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Fulcrum   /fˈʊlkrəm/   Listen
Fulcrum

noun
(pl. L. fulcra, E. fulcrums)
1.
The pivot about which a lever turns.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Fulcrum" Quotes from Famous Books



... force—both of these terms being "aspects" of God—and without a fulcrum no force can manifest itself; there is no heat without cold, and when it is summer in the northern hemisphere it is winter in the southern. There is no movement that does not depend upon a state of rest, no light without shadow, no pleasure without ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... lever, making its shoe bear on the button, and force it well in by repeated blows, the muzzle being the fulcrum. This done, disengage the button by pushing ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN

... what proved to be powdered granite, consolidated probably by lime, or perhaps only by time itself, he called for one of the stones that had been thrown out, laid it by the side of the hole he had picked, and then thrusting down the iron bar and using the stone as a fulcrum, he levered out a good-sized piece ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn

... assured from that moment. She had a good solid foundation to build upon in the jealousy of two or three of the leading girls of the style of pretensions illustrated by some of their talk which has been given. There is no possible success without some opposition as a fulcrum: force is always aggressive, and crowds something or other, if it does not hit or ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... is used to lift a log, one end is placed under the log, a block called a fulcrum is placed under the lever as close as possible to the log, and then the workman pulls down on the outer end of the lever. For example, if the fulcrum is one foot from the log and ten feet from the man, the latter can raise ten pounds with a pull of one pound, but he has to move his end of the lever ten times as far as the log rises. Try it. See other examples ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... interrogative if, and she did not mean it for "the one word," but Bobus caught at it as all he wanted. He meant it for the fulcrum on which to rest the strong lever of his will, and before Esther could add any qualification, he was overwhelming her with thanks and assurances so fervent that she could interpose no more doubts, and yielded to the sweetness of ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the top of the groove, and the least bit above it, say half an inch in all; but it made an appreciable difference to the sounds within, as when you remove your foot from a piano's soft pedal. I could do no more, for there was no further fulcrum for the spike, and I dared not gamble away what I had ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... separation from her, and, whether consciously or subconsciously, would cherish a grudge against Knight as the cause of that separation. The news of Mrs. Knight's death would come as a great shock, and might easily act, so to speak, as the fulcrum of the lever of mental disintegration. Then, dimly enough at first but soon with portentous rapidity, her disordered consciousness would conceive the idea that her friend had been murdered and that it was her duty ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... His thoroughness would have assured his success. He studied his art diligently, and practised regularly in a barn through the winter. His physique, too, was a magnificent instrument. That long, muscular body was superbly steady on the short, thick legs. It gave him a fulcrum, firm, apparently immovable. And those weirdly long, thin arms could move with lightning rapidity. He always stood with his hands behind him, and then—as often as not without even one preliminary step—the long arm would flash ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... who never doubts never thinks. He is like a straw in the wind or a waif on the sea. He is one of the helpless, docile, unquestioning millions, who keep the world in a state of stagnation, and serve as a fulcrum for the lever of despotism. The stupidity of the people, says Whitman, is always inviting the insolence ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... of a division of the school fund, which proved so offensive to many thousand voters in New York. Indeed, it may be said with truth, that Seward's record on that one question did more to defeat him at Chicago than all his "irrepressible conflict" and "higher-law" declarations. It became the fulcrum of Curtin's and Lane's aggressive resistance, who claimed that, in the event of his nomination, the American or Know-Nothing element in Pennsylvania and Indiana would not only maintain its organisation, but largely increase its strength, because of its strong ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... that if I showed any sign of want of spirit or backwardness, I should be ruined at once. So I took my bucket of grease and climbed up to the royal-mast-head. Here the rocking of the vessel, which increases the higher you go from the foot of the mast, which is the fulcrum of the lever, and the smell of the grease, which offended my fastidious senses, upset my stomach again, and I was not a little rejoiced when I had finished my job and got upon the comparative terra firma of the deck. In a few minutes seven bells were struck, the log hove, the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... no doubt represents the decisive factor. The love of truth in the abstract is probably the weakest of human passions; but truth when attained ultimately gives the fulcrum for a reconstruction of the world. When a solid core of ascertained and verifiable truth has once been formed and applied to practical results it becomes the fixed pivot upon which all beliefs must ultimately turn. The influence, however, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... at every revolution. The third takes in the matter of the twisting strain that a rod can manage; but the fourth brings the hardest usage that a connecting rod can be called upon to endure, and that is by making a lever of the rod to get a driving action by prying on a fulcrum in the center. In Fig. 1 is seen a case of this kind taken from a machine in which a disk engine was made use of. The rod has a chance to turn about on its center from a ball and socket joint, and engages with both wheels in nicely fitted ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various

... purely passive: who, incapable of acting by herself, was not competent to any of the operations they beheld, without the direct, the immediate agency of the moving powers they had associated with her: which they had made the fulcrum necessary to the action of the lever. They either did not or would not perceive, that the great Cause of causes, ens entium, Parent of parents, had, in unravelling chaotic matter, with a wisdom for which man can never be sufficiently grateful, with a sagacity which he can never sufficiently ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... have agreed with Maharajah, but the priests had stood between. That treasure was their fulcrum; the legacy, dictated by a dead, misguided hand, intended as a war reserve to stay the throne of Howrah in its need, and trebly locked to guard against profligacy, had placed the priests of Siva in the position ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... wood was thrust through the ring beneath the ankle, so that each end of the stick rested on the earth. A man secured one end by standing upon it, while another placed a stone upon the stick thus secured, which he used as a fulcrum. The lever employed was a piece of abdnoos, which worked upon the stone, and pressed down the base of the ring at the same time that it opened the joint sufficiently to allow it to be passed over the thin portion ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... because he reveals the divine thought concerning man, inherently perfect from the first, but requiring time and space for its outworking. That human individuality may be maintained, man is uplifted only over the fulcrum of his own will. This volitional power is the ray in us of that Creative Energy whose name Jehovah signifies, I will be what I will to be. Thus, then, oneness with God is not sameness with God, nor the absorption of human personality in the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... the fashion to call them lay institutions: legally they may have been so, but judged by their statutes, they were nearly all of them as ecclesiastical as the Chapter of a Cathedral. And Oxford was the fulcrum from which the theological revival hoped to move the Church. It was therefore a shock and a challenge of no light kind, when not merely the proposal was made to abolish the matriculation subscription with the express object ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... like a true tail, extending considerably beyond the rudimentary legs. In the seventh month the convolutions of the brain resemble those of an adult baboon. The great toe, so characteristic of man, forming the fulcrum which most assists him in standing erect, in an early stage of the embryo is much shorter than the other toes, and instead of being parallel with them, projects at an angle from the side of the foot, thus corresponding with its permanent condition in the quadrumana. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... and the banks that exist as a means to other things: those that function along methodically, without taking on any extraneous features; and those that serve as a nucleus for accumulating interests, as a fulcrum to move affairs through a wide and varied range. Of this kind was McComas's. Johnny was not the man to stand still and let routine take its way—not the man to mark time, even through the vacation ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... loop or clevis, to receive an iron pin, to be driven into the ground to keep the machine from moving about while being used. To the pulley block is swiveled a hook, to be hooked into a loop, attached to the forward end of a lever. The rear end of the lever passes through a slot in the upper end of a fulcrum post, and has a notch formed in its lower side to receive a bolt or pin, attached to said post to serve as a fulcrum to said lever. Several notches are formed in the lever to receive the fulcrum ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various

... the alluvial land on the banks of rivers. They mostly irrigate by a dhekli or dipping lift, from temporary wells or from water-holes in rivers. The pole of the lift has a weight at one end and a kerosene tin suspended from the other. Another form of lift is a hollowed tree trunk worked on a fulcrum, but this only raises the water a foot or two. The Marars do general cultivation as well; but as a class are not considered skilled agriculturists. The proverb ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... self-governing community in which the individual realized his powers by living—and dying—with and for his fellows. This new type of human community was of the highest moment in the sequel. In many points it was a model to the Romans, and thus became a fulcrum for the upward movement of the Western world. In the works, too, of the Greek philosophers, especially of Plato and Aristotle, it inspired the earliest and some of the deepest reflections on the nature of social life and government. But it never acquired ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... understand this swift forward motion of serpents. The seizure of prey by the constrictor, though invisibly swift, is quite simple in mechanism; it is simply the return to its coil of an opened watch-spring, and is just as instantaneous. But the steady and continuous motion, without a visible fulcrum (for the whole body moves at the same instant, and I have often seen even small snakes glide as fast as I could walk), seems to involve a vibration of the scales quite too rapid to be conceived. The motion of the crest and dorsal fin of ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin

... outcome of the institution of private or individual property. It has developed, in proportion to the accentuation of the institution of private, as against communal, property. When private property ceases to be the fulcrum around which the relations between the sexes turn, any attempt at coercion, moral or material, in these relations must necessarily become repugnant to the moral sense of ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... tightened with the short iron bar, in the end of which a V-shaped cut had been made. While Pete caught the slack wire with this bar, and, using the post as a fulcrum, the bar as a lever, drew it taut, Conniston with hammer and staples made it secure. Now and again they found a rotten post which must be taken out, while a new one from a row which had been dumped from a wagon yesterday was ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory

... because analysis in discovering common traits and universal principles assimilates things at the poles of being; it can apply to cookery the formulas of theology, and find in the human heart a case of the fulcrum and lever. We commonly keep the departments of experience distinct; we think that different principles hold in each and that the dignity of spirit is inconsistent with the explanation of it by physical analogy, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... The "fulcrum" upon which the whole issue depends, the "pivot" upon which it turns, is the existence of actual living souls filling ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... inconsiderable (four ounces) the inertia of the arm converted it into a lever of the first order. Instead of fulfilling its normal function of preventing displacement, the coraco-acromial arch acted as a fulcrum. The limb from the fingers to that point acted as the "long arm," and the head and part of the neck of the humerus served as the "short arm." The inertia of the arm, left behind as it were, supplied the power, while ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... these two expeditions competed together, and produced a dislocation of plans and ordering of troops to and fro, which told against success in either quarter. By 27th October Ministers definitely decided that Toulon, or la Vendee, was a better fulcrum for their scanty forces than Flanders.[245] Even so, with all these dislocations of the Flemish plans, Pitt and Dundas relied too much upon Austria; and all too late found out that she was a broken reed. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... caught by the sound member—here the long axis of the subject's body may be likened unto a lever of the first class. The posterior part of the body, at the time weight is taken upon the sound leg, is as the long arm: the fore limbs the fulcrum, and the subject's head the weight, which is lifted. The head movements of a horse at a trot, in supporting-leg-lameness of a front leg, synchronize with the discharge of weight from a lame leg to the opposite one if sound; but in pelvic limb affections, the head is thrown or jerked upward as weight ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix

... favourable opportunity. This is the burden of Bernhardi's message, which bristles with rage at the loss of Morocco. He regarded that land as more important than the Congo; for, in addition to the strategic value of its coasts, it offered a fulcrum in the west whereby to raise the Moslems against the Triple Entente. In the Epilogue he writes: "Our relations with Islam have changed for the worse by the abandonment of Morocco. . . . We have lost prestige in the whole Mohammedan ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... ideas which have made the great body of the European people unwilling slaves, reducing them to the very verge of desperation and starvation. Archimedes explained, as illustrating the vast power of the fulcrum, that if he had a place to stand he could move the world. The British land-shark, having got his hold upon the soil, possesses the place to stand for which the Greek sighed in vain, and no man will say he does not move the world; and he will continue to move it ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... Yaverland's mother. It is a picture of Ellen Melville, the girl in Edinburgh, the girl whose craving for the colour of existence has gone unsatisfied until Richard Yaverland enters her life. Yaverland, with his stories of Spain, and his imaginative appeal for that young girl, is the fulcrum of ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... secured on the inside to a brass operating arm, manipulated by means of rods running along each side of the clerestory, and each rod is operated by means of a brass lever, having a fulcrum secured to ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous

... nucleus of it is concerned, belongs to the course of the Assyrian period, and that Deuteronomy belongs to its close. Moreover, however strongly I am convinced that the latter is to be dated in accordance with 2Kings xxii., I do not, like Graf, so use this position as to make it the fulcrum for my lever. Deuteronomy is the starting-point, not in the sense that without it it would be impossible to accomplish anything, but only because, when its position has been historically ascertained, we cannot decline to go on, but must demand that the position of the Priestly ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... it generally," he replied, without surprise. "Money is but a lever. You cannot move the earth unless you have force and fulcrum, too." ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... Body. In mechanics three classes of levers are described, according to the relative position of the power, the fulcrum, and the resistance. All the movements of the bones can be referred to one or another ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... follow more easily, for now you may use a rafter for the fulcrum of your iron lever and pry where the long nails grip the oak too tenaciously, and it is not long before you have the roof unboarded. And here you may have a surprise and be taught a lesson in wariness which you will need if you would survive your unbuilding. The bare rafters, solid oak, six inches ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard



Words linked to "Fulcrum" :   pivot, pin, lever



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