting rod is led at once from the head of the piston to the crank, thus communicating the rotatory motion without ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... weaving had to be done by hand. Not until 1785, when Dr. Cartwright, a parson, invented a "power loom," was it deemed possible to weave by machinery. Cartwright's invention, coming in the same year as the general introduction of Watt's steam engine in the cotton industry, made the industrial revolution. Had the revolution come slowly, had the inventors of the new industrial processes been able to accomplish that, it is most probable that much of the misery of the period would have been avoided. As it was, terrible ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... But he must not think of our farm as at all like some great farm he may happen to know in England; for there was nothing done by machinery on the place. There may be great pleasure in watching machine-operations, but surely none to equal the pleasure we had. If there had been a steam engine to plough my father's fields, how could we have ridden home on its back in the evening? To ride the horses home from the plough was a triumph. Had there been a thrashing-machine, could its pleasures have been comparable to that of lying in the straw and watching the grain ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam engine running upon a railway. This period covers the first experiments, the first great developments, and the complete elaboration of that mode of transit, and the determination of nearly all the broad features of this century's history ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... to the most remote parts of the world. Such protection was needed, because while England prohibited the export of even a single collier who might instruct the people of India in the mode of mining coal—of a steam engine to pump water or raise coal, or a mechanic who could make one—of a worker in iron who might smelt the ore—of a spinning-jenny or power-loom, or of an artisan who could give instruction in the use of such machines—and thus systematically prevented them from ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... mistake as men who, trying to set a steam engine in motion, should turn its wheels round with their hands, not suspecting that the underlying cause of its movement was the expansion of the steam, and not the motion of the wheels. By turning the wheels by hand and by levers they could only produce a semblance ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... threatens he becomes exceedingly nervous and excited. His anxiety is quite acute. In vain he tries to locate the danger, rushing one way for a few yards, then the other way, and finally all ways at once. His tail is up and he is snorting like a steam engine. When he rushes toward you in this attitude it looks very much as though he were charging you with the purpose of trampling you to flinders. As a matter of fact, or, rather, opinion, he is merely trying ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... closely at such an invention as the steam engine in its latest and most complicated developments, about which there can be no dispute but that they are achievements of reason, purpose and design, we shall find them present us with examples of all those features the presence of which in the ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... his horses through the winter. If he said to his horses: 'Quadrupeds, I have no longer work for you; but work exists abundantly over the world: you are ignorant (or must I read you Political Economy pictures) that the steam engine always in the long-run creates additional work? Railways are forming in one quarter of this earth, canals in another, much cartage is wanted; somewhere in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, doubt it not, ye will find cartage, ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... in the provinces is that abrupt termination of her passion which is so often seen in England. In the country, a life under minute observation as keen as an Indian's compels a woman either to keep on the rails or to start aside like a steam engine wrecked by an obstacle. The strategies of love, the coquetting which form half the composition of a Parisian woman, are ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... has just been stated, food may be considered as anything that the human engine can make over into tissue or use in living and working, not all foods are equally desirable any more than all materials are equally good in the construction of a steam engine and in the production of its working power. Those food substances which are the most wholesome and healthful are the ones to be chosen, but proper choice cannot be made unless the buyer knows of what the particular food consists and what it is expected to do. To aid in the selection of food, ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... architects who built the cathedrals which are still the wonder of the world, failed to discern what seems to us so obviously simple a proposition, that two parallel lines of rail would diminish the cost and difficulty of transport to a minimum. Without that discovery the steam engine, which has itself been an invention of quite recent years, would ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... shyness stealing over her and wished that David were by her side. She looked across the room at him. His face had recovered its usual calmness, though he looked pale. He was talking on his favorite theme with old Mr. Heath: the newly invented steam engine and its possibilities. He had forgotten everything else for the time, and his face lighted with animation as he tried to answer ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... the application of steam and in the construction of our war steamers, made under the superintendence of distinguished officers of the Navy. In addition to other manifest improvements in the construction of the steam engine and application of the motive power which has rendered them more appropriate to the uses of ships of war, one of those officers has brought into use a power which makes the steamship most formidable either for attack or defense. I can not too strongly recommend ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Tyler • John Tyler
... in place by a massive framework of iron and are turned to the left or to the right by means of a small steam engine, placed at one side of the lock, which engine, by means of a longitudinal shaft, drives two cross shafts to which bevel wheels are attached. By this means the chamber is lowered and raised. The screw rods are so powerful that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... is no electric lighting in the shop, it will be necessary to install a generator and a gas, gasoline, or steam engine, or a waterwheel to drive it. A 10 battery belt driven generator may be used in such a shop, and may also, of course, be used with a separate motor. The generator should, of course, be a direct current machine. The size of the generator will depend upon the average ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... the Yankee Phoenix made the little coasting trip from Hoboken to Philadelphia in 1809. She was not the first steamer in Canadian salt water, for the St John crossed the Bay of Fundy in 1826. And she was not the first vessel with a steam engine that crossed an ocean, for the Yankee Savannah crossed from Savannah to Liverpool in 1819. The {137} Phoenix and St John call for no explanation. The Savannah does, especially in view of the claims so freely made and allowed for her as being the first regular steamer ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... ingenuity, originated the Soho button, the single wheel clock, the improvement of the steam engine, the platina button, the method of taking exact copies of painting, writing, &c. also, the productions of fancy, in great variety; with which some of the European ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... well,—to do its work thoroughly. But with all his keeping it in order he does not make it work night and day for weeks or months. Such folly is never heard of in an engineer; but with us human beings, who own and manage a far more wonderful machine than any steam engine, we hear of it often, and always, always the tale winds up with the inevitable catastrophe. The business man develops paresis, the clergyman loses his voice or his eyes, the nurse contracts some disease that incapacitates her for work, in every case mother Nature makes the careless ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... headpieces of mankind.—By a judicious application of the scissors of discrimination, the soap of good nature, the brush of reform, and the razor of decision, he expects to bring about results which, like powers of the Steam Engine are, as yet, only dreamed of. The grace of the Athenian beau and the dignity of the Roman senator shall be so intermingled in the grand contour of all who submit to his touch, that the toute ensemble cannot fail to kindle ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... had frequently controlled with great success at Devilshoof; and Benson could not help looking a little mortified, for Charlie was not very well off for tail, and had recollections of his harness days, which made him drop his head at times and pull like a steam engine; besides which, Harry—partly, perhaps, from motives of economy, partly, as he said, because he thought it snobbish to ride in handsome toggery—always mounted in the oldest clothes he had, and with a well-used bridle and saddle. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... great spread, the batteries and motors being secured to the under side of the deck. "The motors are so light that they develop two horse power for every pound of their weight; while, to keep the frames thin, the necessary power is obtained by terrific speed of the moving parts, as though a steam engine, to avoid great pressure in its cylinders, had a long stroke and ran at great piston speed, which, however, is no disadvantage to the rotary motion of the electric motor, there being no reciprocating cranks, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... &c 73. cast away, fool away, muddle away, throw away, fling away, fritter away; burn the candle at both ends, waste; squander &c 818. waste its sweetness on the desert air [Gray]; cast one's bread upon the waters, cast pearls before swine; employ a steam engine to crack a nut, waste powder and shot, break a butterfly on a wheel; labor in vain &c (useless) 645; cut blocks with a razor, pour water into a sieve. leak &c (run out) 295; run to waste; ebb; melt away, run dry, dry up. Adj. wasted ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... two editors to outdo each other have been titanic. When Simpson put in a steam engine, Ayers mortgaged his plant and got one of the new gasoline engines just then being introduced into an unhappy world. He never used it much unless he had lots of time in which to start it, but it was a great comfort ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... their falling from under the dhotie to the ground. Needless to say that the cobras had had their fangs extracted, that the third snake was harmless, and that the baby crocodile was too small to inflict any damage, though all four participants could hiss like a young steam engine. ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... powder henceforth. And in this they obeyed him. And there arose a Lord of the Treasury, saying, 'Let powder be taxed.' And it was so, and the tax was paid, and powder was still worn. And there came the great Reform Bill, and the Steam Engine, and all manner of queer things, but powder did not end, for custom hath many lives. Nor was there an end of those things which the Nobility and Gentry had long since shed from their own persons—as, ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... machine with his own hands before he was old enough to speak the name of it in anything but baby-talk. We have seen boys work in the broiling sun day after day hoeing potatoes, pulling weeds, gathering crops, and doing other hard jobs for small pay, carefully saving every penny to buy a toy steam engine. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... He leaned back in his chair and regarded her with benevolent optimism. "You can always get on if the stuff is in you. I meant to get on, and a steam engine couldn't have kept me back. It's the gospel truth that I believe I came into the world meaning to get out of that cellar, and it was the same thing with areas and ash-bins. I knew all the time I wasn't going to keep grubbing ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... When the Griffin saw the last of the twelve hundred dozen mice disappearing down the road with never a cat after them, he was in a tremendous temper and flew away to the house of the Wicked Witch, only stopping to pick up a steam engine which he dropped through her roof, and then went home to bed. Next day he remembered a friend of his called the Grumpy Giant, who lived six doors away, that is, about a thousand miles, so he flew to ask his advice. When the Giant heard his story, he said in the gruffest voice you ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... compared to a steam engine which is constructed to run at a certain pressure of steam, say one hundred and fifty pounds to the square inch of boiler surface. Once I ran such an engine; and well I remember a morning during my early apprenticeship when the foreman called for power ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... upon another. To-morrow, not religion, not politics, but chemistry, not priests nor politicians, but chemists, would change all that—and change it by the only methods that compel. An abstract idea of liberty or justice can be rejected, evaded, nullified. But a telephone, a steam engine, a mode of prolonging life—those ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... account, of itself in times past; and would again if called to show its sterling qualities. And with this in the hands of Thad Brewster, who was a perfectly fearless chap, according to his churns, who did not know that his boy heart could hammer in his breast like a runaway steam engine, why, they surely ought to be able to stave off any ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... 1830 there had come a remarkable series of inventions which revolutionized the methods of making cloth. This series included the invention of the fly shuttle, the carding machine, the steam engine, and the power loom. The world began to look about for a cheaper and larger supply of fiber for weaving. It was found in the cotton plant, and the southern United States was especially adapted to its culture. The invention of the cotton gin removed the last difficulties. The South now ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... same words upon it that the compositor read upon the letter or written page sent in a little while ago. All night long these types with the letters upon them are being set up, all night long patient men pick up the metal letters and form them into pages; all night long the steam engine is going, and the letters from the inky metal pages are being stamped upon the clean white paper, which, when it is printed all over, will contain the week's history of the world, and will be read by thousands ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... to me, as I remember somewhat vaguely, that precisely the same idea might be applied to a carriage or a wagon on the road. A horseless carriage was a common idea. People had been talking about carriages without horses for many years back—in fact, ever since the steam engine was invented—but the idea of the carriage at first did not seem so practical to me as the idea of an engine to do the harder farm work, and of all the work on the farm ploughing was the hardest. Our roads were poor and we had not the habit of getting around. One of the ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... had assisted his father in tending the fires of the steam engine which worked the machinery of a large coal mine. He devoted himself to the study of this engine until he had mastered every detail of its construction. In 1813, a rich nobleman entrusted him with money to carry out his favorite plan ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... the schooner held on her course. What the boys saw was a bright light shining through the darkness a short distance off the starboard bow, and what they heard a moment later was the puffing of a small but exceedingly active steam engine. The light presently disappeared but the puffing continued, increasing in force and frequency as the approaching launch gathered headway, and then came ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... James Watt. The Inventor of the Modern Steam Engine. With Selections from his Private Correspondence. By James P. Muirhead. Portrait ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... form of drier has its own motor, a little steam engine, attached to the frame of the machine. See Fig 24. This of course demands fixed bearings. The engine is very small. One size used is 3"x4". When a higher velocity of basket is required, we have the arrangement ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... strenuous life sugar has no equal and only one rival, alcohol. Alcohol is the offspring of sugar, a degenerate descendant that retains but few of the good qualities of its sire and has acquired some evil traits of its own. Alcohol, like sugar, may serve to furnish the energy of a steam engine or a human body. Used as a fuel alcohol has certain advantages, but used as a food it has the disqualification of deranging the bodily mechanism. Even a little alcohol will impair the accuracy and speed of thought and action, while a large quantity, as we all know ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... far they had descended and at what rate they were moving. The Captain, from his bridge, carefully superintended every detail of the operation. All signals he insisted on attending to himself personally, transmitting them instantly by his bell to the engineer below. The whole power of the steam engine had been brought to bear on the windlass; the chains could withstand an enormous strain. The wheels had been carefully oiled and tested beforehand; the signalling apparatus had been subjected to the rigidest examination; and every portion of the machinery had been proved ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... for the smallest boy but one divining her intent, immediately began swarming upstairs after her—if that word of doubtful etymology be admissible—on his arms and legs; while the eldest (known in the family by the name of Biler, in remembrance of the steam engine) beat a demoniacal tattoo with his boots, expressive of grief; in which he was joined by the rest ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... told you how the Bluebird was driven along through the water by a small engine. It was not a steam engine, such as are found in many boats, but a gasoline one, such as ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on a Houseboat • Laura Lee Hope
... of Massachusetts, of that wonderful improvement in the separation of cotton-fibre from its seed, known as the "cotton-gin"—which with the almost simultaneous inventions of Hargreaves, and Arkwright's cotton-spinning machines, and Watt's application of his steam engine, etc., to them, marvelously increased both the cotton supply and demand and completely revolutionized the cotton industry—contributed to rapidly and thickly populate the whole region with white Slave-holders and black ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... Austrian brig drifting in the current, the whiff of her flag indicating distress. Her rudder was entirely gone, and she was floating helplessly towards the Thracian coast. A boat was immediately lowered and a hawser carried to her bows, by which we towed her a short distance; but our steam engine did not like this drudgery, and snapped the rope repeatedly, so that at last we were obliged to leave her to her fate. The lift we gave, however, had its effect, and by dexterous maneuvering with the sails, the captain brought her safely into the harbor ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... gradually tapers toward the delivery end of the machine. The briquettes have a cross-section similar to an ellipse with the ends slightly cut off; they are about 1 in. thick and average about 1 lb. in weight (Fig. 2, Plate XX). The press is operated by a direct connection with a steam engine of 150 h.p., the base of which is continuous with that of the press. The exhaust steam from the engine is ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... in Adolphe's lap, and Adolphe cannot help smiling. This smile, extracted as if by a steam engine, Caroline has been on the watch for, in order to make ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... he said. "Here is a little steam engine that runs on wheels; and, see, here is a fan that will open ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... fact that cowpeas gather nitrogen from the air: a man may harness this scientific truth, use it and set it to work, and get results, profits, power, from it, as surely as from a harnessed horse or steam engine. And so with every other useful bit of knowledge under heaven. ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... begin to assume that importance and extent to which they have at present reached, till the middle, or rather the latter part of the eighteenth century; then her potteries, her hardware, her woollens, and above all her cotton goods, began to improve. Certainly the steam engine is the grand cause to which England's wealth and commerce may be attributed in a great degree; but the perfection to which it has been brought, the multifarious uses to which it is applied, both presuppose skill, capital, and industry, without which the mere possession of such an engine would ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... there appeared a strange object, coming straight toward them. It sounded something like a steam engine. "Chug, chug, chug, chug," ...
— Prince and Rover of Cloverfield Farm • Helen Fuller Orton
... thousand pounds to any one who could guess what it was; and though Bendigo Jones's pocket was helped considerably by his percentage of the gate money, his pride suffered considerably when the answers were made public. They ranged from, "Model of the first steam engine when out of control," to "An explosion of a ship at sea," both of which happy efforts gained a bag of nuts. The answer adjudged most nearly correct was sent in by a Fulham butcher, who banked on "Angry gentleman quarrelling with his landlord on quarter-day": which at any rate had the merit ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... hunt a safe distance off, was one thing, but to have one of those huge animals come thundering along like a steam engine directly upon you, was quite another. I was on one of Lieutenant Baldwin's horses, too, and I felt that there might be danger of his bolting to his companion, Tom, when he saw him dashing by, and as I was not anxious to join in a buffalo chase just ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... Mr. Tolman, pausing to shift the gear of the car. "Before the steam engine, as we know it, saw the light, there had to be more experimenting and improving of the steam fountain. It was not until 1705 that Thomas Newcomen and his partner, John Calley, invented and patented the first real steam engine. Of course it was not in the least like ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... used a mixture of combustible gas and air, which operated like steam in a steam engine. This engine had a water-jacket, centrifugal governor, and flame ignition. In 1838 Barnett applied the principle of compression to a single-acting engine. He also employed a gas and air pump, which were placed respectively on either side of the engine cylinder, communication ...
— Gas and Oil Engines, Simply Explained - An Elementary Instruction Book for Amateurs and Engine Attendants • Walter C. Runciman
... rubber, that of packing for the steam engine and connecting machinery appears to have been the most important, as it has been an essential condition of the development and extended use of ...
— The Romance of Rubber • United States Rubber Company
... sawmill, which was run by water-power, had closed for the winter, when building material was not wanted, and the development of a mineral claim they owned would be stopped by the frost. They had planned to put in a steam engine at the mill, but the Hulton Company had delayed a contract that would have kept the saws ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... as the place where I might get the information for which I thirsted was, to say the least, inhabited—for the noise which penetrated through the keyhole and the cracks of the door was appalling. Either, thought I, a free fight is going on within, or there is a steam engine at work, or the builders are shooting bricks through the window. I was mistaken. It was only five boys of ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... railroad, the trans-Atlantic cable, the steam engine, the electric light, the wireless telegraph, the very republic in which we are ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... temperature and pressure, and then applied by means of suitable heat engines to produce the motions we require. It is probably to this circumstance that we must attribute the slowness of the human race to take advantage of the energy of combustion. The history of the steam engine hardly dates back 200 years, a very small fraction of the centuries during which man has existed, even ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... Edward, the second Marquess, was the author of the celebrated "Century of Inventions," in which the first hint of the steam engine appeared, which he calls "By divine providence, and heavenly inspiration, a stupendous water commanding engine, boundless for height or quantity;" and so delighted was he at the discovery of what he terms "The most stupendous work ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... was a slight breeze blowing up the hill from town, there was a low rumbling sound coming from many machines working in wood and steel, followed at regular intervals by the steady breathing of a steam engine. ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... for the source of energy that is necessary to perform our work and maintain our body temperature much in the same way that a steam engine is dependent on the fuel supplied it to perform the mechanical tasks assigned to it, and this fuel value of foods in turn, depends on the amount of protein, carbohydrate and fat, particularly the latter, that are present in the foods. At once we see, in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... originally mixed by hand. In the summer of 1880 the factory installed a steam engine and belt-driven pill-mixing machinery. At least one rotary pill machine was purchased from England, from J.W. Pindar, and delivered to Comstock at a total cost (including ocean freight) of L19-10-9—about $100. One minor unsolved mystery is that ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... degree; its banking a model of efficiency and public usefulness; its roads equal to the best roads in England or in Europe. The people are active and energetic, alike in education, in trade, in manufactures, in construction, in invention. Watt's invention of the steam engine, and Symington's invention of the steam-boat, proved a source of wealth and power, not only to their own country, but to the world at large; while Telford, by his roads, bound England and Scotland, before separated, firmly into one, and rendered the union a source ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... its parts and form a picture of it in our minds throughout. We understand how a violin is made if our minds can follow the manufacture in all its detail and picture it to ourselves. If we feel that we can identify ourselves with the steam and machinery of a steam engine, so as to travel in imagination with the steam through all the pipes and valves, if we can see the movement of each part of the piston, connecting rod, &c., so as to be mentally one with both the ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... to get a load of hothouse glass. While we stood pondering that bit of puzzling information, a third hired man drove into the yard on a heavy wagon drawn by a span of work horses. On the wagon was the old fire box and the boiler of a stationary steam engine that we had had for some time in the shook shop a ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... was being brought to its highest perfection, it was on the eve of being supplanted altogether. In 1769, Watt took out his first patent for the steam engine, and in October 1788 Mr Miller, of Dalswinton in Scotland, first applied the new motive power to propel a vessel. An engine was placed on a frame, fixed between two pleasure boats, and made to turn ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... connected with Dartmouth of late years is Newcomen, the inventor of the steam engine. He carried on business in the town as an ironmonger. All honour is due to his memory, although others perfected the work ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... Wenham's proposal, produced a largish model at the exhibition of the Aeronautical Society in 1868. It consisted of three superposed surfaces aggregating 28 square feet and a tail of 8 square feet more. The weight was under 12 pounds and it was driven by a central propeller actuated by a steam engine overestimated at one-third of a horsepower. It ran suspended to a wire on its trials but failed of free flight, in consequence of defective equilibrium. This apparatus has since been rebuilt and is now in the National Museum of the Smithsonian ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... and bar steel; the various qualities of iron enabling it to be used for purposes so opposite as a steel pen and a railroad, the needle of a mariner's compass and an Armstrong gun, a surgeon's lancet and a steam engine, the mainspring of a watch and an iron ship, a pair of scissors and a Nasmyth hammer, a lady's earrings and a ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... did the community, already conscious of the momentous influence the steam engine was exerting upon the social and economic condition of the countryside, but yet to discover the not less remarkable potentialities of the electric or the petrol spark applied to the problems of transport, herald the birth ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine |
