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Automatical   Listen
adjective
Automatical, Automatic  adj.  
1.
Having an inherent power of action or motion. "Nothing can be said to be automatic."
2.
Pertaining to, or produced by, an automaton; of the nature of an automaton; self-acting or self-regulating under fixed conditions; operating with minimal human intervention; esp. applied to machinery or devices in which certain things formerly or usually done by hand are done by the machine or device itself; as, the automatic feed of a lathe; automatic gas lighting; an automatic engine or switch; an automatic mouse; an automatic transmission. The opposite of manual. Note: Narrower terms are: autoloading(prenominal), semiautomatic; automated, machine-controlled, machine-driven; self-acting, self-activating, self-moving, self-regulating; self-locking; self-winding. Also See: mechanical.
3.
(Physiol.) Not voluntary; not depending on the will; mechanical; controlled by the autonomic nervous system; without conscious control; as, automatic movements or functions. The opposite of voluntary.
Synonyms: reflex(prenominal), reflexive,involuntary "Unconscious or automatic reasoning."
4.
Like the unthinking functioning of a machine. "An automatic 'thank you'"
Synonyms: automaton-like, automatonlike, machinelike, machine-like, robotlike.
Automatic arts, such economic arts or manufacture as are carried on by self-acting machinery.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Automatical" Quotes from Famous Books



... his appointment with Katherine at three o'clock. He glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to the hour, and, beyond a cleaning yesterday afternoon, no preparations were made. In an automatic way he unlocked some cases and drew out his treasures, wiped the sword-blades tenderly with chamois leather, and laid them on the long, baize-covered table. Here and there from the cornice he selected a helmet. The ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke

... attendant, whose first duty shall be to open it for transportation, and prevent it from standing open longer than necessary for cars to pass through, and, persons in charge of cars passing through automatic doors shall be required to keep a close watch over such doors, and if any such door fails to close, they shall promptly close same and report such fact to the mine foreman. This shall not prevent the attendant from performing other duties, provided ...
— Mining Laws of Ohio, 1921 • Anonymous

... was happiness now, the misery belonged to tomorrow. But suddenly that last unrealized fact—at once immaterial and the most leaden reality of all—lost its weight. The greater freedom she had lately grown into became an absolute indifference, a half willful and half automatic shutting of her eyes to everything but the present, the actuality of Gerrit Ammidon walking by her side. She wanted him to speak, so that she could discover his thoughts, feelings; yet she was reluctant ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer

... of their inutility to one of his calling. Then he closed the safe door, closed the tapestry upon it and turned toward a dainty dressing table. From a drawer in this exquisite bit of Sheraton the burglar took a small, nickel plated automatic, which he slipped into an inside breast pocket of his coat, nor did he touch another article therein or thereon, nor hesitate an instant in the selection of the drawer to be rifled. His knowledge of the apartment of the daughter of the house of Prim was little short of uncanny. Doubtless the ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... machinery could be examined more closely. They resembled automatic testing scales, said Smith; such as is used in weighing complicated metal products after finishing and assembling. Moreover, they seemed to be connected, the one to the other, with a series of endless belts, which Smith thought indicated automatic production. To all ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... to an older flower at the bottom of another one. Here a marvellous thing has happened. The passage which, when the flower first expanded, scarcely permitted a bristle to pass, has now widened through the automatic downward movement of the column in order to expose the stigmatic surfaces to contact with the pollen masses brought by the bee. Without the bee's help this orchid, with a host of other flowers, must disappear from the face of the earth. So very many ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... trees you fell? It must be a great labour to clear them out." "We don't clear them out," he replied. "We use ploughs that automatically rise when they come to a stump, and take the earth again on the other side." I cannot but conjecture that Mr. Wells's thinking apparatus is fitted with some such automatic appliance for soaring gaily over the snags that stud ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... forward the enclosed acrostic, and might he be allowed to print it in the Mudborough Young Men's Mutual Improvement Magazine? Messrs. Smith & Smith would be extremely obliged if Mr. Lionel Moore would honor them with his opinion of the accompanying pair of their patent silver-mounted automatic self-adjusting braces. ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... supernormal faculty in savages cannot be brought into court and cross-examined. But I do not give anecdotes of such savage successes as evidence to facts; they are only illustrations, and evidence to beliefs and methods (as of crystal gazing and automatic utterances of "secondary personality"), which, among the savages, correspond to the supposed facts examined by Psychical Research among the civilised. I only point out, as Bastian had already pointed out, the existence of a field that deserves closer study by anthropologists ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... comic in that flapping skirt and short cover-coat above it; but now, under the glare of the mid-day sun, with those faces gathered round them, it appeared rather to add a grotesque horror to the scene. The dragoman salaamed and salaamed like some ungainly automatic doll, and then, as the chief rasped out a curt word or two, he fell suddenly upon his face, rubbing his forehead into the sand, and flapping upon ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle

... my continued acquaintance, and grapple me to your soul with hooks of steel, as Hamlet says. Or was it Harold Bell Wright? Do you care for reading, Miss? I've got a neat little library inside, besides an automatic piano and a patent ice-box.... By the way, Miss, is that policeman doing setting-up exercises or motioning us to move on? ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... passes a water tank on the railway, a 4-in. branch pipe is carried to the bottom of the tank and up to the top, where it is capped by an automatic valve. A gate-valve is placed in the branch pipe at its junction ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell

... curtain drew across beneath me and the wet folds of vapours were swirling round my face. It was clammily cold and miserable. But I was above the hail-storm, and that was something gained. The cloud was as dark and thick as a London fog. In my anxiety to get clear, I cocked her nose up until the automatic alarm-bell rang, and I actually began to slide backwards. My sopped and dripping wings had made me heavier than I thought, but presently I was in lighter cloud, and soon had cleared the first layer. There ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... sufficient scale, money and inventive power will be spent without stint on the task till it is achieved. There still remains the responsibility for seeing that the machinery is in good order and working smoothly; but even this task is often made light of by the introduction of an automatic movement which brings the machine to a stop ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... emphatic voice, half-surprised remonstrance, half-automatic rebuke; "I am astonished!" She looked it. She pursed her lips more tightly, and gazed at the pair of culprits as though she had hoped better things of them and again had been disappointed. "You know quite well that this is ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood

... automatic discoveries had seemed, they had been in reality so swift that the report was still ringing in his ears when he who must have made it sprang hideously into being across the palings. A hand darted through them and ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung

... of a whisky, and it may appear to all intents and purposes one of the common vehicles of the kind. He had also a contrivance, never to be sufficiently commended, that when the snuff of the candle had attained a certain length, it moved a kind of automatic pair of snuffers that hung within side, and amputated itself. He left me two of these lanthorns as a legacy. Such is my value for your lordship, that I have wrought myself up to a resolution of parting with one of them in your lordship's favour. You will receive it in four days from the ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin

... jerk, looking before him. His fingers beat a rapid tattoo on the sides of the sofa. He looks at them, rises convulsively and walks round the room, grasping chairs and furniture as he goes round. He returns to the sofa, sits, and begins the tattoo again. With a sudden wild automatic movement he beats his closed fists in rapid succession against the sides of his head. BELSIZE returns, carrying ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn

... patient usually drops anything he may be holding. The consciousness returns in a moment or two and the patient resumes conversation as if nothing had happened. In other instances there is a slight incoherency or the patient performs some almost automatic action. He may begin to undress himself, and on returning to consciousness find that he has partially disrobed. He may rub his beard or face, or may spit about in a careless way. An eminent physician states: "One of my patients, after an attack, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... naturally aesthetic; that The People's own untutored instinct would always unerringly select the best; that it was an insult to the noble idealism of The People to try to educate them; they were, so to speak, born with an education, ready-made, automatic, in sound working order from the beginning. Now, anyone almost may have theories, but if they are wise souls they won't try to apply them. If they have never been practically tested they can't be proved fallacious and thus may be treasured and loved and petted indefinitely, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... deliberately reproduced passages from Greek, Latin, and old Italian writers, just as Virgil did in the case of Homer, Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and others. There are, doubtless, instances in which a phrase is unconsciously reproduced by automatic memory, from an English poet. But I am less inclined than Mr Bradley to think that unconscious reminiscence is more common in Tennyson than in the poets generally. I have not closely examined Keats ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... the cliffs, was the castle of the Mayers, whose fortunes came from coal.—Montague thought of the young man who had invented the device for the automatic weighing of coal as it was loaded upon steam-ships. Major Venable had hinted to him that the reason the Coal Trust would not consider it, was because they were selling short weight; and since then he had investigated the story, and learned that this was true, and that it was old Mayer himself ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair

... hand away he knocked her to the ground, and she lay face downward. But this blow was nothing, purely automatic, like his first blow, not bringing with it that faint sense of something refreshing, the momentary appeasement of his agony. For in truth the torture that he himself suffered was almost unendurable. Yet up to now ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... compressed-air sprayers—either a knapsack pump or a compressed-air sprayer—types of which are illustrated. These are used for applying wet sprays, and should be supplied with one of the several forms of mist-making nozzles, the non- cloggable automatic type being the best. For more extensive work a barrel pump, mounted on wheels, will be desirable, but one of the above will do a great deal of work in little time. Extension rods for use in spraying trees and vines may be obtained ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell

... to the "choice of domicile," always the right of the husband and father, there is little change in law; but the strong movement to secure to women independent nationality, in place of automatic following of the nationality of their husbands, will, if carried out, make the supreme choice (that of the country to which one shall pledge allegiance) a legal right of women as of men. That in itself would make some confusion ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... connection or miscalculated a route in such manner that I was left stranded for rather more than an hour. I adore waiting at railway stations, but this was not a very sumptuous specimen. There was nothing on the platform except a chocolate automatic machine, which eagerly absorbed pennies but produced no corresponding chocolate, and a small paper-stall with a few remaining copies of a cheap imperial organ which we will call the Daily Wire. It does not matter which imperial organ it was, as ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... terms of equality with native Americans. But they are quick withal, versatile; and as a rule, easily molded; they take readily to the use of machinery; and they have no tradition that could prevent them from doing their best in using semi-automatic machines, which are simple of handling, while doing complex work. Thus America has obtained a plentiful supply of people who are able and willing to do the routine work of a factory for relatively low wages, and whose aptitudes supplement those of the stronger races that constitute the great ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis

... his will lapse, and surrendered to the sleepy numbness which assailed his brain in waves. He was riding without support by this time, but it was an automatic effort. There was no more real life in him than in a dummy figure. It was not the effect of the blow. It was rather the long exposure and the overexertion of mind and body during the evening and night. He had simply collapsed beneath ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand

... minute. A single class of insects, a single family of plants, the habits of one race of fishes, suffice for the exclusive study of half a lifetime. Minds of a more active or more practical bent will spend an equal time over the construction of a new machine more absolutely automatic than any that has preceded it. Physical labour is thrown as much as possible on the young; and even they are now so helped by machinery and by trained animals, that the eight hours' work which forms their day's labour hardly tires their muscles. ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... warily, but not warily enough. For as the door was banged upon his entrance he faced around only in time to find himself looking down the barrel of a Colt automatic. ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer

... in the early morning and walked bare-footed in the grass, and others went hopping about the floor on their hands and knees to take off fat. There were "rest cures" and "water cures," "new thought" and "metaphysical healing" and "Christian Science"; there was an automatic horse, which one might ride indoors, with a register showing the distance travelled. Montague met one man who had an electric machine, which cost thirty thousand dollars, and which took hold of his arms and feet and exercised him while he waited. He met a woman who told him ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... security that would impede the free exchange of credit and necessitate a more frequent production of gold in evidence, then there comes an undue appreciation of money as against the general commodities of life, and an automatic impoverishment of the citizens in general as against the creditor class. The common people are mortgaged into the bondage of debt. And on the other hand an unexpected spate of gold production, the discovery of a single nugget as big as St. Paul's, let us ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... however minute may be the changes required in the cells or fibres of the brain, to set in motion the nerve currents which loosen or excite the pent up forces of certain muscles, some force must be required to effect those changes. If it is said, "those changes are automatic, and are set in motion by external causes," then one essential part of our consciousness, a certain amount of freedom in willing, is annihilated; and it is inconceivable how or why there should have arisen any consciousness or any apparent will, in such purely automatic organisms. ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... Horses lay about, dead or horribly torn; one horse hitched to a tree went on cropping grass. Penhallow missed nothing. He was in the mood peril always brought. Men said he was a slow, sure thinker, and missed seeing things which did not interest him. Now he was gay, tuned to the highest pitch of automatic watchfulness, as this far-sent storm of bursting shells went over and past the troops it was meant to destroy. Hurrying through it he saw the wide slope clear rapidly of what was left of active life. He laughed as a round shot knocked a knapsack off a man's back. The man unhurt did not stay to ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... this Course we shall instruct you in practical methods by which the selection of those elements of experience that are helpful may be made absolutely automatic. ...
— Applied Psychology: Making Your Own World • Warren Hilton

... intellectual machinery, the purgatory and the code of slave-ethics. She has the supreme advantage that the rank and file of her mighty host really believe what she teaches; they do not have to listen to table-rappings and flounder through swamps of automatic writings in order to bolster their hope of the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... but he must answer her. An automatic second-self, summoned by the emergency, answered ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... empty," he announced. "They shouldn't be—but they are. Someone must have sabotaged them before the plants were poisoned—and done it so the dials don't show it. I just found it out when the automatic switch to a new tank failed to work. We now have the air in the ship, and no more. Dr. Napier and I have figured that this will keep us all alive with the help of the plants for no more than fifteen days. I am open ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey

... who has gone through what I have gone through to feel like other people. Has that occurred to you?..." He looked up at last... "Mrs Anthony, I can't bear the sight of the fellow." She met his eyes without flinching and he added, "You want to go to him now." His mild automatic manner seemed the effect of tremendous self-restraint—and yet she remembered him always like that. She ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... exceptional negroes and mulattoes, on the other hand, they sought to foster by special training and rewards. But the prevalence of slavery which aided them in the one policy hampered them in the other, for it made the rewards arbitrary instead of automatic and it restricted the scope of the laborers' employments and of their ambitions as well. The device of hiring slaves to themselves, which had an invigorating effect here and there in the towns, could find little application ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... meteorological manifestations—all showing a continuous adjustment of interior to exterior conditions or relations. The earth should, therefore, fall under the category of "life," according to Herbert Spencer's definitional formula. And so should an automatic dancing-jack that is made to run by internal adjustments to external movements or manifestations. There are any number of Professor Bastian's "ephemoromorphs" that do not live half as long as one of these automatic dancing-jacks will ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... printed on small square sheets of paper, and delivered by an army of boys at brief intervals while the Stock Exchange is open at the offices of the bankers, brokers, insurance companies, and hotels; or the same matter is disseminated by means of an automatic printing machine called a news-ticker. For this service the offices pay the bureaus from $1 to $2 a day. News bureaus form an important cog in the machinery for making stock-markets, as it is through the news they furnish to the Stock Exchange and to the offices where investors ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... impossible for us to enter into that spiritual contentment enjoyed by those who are honest with themselves. If we are untrue to ourselves how can we be true to others? The framework of a man's moral being must be that of honesty. It must become his very nature and become automatic in its processes. It belongs to the healthy, those who keep themselves well through vigorous exercise and temperate living. It is not a quality set aside for the lucky few. Every man, woman and child possesses it in ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks

... uncomfortable feeling that he had seen that face before, and that the long mustache and side-whiskers had grown in a remarkably short space of time. Could it be that there were two men who could spread a smile over the lower half of their faces in that automatic way, while the spider-eyes had no sort of sympathy with it? Surely, this man with black whiskers and mustache was not just like the singing-master at Sugar-Grove school-house, who had "red-top hay on to his upper ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston

... of the wrist so swift their eyes could not follow, a metallic click, and the startled group were staring into the black muzzle of a menacing little automatic. ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... a cry, not of wrath, as Kant said, nor a shout of joy, as Schwartz thought, but a snuffling, and then a long, thin, tearless a-a, with the timbre of a Scotch bagpipe, purely automatic, but of discomfort. With this monotonous and dismal cry, with its red, shriveled, parboiled skin (for the child commonly loses weight the first few days), squinting, cross-eyed, pot-bellied, and bow-legged, it is not strange ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... ship. The Ambassador was a perfect machine, automatic, self-adjusting, self-regulating. It was built to last and do its job without failure under any and all conditions, as long as there was a universe around it. And it could not fail. There was ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn

... hesitating, as if he were trying to make up his mind. He flipped away the cigarette, turned on his heel, walked briskly to the automatic elevator which would take him to the ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak

... perdition, we are consoled by contemplating the steadfast virtue of commuters. The planet grows harder and harder to live on, it is true; every new invention makes things more complicated and perplexing. These new automatic telephones, which are said to make the business of getting a number so easy, will mean (we suppose) that we will be called up fifty times a day—instead of (as now) a mere twenty or thirty, while we are swooning and swinking ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... along the milk in them flopped softly against their tin sides. Out from the white streak of sky behind his figure stood strongly relieved in silhouette, large, stooping, dispirited. The whole attitude was one of extreme fatigue, though for the silence and automatic movement of him you might almost think him a piece of ambulatory mechanism. Once or twice, to be sure, he turned his head, perhaps to look off over the cultivated fields and to calculate the labor still to be put on them, or possibly to draw a sort of unconscious, tired ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... that she was lost. Yellowjacket had thereupon walked a few rods farther and stopped, patiently indifferent to the location of his oats box. Lorraine had waited until his head began to droop lower and lower, and his switching at flies had become purely automatic. Yellowjacket was going to sleep without making any effort to find the way home. But since Lorraine had not told her father anything about it, his injunction could not have anything to do with the ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower

... the fire, moved farther into the shadow of the trees. But I could not sleep—I sat hour after hour, my pistol in my hand," she patted the automatic in her belt, "my ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... a prayer to herself. She was nearer the door than Craig by about half-a-dozen paces. Her hand groped in the little bag she was carrying and gripped something hard. She clenched her teeth for a moment. Then the automatic pistol flashed out through ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... ere long, that a lesser riddle would have been to stand in the manufactory of the Faubourg St. Marcel, and abolishing the pattern of the designers, the directing touch of Lebrun, the restraint of the heddle, demand that the blind, insensate automatic warp and woof should originate, design and trace as well as mechanically execute the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... a single bullet the whole contents of the automatic's magazine poured out and every missile took effect in the reptile's huge head. In its death agony it straightened out its folds and Frank's senseless body dropped from them, seemingly ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... facade of the hotel, and by that time Tom had not only arisen, but departed, leaving a message that he should be back at six o'clock. So Henry wandered up and down the boulevard, from the Madeleine to Marguery's Restaurant, had an automatic tea at the Express-Bar, and continued to wander ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett

... remember Byron's line about "striking the electric chain"? —To be sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves us. What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and finding the flakes of Christmas ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... the thresher, away from the traction-engine, the fumbling lips of the shakers, mouthing in and out beneath their little penthouse, pushed out the beaten straw into the maw of an automatic trusser, which Ishmael had only bought that year and which he was watching eagerly. For one moment the formless tumble of straw, pushed out by those waggling wooden lips above, was lost in the trusser, then it shot forth below in bound bundles that had been ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... Telephone system: domestic: good automatic telephone system international: 1 coaxial submarine cable; satellite earth station - 1 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean); tropospheric scatter to Saba (Netherlands Antilles) ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... of duration, of the passage of seconds or minutes. There was only a dream in which, suddenly, a gentle mind made its presence known. Concepts tapped lightly at his own mind and an automatic process of interpretation winnowed and equated until a gentle voice seemed to speak. The words were few, merely computed associations keyed to understanding, and with them were perfectly and intimately synchronized fragments of emotion and vision, softly washing ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan

... she exclaimed mockingly. "What do you know about them, you of all men, a bundle of nerves and brains, with a motor for a heart, and an automatic brake upon your passions? Upon my word, I believe that I have solved the mystery of your perennial youth. You have found a way of substituting machinery for the human organ, and you are wound up to ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... but silently clearing away the tea things. The young man caught fleeting glimpses of her as she moved airily about her work. He drew a cigar from his case, cut off the end with his knife, and lit a match on the sole of his boot, doing this with an easy automatic familiarity that required no attention on his part; all of which aroused the respectful envy of young Hiram, who sat on a wooden chair, leaning forward, eagerly watching the man from ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr

... carry him, bound, to the gallows. And the fact that this machine-like work will be performed over him by human beings like himself, lent to them a new, extraordinary and ominous aspect—they seemed to him like ghosts that came to him for this one purpose, or like automatic puppets on springs. They would seize him, take him, carry him, hang him, pull him by the feet. They would cut the rope, take him down, carry him off ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev

... as against the certainty that, whatever happens, the primitive and essential things will never, anywhere, wholly cease, while mankind lasts. And thus it is that Brown's Ode to the Steam Plough, Jones' Sonnet Sequence on the Automatic Reaping Machine, and Robinson's Epic of the Piscicidal Dynamo, leave unstirred the deeper depths of emotion in us. The subjects chosen by these three great poets do not much impress us when we regard them sub specie aeternitatis. Smith has painted ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... passing of liners, for they were safe in the harbor of the lower levels. He moved the controls once to avoid the green glare of an ascending area, then he knew that there were no ships to fear, and let the automatic control put him back ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... eyes aft over the ship on which he found himself, summing her up with an automatic expertness. An American ship, it was plain, and a three-skysail-yarder at that, with a magnificent stature and spread of spars. Abeam of her San Francisco basked along its shore; she was at an anchor well out in the bay. What ship was it that he had viewed from a dock-head ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... back to Weinsberg to write the biography of this "delicate flower who lived upon sunbeams," we must shake off the spell of her strange personality and ask seriously what manner of mortal she was. This inquiry is the more imperative since the doings of the tambourine players and automatic writers, of whom so much is made in certain quarters to-day, pale into insignificance beside the story ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... Arsenious oxide purifier, Atkins, dry process of generation, Atmospheric moisture and carbide, Atomic weights, Attention needed by generators, Austrian Acetylene Association, regulations as to carbide, Austrian Government Regulations, Autogenous soldering and welding, Automatic generators. ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield

... this theory the true via media? The theory of the automatic extension of the constitution of a state over its annexed insular, transmarine and transterranean regions which from their local or other circumstances can never equally participate in the institution and operation of its government, in some cases protects individual ...
— "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just Connection"? • Alpheus H. Snow

... The birds swept in circles overhead on pulseless wings, and rose high up in the air. Occasionally there was a side-rocking motion, as of a ship rolling at sea, and then the birds rocked back to an even keel; but although we thought the action was clearly automatic, and were willing to learn, our teachers were too far off to show us just how it was done, and we had ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... consequences of the peculiar development of these spirits during the earth-period entailed their becoming adversaries of the spirits who, acting from the moon, desired to make human consciousness an automatic reflector of the universe. What had helped man to a higher state of development of the old Moon, proved to be in opposition to the possibilities which had arisen through the evolution of the earth. The opposing forces had brought with them ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... conviction was an act of legal violence. There was no prospect of rescue through the machinery of the law from an overwhelming disaster which demonstrated law to be without a conscience or sense of responsibility. As soon as the law with its automatic violence had possession of his case, he felt himself held in a grasp not to be relaxed. He knew he must look outside law for justice as well as mercy. It and its ministers were not intentionally cruel. Simply their craft had assumed a scientific shape ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... my—race,—they have moulded and inspired us; but, there is the strange paradox of your civilization, your thought reacts so little on your life. Your idealists and seers count only for your culture, and even in your culture affect so little the automatic existence of your people. They form a little isolated class, a leaven that lies outside the lump. Now, with us, thought rises, works, ferments through every ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... explanations with bulls when they look "horstile." A swift get-away is the thing to do. It took me some time to learn this; but the finishing touch was put upon me by a bull in New York City. Ever since that time it has been an automatic process with me to make a run for it when I see a bull reaching for me. This automatic process has become a mainspring of conduct in me, wound up and ready for instant release. I shall never get over it. Should I be eighty years old, hobbling along the street on ...
— The Road • Jack London

... opus to which he would devote many years to come. Then came the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing," he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible scholarship which was never ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... college professor! a man about town or any other respectably successful, humdrum, square wooden peg-of-a-thing in a square tight hole! There is an evil, says the Preacher, which I have seen under the sun—the man of about forty who has become moderately successful and automatic, but who has not, and now knows he cannot, set the world on fire. This is a vanity and ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp

... anarchist will never be an artist, though many artists have believed that they were thorough anarchists. One man cannot pour an aesthetic experience straight into another, leaving out the problem. He cannot exude form: he must set himself to create a particular form. Automatic writing will never be poetry, nor automatic scrabbling design. The artist must submit his creative impulse to the conditions of a problem. Often great artists set their own problems; always they are bound by them. That would be a shallow critic who supposed ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell

... looked over his shoulder. Sweat rolled from him, he lost his hat, and the matted mane of thick yellow hair swept over his forehead and shaded his small, twinkling eyes. At times, with a vague, nearly automatic gesture, he reached his hand forward, the fingers prehensile, and directed towards the horizon, as if he would clutch it and draw it nearer; and at intervals he muttered, "Hurry, hurry, hurry on, hurry on." For now at last McTeague ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... Our relation to it, whether on the scale of the individual or the universal, is the key to all that we are or ever can be. In its unrecognized working it is the spring of all that we can call the automatic action of mind and body, and on the universal scale it is the silent power of evolution gradually working onwards to that "divine event, to which the whole creation moves"; and by our conscious recognition of it we make it, relatively to ourselves, all that we believe it to be. ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... office building, unless the sending is an occasional rather than a steady practice. Costs in this work are cut by better planning of the work and facilities, setting work standards, paying a bonus in excess of the standards, and by the introduction of automatic machinery. The Post Office now permits, under certain conditions, the use of a machine which prints a stamp that is really a frank. This is now being used very generally by concerns which have a heavy outgoing mail. Then there are sealing ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther

... 673. I had no sooner given the address than I perceived a flaw in that part of it; but I have left the passage unaltered ever since, because the flaw did not spoil its illustrative value. The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a godless universe, I thought of what I called an 'automatic sweetheart,' meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her. Would any one regard her as a full equivalent? Certainly ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... reminded House of actual situation concerning Home Rule Bill and Welsh Disestablishment Bill. But for the outbreak of war Parliament would have been prorogued at least a fortnight ago and, by automatic procedure under Parliament Act, these measures would have been added to Statute Book. On outbreak of war political parties, amid plaudits of the Country, patriotically put aside partisan tactics and presented a united front to ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various

... of conventionalism makes the whole civilized world kin Aimlessness of a woman's curiosity All concessions to the people have been won from fear Appealed to reason in them; he would not hear of convictions Automatic creature is subject to the laws of its construction Beautiful servicelessness Canvassing means intimidation or corruption Comfortable have to pay in occasional panics for the serenity Consult the family ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger

... spontaneous, that is to say, the movements are not designed or directed by the conscious will. But in mankind, in proportion as individuals are trained in self-control, it is more or less completely under command, and in spite of the most urgent tendency of the automatic mechanism to enter upon the progressive series of movements which we distinguish as (1) smile, (2) broad smile or grin, (3) laugh, (4) loud laughter, (5) paroxysms of uncontrolled laughter, a man or woman can ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... were given gas masks and shown how to use them. They were also each provided with an automatic pistol and were given uniforms. For they had to be on the firing line and on such occasions were not really of the non-combatant class, though they were not supposed to take part in the fighting unless it should be to ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton

... acts which were first done only with effort and by a conscious will, become automatic. The will ceases to concern itself. By what is called reflex action, memory is developed in the spinal cord and the muscular centers (sec. 273). There is thus a great saving of actual brain work, and one important cause of fatigue ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... machine may be worked by hand (Fig. 17) or power driven. Where large quantities of a particular tablet have to be stamped, one of the many automatic mechanical stampers in existence may be employed, the tablets being conveyed to and from the dies by means of endless belts. Such a machine is shown in the accompanying illustration ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons

... the gap crawled steadily eastward. Knowlton tested the feed of his automatic, which, since its balkiness in the fight with the Peruvians, he had kept carefully oiled and free from the slightest speck of rust. Tim arose at intervals and paced up and down in sentry go, eyes and ears alert—a useless activity, but one which provided an outlet for his restless energy. McKay ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel

... thorough, but to set it in motion required an effort which constituted an automatic obstacle to extortion. The lands and people of the uji were governed by the Emperor but were not directly controlled by him. On the other hand, to refuse a requisition made by the Throne was counted contumelious and liable to punishment. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... don't seem anxious to give the alarm," said Wilson, toying with the little automatic and turning it over in the expanse ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie

... waited, in growing dread, for the automatic relays strung out through space to take hold, automatically calculating the route, set up the required space-jump bands. It was called instantaneous communication, but that was only relative. It ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... had emptied his weapon, but that did not deter him, for, continuing his wild pursuit, the stranger could be seen to draw another automatic revolver. ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock

... dropped to her lap, came up to the level of the table top and in its palm he saw the shining barrel of a small automatic pistol. ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory

... an exceptional number of babies and small children on board and my unfraternal little prairie-waifs did not see why every rattle and doll and automatic toy of their little fellow travelers and sister tourists shouldn't promptly become their own private property. And traveling with twins not yet a year old is scarcely ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... wife was sending a call for me to come home as quickly as I possibly could; nothing else. It was Thursday. The Sunday before I had left wife and child in perfect health. But scarlatina and diphtheria were stalking the plains. The message had been such a shock to me that I had acted with automatic precision. I had notified the school-board and asked the inspector to substitute for me; and twenty minutes after word had reached me I crossed the bridge on the road to ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... intelligence to quit it. When death itself comes, the sense of continuance is not at once broken in the survivors. In these moral deaths, which men survive in their own lives, there is no immediate consciousness of an end. For a while, habit and the automatic tendency of desire ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... true, that man is an automatic animal moving always along the paths of least resistance toward predetermined ends, it cannot fail to be useful to us in the present emergency to mark, as distinctly as we can, the causes which impelled Germany, at a certain point in her career, to choose the paths which ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... automatic tontine Policy with ball-bearings," continued the Death Angel. "In this case, the entire Residue goes into the Sinking Fund and draws Compound Interest. This is made possible under our new System of reducing Operating Expenses ...
— People You Know • George Ade

... it is!" Mr. Hennage walked to the end of the porch. He was just a little excited. "It's all off with the hobo" he continued. "I know the man that's using that automatic, and he can shoot your eye out at a hundred yards. I saw him ridin' in just as I left ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... learn that the least thing may hinder his work in us. It became necessary for me recently to purchase a hayrake. I was told of two different kinds, one the old-fashioned kind where the prongs of the rake must be lifted by hand, the other an automatic arrangement where by simply touching the foot to a spring the movement of the wheels would lift the rake at the proper time so that raking hay was a delight. The first day the rake was in the field it was almost impossible to use it. It was too ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman

... machine, an automatic one, which produces things, everything which enters into the constitution of the cosmos, by evolutionary processes, or rather all such things, and there are no others, are the result of one universal ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown

... tankard upon him, he drank some wine with an automatic air, and still stood with his eyes fixed on Angela's pallid countenance, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... drilling. It was under the lawn, in front of the church. Gorju, in a blue smock-frock, with a neckcloth around his loins, went through the movements in an automatic fashion. When he gave the orders, his voice ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... gaze upon these huge engines, only occasionally touched by a woman's hand, we are reminded of man, the pigmy guiding an elephant. We seem conscious, moreover, of what almost approaches human intelligence, so much of the work achieved appearing voluntary rather than automatic. The skins reach Rheims direct from Australia and are here dressed, cleaned and prepared for working up into cloth. If machinery is brought almost to the perfection of manual dexterousness, human beings ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... Excelsior Mills, immediately after its introduction adopted the process, and put it into their mills, and by employing American skilled artizans and millers to set up and operate their machinery, succeeded in securing the first absolutely perfect automatic mill of the new kind in the country. General Washburn, having imported Hungarian millers to start and operate his experimental mills, found himself somewhat handicapped by their inefficiency and sluggishness in adopting American ways ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... will show you all my plans. I have also invented an automatic crane for hanging the paper on the rods in the drying-room. Next week I intend to take up my quarters in the factory, up in the garret, and have my first machine made there secretly, under my own eyes. In three months the patents must be taken out and the ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... he picked it up, opened and read it, and, with the automatic caution that had become habitual, carried it across the room and dropped it in the fire. This done, he returned to the desk, read the letters that awaited Chilcote, and, scribbling the necessary notes upon the margins, left them in readiness ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... learned the other's secret; each realized that the success of his plans depended on the silence of the other; each resolved instantly to procure that silence at any cost. Von Staden reached for his hip pocket, but before he could draw his automatic pistol and cover the skipper, Michael J. Murphy had hurled ten pounds of code book into the geometric centre of the supercargo's face. It was the first weapon his hand closed over, and he did not disdain ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... once on a time, it was a woman's work—once on a time! But, then, you men were dependent on us. Marriage was a real partnership. Nowadays, what with servants and countless inventions, so that machinery supplies the work, the home is a joke. The house itself is an automatic machine that runs on—buttons, push-buttons. You men can get along without us just as well. You don't really depend on us for anything in the home. Your lives are full up with interest; every second is ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan

... not say anything. What was the use? He put his hands against the weeds and pushed his body up. He looked into the silent mouth of a .38 automatic. It told him his running days were over. You didn't talk back ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer

... exchange of hearts, partly to suggest that Liehtse's China may have had the actuality, or at least a reminiscence, of scientific knowledge since lost there, and only discovered in Europe recently. In the same way one finds references to automatic oxen, self-moving chariots, traveling by air, and a number of other things which, as we read of them, sound just like superstitious nonsense. There are old Chinese drawings of pterodactyls, and suchlike unchancey antediluvian wild fowl. Argal, (you would say) the Chinese knew of these ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... There was a brisk chirping sound somewhere. The pilot reached ahead to the course-correction knob. The plane changed course. Sunshine shifted as it poured into the cabin. The ship was running on automatic pilot well above the cloud level, and at an even-numbered number of thousands of feet altitude, as was suitable for planes traveling south or west. Now it droned on its new course, forty-five degrees from the original. Joe found himself guessing that one of the security provisions for planes ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... the door was wrenched open and two figures darted out and joined in the melee. It was soon over. Three to one are heavy odds. The sentry, gagged and securely bound, was hustled inside the cabin. His hat, overcoat, and automatic were appropriated for Jim Spurling, who took his place. So skilfully had the coup been conducted under cover of the disturbance in the cove that none of the other smugglers had taken the ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman

... same instrument ordinarily used on steamboats and locomotives. It is from 6 to 18 inches in diameter, and is operated by steam under a pressure of from 50 to 100 pounds. An engine takes its steam from the same boiler, and by an automatic arrangement shuts off and turns on the steam by opening and closing its valves at determined times. The machinery is simple, the piston-pressure is light, and the engine requires no more skilled attention ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... said, drawing an automatic pistol and cocking it carefully. "This is not meant as a personal threat to you, so long as we two are in here alone. It's in case of trickery from outside. I shall blow this place sky-high if anything goes wrong. If the regiments come, good! You shall have the bombs. If ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy

... recommendations were: that publishers or importers of comics should apply for registration of every title and that only suitable titles should be registered. The sale of unregistered comics was to be an offence. This procedure may be preferable to the subsequently suggested system of automatic registration followed by ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie

... faces in the Marien-Platz before the ornate Gothic Rathaus to hear the eleven o'clock chimes play and see the painted figures of the King and Queen watch from their balcony the passing before them of the automatic tournament procession with its trumpeters and tilting knights. When the show was over and the automatic cock broke forth into his lusty farewell crow, they laughed just as any other boys would have laughed. Sometimes ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... vigilance and activity of the brain. Like the other organisms which possess a proper nervous system, man carries on the common organic processes of life with a regularity and unfailing accuracy which seem to verge on the mechanical forces, or to be, at least, automatic. All habitual voluntary acts by repetition become almost automatic, or require no perceptibly distinct impulse of the will. When we emerge from this necessary field of labor, we come to those functions peculiar to the proper brain. Here all is continual ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... clothes-closet, in the breast pocket of my coat." As he spoke, he opened the cedar-lined closet, that was almost as big as a modern hall bedroom, and put the paper in the breast pocket of his coat. Locking the door, he placed the key under his pillow, and beside it a new and businesslike Colt automatic. ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... the motions of loading and firing without using cartridges. However, the automatic action and the effect of ball cartridges in operating the slide cannot be taught without firing ball cartridges. Practice without cartridges is very necessary to acquire facility in the exact movements of the manual and in aiming, holding ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker

... their hopes. The Blues had not yet found themselves. There was a cog missing somewhere in the machinery. Technically, their playing was not open to much adverse criticism. Their passing was accurate and their tackling fair, but they were too mechanical and automatic. They needed something to wake ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield

... Chinese can you be thinking, for you hate them with an automatic hatred—the hatred of the well-fed for the starved, of the warlike for the weak. When they cross you, you kick them, viciously, with the drawing back of your silken beard, your black, black beard, from your white teeth. ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens

... he replied. "I told them how everything is, Verslun, and they're not afraid. Edith has an automatic pistol that she brought from the yacht, and she'll use it if she is ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer

... you'd had the sense to stay out of the squabble a second or so longer, the man who tackled you would be either in jail or in the morgue, by this time. I'm not oversized. But neither is a stick of dynamite. An automatic pistol isn't anywhere as big as an old-fashioned blunderbuss. But it can outshoot and outkill the blunderbuss, with very little bother. Think it over. And, while you're thinking, stop to think, also, that a 'panhandler' doesn't do his work with a knife. He doesn't try to stab a man ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune

... nothing to prevent its application. But the arrangement of the boiler would perhaps require to be changed, and it might be preferable to combine its use with the employment of vertical tubes, for the transmission of the smoke. The introduction of any effectual automatic contrivance for feeding the fire in steam vessels, would bring about an important economy, at the same time that it would give the assurance of the work being better done. It is very difficult to fire furnaces by hand effectually at sea, especially in ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... happened, or in what automatic way he got through the duties of politeness in the interval, until he was free and saw Maggie seated alone again, at the farther end of the room. He made his way toward her round the couples that were forming for the waltz; and when Maggie became conscious that ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... camera, the larynx with a reed pipe, the heart with a pump, while the ear fitly opens the chapter on acoustics. The reader who is unacquainted with physiology will thus be enabled to appreciate the better these marvellous devices, far more marvellous, by reason of their absolutely automatic action, than any ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams

... a series of long high bounds. While in midair he half tucks up his feet, which gives him the appearance of an automatic toy. This gait looks deliberate, but is really quite fast, as the mounted sportsman discovers when he enters upon a vain pursuit. If the horse is an especially good one, so that the kongoni feels himself a trifle closely ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... he moved with the crowd until he reached the rounded niche that marked an escape chamber. As if pushed by the hurrying throng, he backed into it, the automatic doors opening and ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones

... marine battalion at that time was between five and six hundred men. They were armed with rifles of the Lee or Lee-Metford pattern, and had, in addition, two automatic Colt machine-guns and three rapid-fire Hotchkiss cannon of three-inch caliber. The greatest disadvantage under which they labored was that due to the tangled, almost impenetrable nature of the chaparral that surrounded the camp, and the facilities which ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... respect they were consistent; equality-socialism[41149] allows none but automatic citizens, mere tools in the hands of the State, all alike, of a rudimentary fashion and easily managed, without personal conscience, spontaneity, curiosity or integrity; whoever has cultivated himself, whoever has thought for himself and exercised his own will and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... by reason of its very principle, presents both the advantage and inconvenience of leaving no automatic trace of the correspondence that it transmits. The advantage is very evident in cases in which an optical station falls into the hands of the enemy; on the other hand, the inconvenience is shown in cases where a badly transmitted or badly collated telegram allows ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various

... experiments in torpedo warfare were not confined to attempts to destroy hostile vessels by means of his submarine vessel. He made several attacks upon the enemy by means of automatic torpedoes, none of which met with complete success. One of these attacks, made at Philadelphia in December, 1777, furnished the incident upon which is founded the well-known ballad of ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... cholera," "the smallpox," "the scarlet fever," and such. Some escape it: we do not say, "the sciatica," nor "the locomotor ataxia." It is too common in general propositions, as, "The payment of interest is the payment of debt." "The virtues that are automatic are the best." "The tendency to falsehood should be checked." "Kings are not under the control of the law." It is impossible to note here all forms of this misuse, but a page of almost any book will supply ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce

... camp had been seen two days earlier. They came into action on our right flank with a brisk rifle fire, followed by the deep notes of artillery. In intervals between the regular roar of field guns came the sledgehammer "thud! thud! thud!" from an automatic gun, which Tommy Atkins, with his aptitude for expressive phrases, promptly christened "Pom! Pom!" and that name sticks to it with unpleasant associations, for the Boers had not only one but many ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse

... Instead of stop watches, therefore, we used a timing device capable of recording the most minute time-intervals with perfect precision. The whole system was immeasurably superior to the German, and at least twenty times as accurate, for the British system was absolutely automatic. It recorded the arrival of the sound at the various microphones instantaneously on a permanent record; while the German system, apart from its crude method of measuring time, was subject to the combined ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... ready to grasp the chance of self-expression. Whence the automatic return to the dream of universal arithmetic, which Laplace, Du Bois-Reymond, and Huxley have expressed with such precision. ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy

... through which a current of electricity is then passed, thus decomposing or splitting up the salt into its elements, chlorine and sodium. In the separation of the sodium, however, a secondary action takes place, which converts it into caustic soda. An automatic circulation of the solutions is maintained by placing the charging tanks at a slight elevation, and the vessels themselves on platforms arranged in steps. The solutions are pumped back from the lowest vessel to their respective charging tanks, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... under similar conditions. The only difficulty was in fishing up a cylindro-conical projectile, the walls of which were so smooth as to offer no hold for the hooks. On that account Engineer Murchison hastened to San Francisco, and had some enormous grappling-irons fixed on an automatic system, which would never let the projectile go if it once succeeded in seizing it in its powerful claws. Diving-dresses were also prepared, which through this impervious covering allowed the divers to observe the bottom of the sea. He also had put on board an apparatus of compressed air very ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... is controlled by the automatic opening and closing of the admission valves under the control of a governor (Fig. 19), of the spring-weighted type attached directly to the top end of the turbine shaft. The action of the governor depends on the balance of force exerted by the spring, and the centrifugal ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins

... gives rise by transmutation to a gaseous element—the emanation of radium. The new element is a heavy gas at ordinary temperatures and, like other gases, can be liquified by extreme cold. The extraordinary property of transmutation is entirely automatic. No influence which chemist or physicist can apply can ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... on the pursuers with their automatic weapons and checked them. Tashi was about a hundred yards from shelter when a shot struck him. He stumbled and fell, while a howl of delight rose from his foes. As he tried to struggle up bullets kicked up the dust round him ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... form, dashed over the back-trail with the curious lumbering strides of the man who would hurry on rackets. He had jerked off his heavy mitten at the sound of the shot, and his bared hand clutched firmly the butt of a blue-black automatic. A spruce-branch, suddenly relieved of its snow, sprang upward with a swish, thirty yards away. MacNair fired ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... the girl that the minds and the tongues and the movements of the two men were part of some slow-acting, wooden, automatic mechanism. Whether they reached the land or not seemed a matter almost of indifference to them. Accustomed to people who talked much and had much to talk about she could not understand. All this was part of the new world in which she found herself, part of the boat itself, of the mast, now ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... Automatic action in the moral world; the reflex movement which seems to be self-determination, and has been hanged and howled at as such (metaphorically) for nobody knows how many centuries: until somebody shall study this as Marshall Hall has studied ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... sort of freedom which makes him the Ishmael of the Universe, everyone's hand against him, as his own hand is against everyone. The human animal has achieved no advance beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed himself from his bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes. And so the sociologist, the analyst of human associations, turns out to be simply the historian and accountant ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... to strike the preliminary canter of the five automatic chords, every voice was silenced, and all eyes were turned upon him, for Palmer Billy was always ready to oblige a camp with his vocal entertainment, though in return he demanded, on the part of his audience, silence (except when the chorus-time came) and attention. Failing ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott

... the teaching of that modern Absolute Idealism which declares, with Green, that man is his motives, and that he is "free" inasmuch as it is by his own motives that he is governed. It would be as accurate to call an automatic machine "free" on the ground that it is by its own works that it is moved. This is only, as Professor William James aptly calls it, "soft Determinism." If the automaton could decide to slacken or increase its rate of speed, to go or to stop as it liked and where it liked—above all, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... hand in self-defence until it burst and injured the plaintiff. Here even human agencies were a part of the chain between the defendant's act and the result, although they were treated as more or less nearly automatic, in order to arrive ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... atomic anionizers at the right spacing so as to bring down the whole city once we were escaped, using the remote control provided for that very purpose. The suits would protect us from the blasts, and, as a precaution, the remote had an automatic five second delay between being pressed and exploding the bombs, though it was more for form than practicality. After he finished we set off, being arranged two abreast per row, there being ten rows. Bernibus and myself were partners, for we had become close friends ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn

... and Claire seated herself at the end of the sofa and smilingly awaited her companion's lead. It did not come. After one automatic nod of the head, Lady Jane resumed her former position, taking no more notice of the new-comer than if she had remained at the far end of the room. Claire felt her cheeks begin to burn. Her complacence had suffered a shock, but pride came to her rescue, and she ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... studying the campaigns of the great commanders, and reflecting upon them with an intensity that so embedded their lessons in his subjective mind that they became a part of him, and actions in conformity with those lessons became afterward almost automatic. Alexander and Napoleon are perhaps the best illustrations of this passionate grasping of military principles; for though both had been educated from childhood in military matters, the science of strategy was almost non-existent in concrete form, and both men were far too young to ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske



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