"Piston" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rifles on to their right hips and pointed with their left feet forward at the breasts of the men opposite. "Rest!" The rifles were brought to earth between twelve pairs of feet. "Point! Withdraw! On guard!" They pointed, withdrew, and were on guard again with the precision of piston-rods. ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... books on mechanics, in one of which, Les Raysons des Forces Mouvantes, he speaks of the expansion and condensation of steam in a manner which has been supposed to suggest the alternate action of the piston, the principle of the steam engine, and, finally, 'the great discovery' of and to the Marquis of Worcester. How far all this may be supposed to contradict the lady's story, I will not say. Certain it is, that many a man who has done quite as well in worldly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... me! He put down: 'La Favorita, complete arrangement for pianoforte, arrangement without words, for solo; ditto, for duet; complete arrangement for quartette; the same for two violins; ditto for a Cornet a piston. Total fee, frcs. 1100. Immediate advance in cash, frcs. 500.' I could see at a glance what an enormous amount of trouble this work would involve, but I did not hesitate ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... believe it?—between twelve and one in the morning I woke up with my head full o' figgers. Not another wink o' sleep could I get, neither. Soon as ever I shook up the bolster an' settled down for another try, I see'd myself whiskin' back and forth over this here piece o' water like a piston-rod in a steamship, and off I started countin' for dear life. Count? I tell you it lasted for nights, and by the end o' the week I had to see the doctor about it. I was losin' flesh. Doctor, he gave me a bottle o' trade—very flat-tasted stuff it was, price half a crown, with a sediment if ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... experienced in getting his paddle-wheels turned round. On which Symington immediately asked, "Why don't you use the steam-engine?" The model which Symington exhibited, produced rotary motion by the employment of ratchet-wheels. The rectilinear motion of the piston-rod was thus converted into rotary motion. Mr. Miller was pleased with the action of the ratchet-wheel contrivance, and gave Symington an order to make a pair of engines of that construction. They were to be used on a small pleasure-boat on ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... there exists another action due to the agitation of the granules as the chamber is caused to vibrate by the sound waves. In other words, in addition to the ordinary action, which may be termed the piston action between the electrodes, it is claimed that the general shaking-up effect of the granules when the chamber vibrates produces an added effect. Certain it is, however, that transmitters of this general type are very efficient and have ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... SINGLE-ACTION STEAM-ENGINE. A condensing machine, in which the downward stroke of the piston is performed by the pressure of the atmosphere ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... may yet accomplish in this respect, remains yet undetermined. There is, it is true, a mile or more of pneumatic railway used between Dublin and Kingstown. An air pump, driven by steam, exhausts the air from a cylinder in which a piston moves; this cylinder is laid the whole length of the road, and the piston is connected to a car above, so that, as the piston moves forward on the exhaustion of the air in front of it, the car is also carried forward. The original ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... required has been experimentally determined at 40-50 cubic meters per minute at 15 lb. pressure. This will be supplied by a single cylinder engine of 900 millimeters blast, and 786 millimeters steam piston, diameter 786 millimeters, stroke making fifty revolutions per minute, which is also to work a Root blower and the accumulator pumps. Having regard to these very different demands upon the power of the engine, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... Then, for involuntarily he now did everything running, with a dash up the steps he seized the sullen pendant bell-handle, and worked it pumpwise, till he perceived a smaller bell-knob beside the door, at which he worked piston-wise. Pump and piston, the hurly-burly and the tinkler created an alarm to scare cat and mouse and Cardinal spider, all that run or weave in desolate houses, with the good result of a certain degree ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... next instant they were at close quarters, swinging madly, rife with the one desire to down the other, to maim, to kill. A blow crashed home on Rainey's cheek, sending him back dazed, striking madly, clinching to stop the piston-like smashes of the hunter clutching him, trying to trip him, hammering at the fierce face above him as they both went down and rolled into the scuppers, tearing at ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... Point a la Croix; but the short delay during the storm occasioned faster work. More voyageurs were engaged from the Nipissangue tribes. As soon as one lot fagged fresh shifts came to the relief. Paddles shot out at the rate of modern piston rods, and the waters whirled back like wave-wash in the wake of a clipper. Except for briefest stoppages, speed was not relaxed across the whole northern end of those inland seas called the Great Lakes. With ample space ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... the saddle is traveling back. Thus is insured an exactly equable amount of cut on the whole three rests. When the lever, D, is not in use, the catch is removed from the wheel, B, and is allowed to rest against the pins, G or A, provided for that purpose. For piston rods, or for work such as cutting jack screws, this lathe is very useful. It is obviously, however, a ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... at high pressure, and of various diameters. Of machines worked by water pressure the author proposes to refer only to two which appear to him in every respect the most practical and advantageous. One is the piston machine of M. Albert Schmid, engineer at Zurich. The cylinder is oscillating, and the distribution is effected, without an eccentric, by the relative motion of two spherical surfaces fitted one against the other, and having the axis of oscillation for a common axis. The convex surface, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... eye permission from Dick, easily and quickly thrust the needle through the stretched skin, with steady hand sank the piston home, and with the ball of the finger soothingly ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... to understand, for she turned away a few steps and then looked at him pleadingly, standing with her jaws open, and her long dripping tongue working like a piston ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... sufficient, and we also tested and improved the ignition. At four o'clock the wind dropped, and in an hour the engine was started. While moving along, the idle cylinder was ejecting oil, and this, together with the fact that it had no compression, made me hope that broken piston-rings were the source of the trouble. It would only take two hours to remove three cylinders, take one ring from each of the two sound ones for the faulty one, and all might ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... fiercely; and the next moment he was down on his knees, rapidly examining the connections, valve, piston, and rod. "Yah!" he roared, savagely. "The pins are left ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... hydraulic pumps. This extends from the tank on the side of the mountain to the 3,000 foot level. It is tapped at the points where are situated the several sets of hydraulic pumps. The water from the pressure pipe enters one part of the pump, where it moves a piston-back and forth, just as the piston of a steam engine is moved by steam. This water engine moves a pump which not only raises to the surface the water which has been used as driving power, but also a vast quantity of water from the shaft, all of which is forced up ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... caught in a complex network of steel. He turned one thrust, turned another, turned another. Then suddenly he went forward at the lunge with his whole living weight. Turnbull leaped back, but Evan lunged and lunged and lunged again like a devilish piston rod or battering ram. And high above all the sound of the struggle there broke into the silent evening a bellowing human voice, nasal, raucous, at the highest pitch of pain. "Help! Help! Police! Murder! Murder!" The gag was broken; ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... near the center of the musicians, were the brass: trumpets and trumpets-a-piston, trombones and valve trombones and Fulk horns, all blatting away to split the sky with maddening sound, Sousaphones and saxophones and French horns and bass horns and hunting horns, and tubas along in their own little cart, six round-cheeked ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... it is out from that under-world, from the dead and the unknown, from the cold moist ground, that these green blades have sprung. Yonder a steam-plough pants up the hill, groaning with its own strength, yet all that strength and might of wheels, and piston, and chains, cannot drag from the earth one single blade like these. Force cannot make it; it must grow—an easy word to speak or write, in fact full of potency. It is this mystery of growth and life, of beauty, and sweetness, and colour, starting forth from the ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... sick engines merely, but of engines on which post-mortems have already been held. They are actually mending engines, parts of which have already been taken out and used for the mending of other engines. There are consequently abnormal demands for such things as shafts and piston rings. They are particularly short of Babbitt metal and boiler tubes. In normal times the average number of new tubes wanted for each engine put through the repair shops was 25 (10 to 15 for engines used in the more northerly districts, and 30 to 40 for engines in the south where the water is not ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... group of worried trainmen gathered about the engine, and it needed but a glance to show what the trouble was. The piston rod had broken while the ponderous engine was going at full speed, and the driving rods, which had broken off from where they were fastened to the wheels, had been driven deep into the ground. This had served to fairly lift the engine from the rails, and, ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... give the proper amount of lead, and the desired release and compression, and the expansion valve is operated by a separate eccentric fastened in line with or 180 deg. ahead of the crank. When the piston, therefore, commences to move from the crank end to open the port, D, the expansion valve is forced by its eccentric in the opposite direction, and is closing the steam port and would have closed it before the piston reached quarter stroke, thus allowing the steam then in the cylinder to do ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... leaves it on the table while he seeks some other part of his magic equipment. The servant comes in, reads off the formula, and immediately becomes an emperor of the elemental spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He summons and dismisses them alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod working at high speed; he keeps them flying between the doctor's house and their own more unmentionable residences till they faint with rage and fatigue. There is all the best of the Middle Ages in that; the idea of the great levellers, luck and laughter; the idea of a sense ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... for a journey that in theory should last forever. It was daunting to think that before a space ship could be built and powered and equipped with machinery there had to be such wildly irrelevant plans worked out as a proper check of controls for the piston-engine ships that flew parts to the job. ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... to the authority of NorCon. Public demand for faster and more powerful vehicles had forced the automotive industry to put more and more power under the touch of the ever-growing millions of drivers crowding the continent's roads. Piston drive gave way to turbojet; turbojet was boosted by a modification of ram jet and air-cushion drive was added. In the last two years, the first of the nuclear reaction mass engines had hit the roads. Even as the hot Ferraris and Jags of the mid-'60s ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... at Dartmouth; invented a steam-engine in which the piston was raised by steam and driven down by the atmosphere after the injection into the cylinder of a squirt of cold water, which cooled it, so that the steam when injected did not raise the piston at once up. By James ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... water is heated, the water which is turned into steam, the piston on which the steam acts, the driving wheel, &c., &c., are all one as much as another a means whereby a train is made to go from one place to another; it is impossible to say that any one of them is the main means. So (mutatis mutandis) with modification. There ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... One may be prepared for a knowledge of the economic and social significance of the railway even if one does not know a throttle from a piston-rod, provided one has broad and well-balanced knowledge of the interplay of human social interests. One's proficiency here requires one to stand off from society, and to obtain a perspective that ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... hole well enough since. And it was as we were running out of Loando, that, in reversing the engine too suddenly, lest we should smash up an old Portuguese woman's bum-boat, that the slides or supports of the piston-rod just shot out of the grooves they run in on the top, came cleverly down on the outside of the carriage, gave that odious g-r-r-r, which I can hear now, and then, dump,—down came the whole weight of the walking-beam, bent rod and ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... should have cursed it after the approved pontifical fashion, in standing and in running, in watering and in coaling. He should have cursed it in the whole structure of its machinery,—in its funnel, in its boiler, in its piston, in its cranks, and in its stopcocks. I can see a hundred things which are sure to be crushed beneath its ponderous wheels. I can see it tearing ruthlessly onwards, and dashing through prejudices, opinions, usages, and time-honoured and venerated institutions, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... by a pop-gun, some ten feet in diameter, charged with mephitic vapours and plugged with microbes of typhoid fever. Conceive your sensations when you were aware that the piston was ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... travellers found themselves passing under triumphal arches, to the clang of church bells and the blare of bands. On the leading engine rode the young Marquis of Blandford playing "See the Conquering Here Comes" on the cornet-a-piston, Mr. George Owen, Mr. Davies and Mr. Webb. Earl Vane was in the train and received a public welcome at the station. Then the inevitable speeches. The return train was still longer and took two hours to reach Machynlleth, where the ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... is now third; and, if I'm not very much mistaken, we'll find old Donald Maclean aboard too, tinkering away at his beloved engines. I don't believe that fellow could take a holiday away from his thrust blocks and piston rods if he were paid to. We'll have a palaver about old times, and I'll put you ashore myself when you want to go. There, what do ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... be bent or curved to single or double curvature and sometimes to a warped surface to fit the form of the ship. There are several methods of bending plates. One method employs a cast iron slab of the required form, which is placed on the piston of a hydraulic press. The armor plate is placed face down on this slab, and on top of the plate are laid packing blocks of cast iron, of such sizes and shapes as to conform to the required curve. These blocks take against the upper table of the press, when the piston is forced up, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... 1853, some specimens of which are still in use.[1] These engines have ten wheels, the single drivers in the center, 9 ft. in diameter, and a four-wheeled bogie at each end. The driving wheels have no flanges. The bogie wheels are 4 ft. in diameter. The cylinders have a diameter of 161/2 in. and a piston stroke of 24 in. The boiler contains 180 tubes, and the total weight of the engine is 42 tons. These locomotives, constructed for 7 ft. gauge, have attained a speed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... can nowise modify his work: shall God not modify his? Law is but mode of life-action. Is it of his perfection that he should have no scope, no freedom? Is he but the prisoned steam in the engine, pushing, escaping, stopped—his way ordered by valve and piston? or is he an indwelling, willing, ordering power? Law is the slave of Life. Is not a man's soul, as it dwells in his body, a dim-shadowing type of God in and throughout his universe? If you say, he has made things to go, set them going, and left them— then I say, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... taken of this in steam engine construction. If a cylinder has a piston in it with an area of 100 square inches, and a pipe one inch square supplies steam at 50 pounds pressure, the piston will have 50 pounds pressure on every square inch of its surface, ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... experiments; and further evidence is found in the fact that the engines he ordered of Messrs. Boulton and Watt for the "Clermont" were precisely of the same dimensions as those in the "Charlotte Dundas," with the exception of two inches more diameter in the piston; and the patent of Fulton dates from 1809—twenty years after Symington had propelled a boat by steam on Lake Dalswinton, and eight years after he had himself taken sketches of Symington's engines in the Forth and ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... jugs and tea-pots are made and united with the body of the vessel in the same way. Small handles, beadings, mouldings, &c. are formed by means of an iron cylinder, having its bottom perforated so as to mould the clay, as it passes through, into the required figure. A piston is inserted into the top of the cylinder, and caused to descend slowly by means of a screw, in consequence of which the clay is continually passing out through the perforation, and is cut ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... of what is due to the game and to his own dignity is then suddenly lost, and a strange sight is often seen. Five, six, and seven more follow in quick succession, the man's arms working like the piston of a locomotive, and his eyes by this time being quite blinded to the ball, the sand, the bunker, and everything else. As an interesting feature of what we might call golfing physiology, I seriously suggest that players of these habits and temperament, when they begin to work ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... working order, and shone like silver, one bearing the name of Worden, the other that of Ericsson. Her engineer, Mr. Campbell, was in the act of giving some final touches to the machinery, when his leg was caught between the piston-rod and frame of one of the oscillating engines, with such force as to bend the rod, which was an inch and a quarter in diameter and about eight inches long, and break its cast-iron frame, five-eighths of an inch in thickness. The most remarkable fact ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... of his speech was inaudible to Mahony. Just behind him stood one of his brother-in-law's most arrant opponents, a butcher by trade, and directly John began to hold forth this man produced a cornet-a-piston and started to blow it. In vain did Mahony expostulate: he seemed to have got into a very wasps'-nest of hostility; for the player's friends took up the cudgels and baited him in a language he would have ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... pyramid upon its base through centuries of time, condescending to turn the restless wheels of man's machinery! When the expansive burst of the vapour confined within the cylinder of the condensing steam-engine thrusts upwards the piston-rod with its mighty beams, it is simple weight—the weight of the superincumbent transparent atmosphere—that crushes the metal back with antagonistic force. When particles of water have been sublimated ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... pimpernel : anagalo. pimple : akno. pin : pinglo, pinglefiksi. pincers : prenilo. pinch : pincxi. pine : pino; konsumigxi. "-apple," ananaso. pink : rozkolora; dianto. pioneer : pioniro. pipe : tubo, pipo; (mus.) sxalmo. pistol : pistol'o, -eto. piston : pisxto. pit : kavo, fosajxo, (well) puto; (theatre) partero. pitch : pecxo, bitumo; tono. pitcher : krucxo. pity : kompati. ("a-"), domagxo. pivot : pivoto, akso. placard : afisxo, place : loko; meti. plague : turmenti, inciteti; ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... I'm senior partner with the firm of Stephenson & Mackenzie. If ever you're up in Greenock direction, and want to see how we do it, just ask for Donal Mackenzie, and they'll show you the place. (Proudly.) We're the sole makers of the Mackenzie piston, if ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... kinds of machinery referred to. In Fig. 48 is shown a small pump, made by The Goulds Manufacturing Co., capable of lifting forty-eight gallons of water per minute against a head of a hundred feet. The diameter of piston is four inches and the length of stroke is six inches. It is operated by a belt from a steam engine used ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... to her lips at certain delicate phrases of the violin, that sometimes played alone while the other instruments were silent; one could hear the clear clink of the louis d'or that were being thrown down upon the card tables in the next room; then all struck again, the cornet-a-piston uttered its sonorous note, feet marked time, skirts swelled and rustled, hands touched and parted; the same eyes falling before you ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... Through the walls could be seen a quantity of apparatus resting on the opaque bottom portion. Two mechanics from the Bureau of Standards were making final adjustments of one of the pieces of apparatus, which resembled a tank fitted with a piston geared to an electric motor. From the tank, tubes ran to four hollow pipes, an inch and a half in diameter, which ran through the skin and extended thirty inches from the outer skin of the twenty-foot sphere. Dr. Bird stood near talking ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... the screw, and is itself ground by the piston—not to mention the cylinder and boiler—works in a dark place deep down in the engine-room, like a giant hand constantly engaged on deeds ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... going a journey comes a time when one tiredly shrinks from the work of speech, when observation dozes, and thought lolls like a limp sail that only idly stirs at the passing zephyrs; the legs like piston-rods strike on; when the pleasure is like that almost of dull narcotics; one realises only dimly that one is moving. At such times as these, coming from one knows not whence, and one feels too weak to search back to discover, there flit across the mind strange ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... when Dorothy entered the workshop for the last time to take her mournful leave of the place, there lay the bones of the mighty creature scattered over the floor—here a pipe, there a valve, here a piston and there a cock. Nothing stood but the furnace and the great pipes that ran up the grooves in the wall outside, between which there was scarce a hint of connection ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... with grass roofs, but no sides or floors (Plate LXII). At one end is a raised bamboo bench in front of which stands the forge. This consists of two upright wooden cylinders, usually logs hollowed out, known as po-opan. In each of these is a piston or plunger (doeydoyog) at the lower end of which is a wooden ring packed with corn husks and chicken feathers. When this is pushed downward in the cylinder, it compresses the air and forces it out of the small opening in the base, but when it is drawn ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... pipe connected with a piston pump, as at C, as the piston moves to and fro the water in the pipe will move first one way and then the other. So also when an alternating current generator is connected to a wire circuit, as at D, the current will flow first in one direction and then in the other, and this is what is called ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... Clark designated it, proved, however, to be no difficult proceeding. The crowd of hoodlums had got a set-back from the boy with the piston-rod arm, it seemed. They scanned Ralph and Clark keenly as they passed by, but made no attempt to ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... time Finley Morse and his brother Edwards had jointly devised and patented a new "flexible piston-pump," from which they hoped great things. Edwards, always more or less of a wag, proposed to call it "Morse's Patent Metallic Double-headed ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... and you are fond of engines, and like to "pat" them, as I do, you will notice that the cranks and piston-rods work outside the wheels, not between them, and underneath the boiler, as in the Great Western engines. You will have just time to look at the wheels and the name when the man on the platform will wave his flag, and the "Irishman" ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... the male florets of certain Compositae the style functions merely as a piston for ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... though A- was ready to swear after each fit was past, that that was the first time he had felt anything, and at this moment would declare in broad Scotch that he'd never been sick at all, qualifying the oath with "except for a minute now and then." He brought a cornet-a-piston to practice on, having had three weeks' instructions on that melodious instrument; and if you could hear the horrid sounds that come! especially at heavy rolls. When I hint he is not improving, there comes a confession: "I don't feel quite right yet, ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... strike upon the solid mass of our sphere. The conception of what took place in the consolidation of the originally disseminated materials of the sun and planets can be somewhat helped by a simple experiment. If we fit a piston closely into a cylinder, and then suddenly drive it down with a heavy blow, the compressed air is so heated that it may be made to communicate fire. If the piston should be slowly moved, the same amount of heat would be generated, or, as we may better ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... Instead of a single column of smoke he counted thirteen, forced through the soil as if violently propelled by some piston. It was evident that the crust of the earth was subjected in this part of the globe to a frightful pressure. The atmosphere was saturated with gases and carbonic acid, mingled with aqueous vapors. Cyrus Harding felt the volcanic tufa ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... before, since the law of gravity seemed no longer to be in force. One of the engineers was doing his work in a peculiarly twisted way, like a man asleep caught between the rim of the wheel and the piston-rod covered with verdigris. Frederick descended on his ghastly tour down to the stokers, whom the catastrophe had surprised in the midst of their occupation. Some were still holding their shovels in their hands, though unable to lift them. They themselves were ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... In such circumstances it would go through an ordinary house, train and all, as a rifle-bullet would go through a cheese. It was an eight-wheeled engine, and the driving-wheels were eight feet in diameter. The cylinder was eighteen inches, with a piston of two feet stroke, and the total weight of engine and tender was fifty-three tons. The cost of this iron horse with its tender ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... were flaring in the room, diffusing dim rays in the midst of the tobacco-smoke. The waiters, after serving the coffee and the brandy, had removed the last piles of dirty plates. Down below, beneath the three acacias, dancing had commenced, a cornet-a-piston and two fiddles playing very loud, and mingling in the warm night air with the rather hoarse laughter ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... a machine of remarkable structure. It has had, in one sense of the term, a wonderful "evolution." It is based on certain principles, the foundation one of which is the expansibility of steam, and its ability, when confined in a cylinder, to give motion to a piston. The steam-engine was first used for pumping, then for turning machinery, then for propelling boats, and now its crowning department is seen in the locomotive. There is a plan, a likeness, a similarity, which runs through all steam-engines, whether they be found in the ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... jaw grew more salient than ever, the teeth set and clenched behind the close-gripped lips, the cast in the small twinkling eyes grew suddenly more pronounced. One huge fist raised, and the arm slowly extended forward like the resistless moving of a piston. Then when his arm was at its full reach Bennett spoke as though in answer to the voiceless, terrible challenge of the Ice. Through his clenched teeth his words ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... to tell what is superior and what is subordinate work. I suppose that in a steam engine the smallest rivet is quite as essential as the huge piston, and that if the rivet drops out the piston-rod is very likely to stop rising and falling. So it is a very vulgar way of talking to speak about A.'s work being large and B.'s work being small, or to assume that we have eyes to settle which work ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... good men who had received a European mechanical education among those I had brought from Egypt; these were now engaged with the English engineers in repairing the engine of the No. 10 steamer, which required a new piston. I ordered a number of very crooked bill-hooks to be prepared for cutting the tangled vegetation during our next voyage. The first boat, about sixteen feet long, was progressing, and the entire station was a field of industry. The gardens were green with vegetables, and everything ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... progress in the science of this great force, until at the present time it is handled, controlled and understood in its phenomena almost as easily as water is poured into a vessel, air compressed under a piston, or hydrogen made to ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... the beginning of the treatment when the feces become packed. They soften the mass and aid its discharge. The water must go above the rectum into the colon. To do this a colon tube from eighteen to twenty-four inches long, a good syringe (the Davidson bulb) hard rubber piston or a fountain syringe, the nozzle of which can be inserted into the tube, are required. The patient is placed in the lying down position on the left side with knees drawn up, with the hips elevated. Oil the tube and pass it gently and slowly up the bowel for a ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... shock must follow shock, Until the sole remaining Rock That all one's hopes exist on, Crumbles beneath the crushing force Of Conscience, kicking like a horse, And pounding like a piston. ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... (of fruit) grajno. Pipe (tube) tubo, tubeto. Pipe (for tobacco) pipo. Piquancy pikeco. Piquant pika. Pique ofendi. Piracy marrabo—ado. Pirate marrabisto. Piscina nagxejo. Pistil (botany) pistilo. Pistol pafileto. Piston pisxto. Pit (well, etc.) puto, fosajxo, kavo. Pit (theatre) partero. Pitch (to smear with) kalfatri. Pitch pecxo. Pitch (of ships) subakvigxi. Pitcher krucxo. Pitchfork forkego. Piteous kompatinda. Pitfall enfalujo. Pith suko. Pitiable kompatinda. Pitiful kompatinda. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... closes an exhaust-valve, and the other opens an inlet-valve, in the compressed air tank. At once air is forced into this double cylinder, which you see at the bottom of the stabilizer, filling the half which is to operate its own set of rudders; and a piston begins to work inside. The piston is connected to a toothed rack, as you will note, causing this to turn a sector engaging it. The control wires connect with ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... movement imparted to the cable by the rising and falling of the buoy now requires to be converted into a force exerted in one direction. In the steam-engine and in other machines of similar type, the problem is simplified by the uniform length of the stroke made by the piston, so that devices such as the crank and eccentric circular discs are readily applicable to the securing of a rotatory motion for a fly-wheel from a reciprocating motion in the cylinders. In the application of wave-power ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... engine had a vertical boiler and machinery. The cylinders were on the opposite side of the boiler from the door of the fire box, and mounted independently; the motion of the piston was communicated by means of a crank shaft and toothed wheels to the driving axle. The wheels were coupled. A regulator, injector, and a hand-brake were placed at each end, so that the engine driver ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... engine as the Punjab comes sliding down, the round world to welcome its curled darling. It spurns with contemptuous piston the vulgar corn-growing provinces of Couper; it seeks the fields that are sown with dragon's teeth; it hisses forward with furious joy, like the flaming chariot of some Heaven-booked Prophet. Already Egerton anticipates ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... a shock. Ursula sat playing on her piano till very late; and went to bed easier in mind and very sleepy. About midnight she was awakened by the music of a band composed of a clarinet, hautboy, flute, cornet a piston, trombone, bassoon, flageolet, and triangle. All the neighbours were at their windows. The poor girl, already frightened at seeing the people in the street, received a dreadful shock as she heard the coarse, rough voice of a man proclaiming in loud tones: "For the beautiful ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... the Actual Horse-power of an engine, multiply the area of the cylinder in square inches by the average effective pressure in pounds per square inch, less 3 lb. per square inch as the frictional allowance, and also by the speed of the piston in feet per minute, dividing the product by 33,000, and the quotient ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... the fall. I felt that I must move. Yet, what to do? There was the thing. Cards, of course. But that's only for times, not for all seasons. So I was like a wild dog on a chain. I had a good horse—Tophet, black as a coal, all raw bones and joint, and a reach like a moose. His legs worked like piston-rods. But, as I said, I did not know where to go or what to do. So we used to sit at the Post loafing: in the daytime watching the empty plains all panting for travellers, like a young bride waiting her husband ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... undertook and carried through the job. That gave me a chance to study the new engine at first hand and in 1887 I built one on the Otto four-cycle model just to see if I understood the principles. "Four cycle" means that the piston traverses the cylinder four times to get one power impulse. The first stroke draws in the gas, the second compresses it, the third is the explosion or power stroke, while the fourth stroke exhausts the waste gas. The little model worked well enough; it had a one-inch ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... the steep slope. Sometimes we sank so deep that time was lost in extricating our legs, and again we slipped back, which was even more annoying than sticking fast. The powdery snow flew about like dust, and was occasionally dumped into my face by the piston-like action of my knees. The lanterns jangled and flickered wildly, and in their shifting and uncertain light, with our odd habiliments, we must have resembled a company of mad demons on ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... vital outputs of the same principle that animates the old order. To account every co-ordination of modern social life as an instance of civilization is as if any one should cite the turbine engine and its achievements and set these down to the credit of the piston engine. But the idea of the one is wholly new and not a further evolution of the old. Or it is as if one should assign the glory of the motor-car to the inventor of the bicycle, or of the bicycle to the originator of the horse-cart; or as if one ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... For, among other doctrines delectable, Was he not surely the first to insist on The natural sovereignty of our race?— Here the lecturer came to a pausing-place. And while his cough, like a drouthy piston, Tried to dislodge the husk that grew to him, I seized the occasion of bidding adieu to him, The vesture still ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... in our illustration was built in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada. She is 42 ft. keel and 7 ft. beam, and has 4 ft. depth of hold. She has an improved Clarke compound engine, also shown in an accompanying illustration, with a high pressure piston four inches in diameter, and a low pressure piston eight inches in diameter, the stroke being six inches, and the engine driving two twenty-six inch screws. With 130 pounds of steam, and making 275 revolutions per minute, the launch attains a speed of nine miles per hour, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... dog; men were shouting questions at one another; from the box-car on the railroad tracks issued vociferous yells and curses. Trevison slipped out through the door, panting. His opponent had gone down, temporarily disabled from sundry vicious blows from a fist that had worked like a piston rod. A figure loomed at his side. "I got mine!" it said, ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... hold, but the effort was fruitless. Changing his tactics, his breath lagging in his throat from the terrible pressure on it, Trevison worked his right hand into the other's stomach with the force and regularity of a piston rod. The big man writhed under the punishment, dropping his hand from Trevison's chin to his waist, swung him from his feet and threw him from him as a man ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of men, some twenty of them, cleaving their way through the crowd like a wedge. At their head, and taller than the others, fought two men, whose arms worked with the systematic precision of piston-rods, and before whom men fell on either hand ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... "Broken piston-rod!" he exclaimed. "That means a trip to Matinicus. And we've got to go right away, so we can get back before night ahead of the storm that's coming. We must fix that engine, or we may lose two or three days' good fishing, after the sea smooths down. Perce, you and I'll go in the ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... stopper, stopple; plug, cork, bung, spike, spill, stopcock, tap; rammer^; ram, ramrod; piston; stop-gap; wadding, stuffing, padding, stopping, dossil^, pledget^, tompion^, tourniquet. cover &c 223; valve, vent peg, spigot, slide valve. janitor, doorkeeper, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to Krugersdorp we left for Cape Town and England. We made the voyage on the old Roslin Castle. Always a slow boat, she had on this occasion, in sporting parlance, a "wing down," having broken a piston-rod on her way out from England, when we had vainly awaited her at Cape Town, and I think it was nearly three weeks before we landed at Plymouth. Again Randolph's African journey was brought back to my recollection. The captain of the Roslin Castle, ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... had mercy. The quirt went back and forth like a piston-rod, and the outlaw, in screaming fury, leaped and tossed like a small boat in a tremendous sea ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... and He sometimes takes, that we may be led, in the hour of emptiness and loss, to recognise whose hand it was that pulled up the props round which our poor tendrils clung. But the opposite actions have the same purpose, and like the up-and-down stroke of a piston, or the contrary motion of two cogged wheels that play into each other, are meant to impel us in one direction, even to the heart of God who is our home. A landowner stops up a private road one day in a year, in order to assert his right, and to remind ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... and sabre stood a piano open, and with a piece of music on the stand—a movement by Chopin; a violoncello leaned in its case in one corner, a cornet-a-piston showed itself, like an arrangement in brass macaroni packed in red velvet upon a side-table; and in front of it lay open a small, flat flute-case, wherein were the two halves of a silver-keyed instrument side by side, in company with what seemed to be its young one—so exact ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... laws into the benignant power that was bearing him so gently over summer seas, held him breathless with interest and delight. Even the clang of the first dinner gong could not distract him from his study of cylinder and piston and shaft and driving-rod, and all shining mechanism working without pause or ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... in diameter was this shaft, and ringed regularly along its height by wide amethystine bands—like rings of a hollow piston. They were, in color, replicas of that I had glimpsed before our descent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the outlines of the incredible city had lowered. And they were in motion, spinning ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a Fleming named Kremer, i.e. dealer.] the two languages being represented by those important tradesmen Baker and Butcher. The former is reinforced by Bollinger, Fr. boulanger, Pester, Old Fr. pestour (Lat. piston), and Furner— ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... some were disturbed by the prospect of competition with whites of equivalent rank that would naturally follow. Many of the black officers were overage in grade, their proficiency geared to the F-51, a wartime piston plane, and they were the logical victims of any reduction in force that might occur in this period of reduced military budgets.[16-9] Some men doubted that the new program, as they imperfectly understood it, would ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... "an amatyure like yourself. That's one style of play, yours is the other, and I like it best. But I began when I was a boy, you see, before my taste was formed. When you're my age you'll play that thing like a cornet-a-piston. Give us that air again; how does it go?" and he affected to endeavour to recall ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... connected to the cylinder of the engine by another pipe, and there is valve which is opened by the engine itself and is closed by a spring. By an ingenious contrivance the valve is opened when the piston moves out of the cylinder, and a vacuum is created behind it and in the carburettor. This carries a fine spray of petrol to be sucked up through the nozzle. Air is also sucked into the carburettor, and the mixture of air and petrol spray produces an inflammable vapour which is drawn ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... bell in the engine-room tinkled softly once, and then rang savagely again and again to "hoist away." The great wheel turned fast and faster; the piston-rods flew in and out; the iron ropes hummed as they cut the air; and the people at the shaft's mouth waited, breathless with suspense, to see what the blackness would yield up to them. The carriage rose swiftly to the surface. On it four men, tottering and exhausted, were supporting an ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... and then, the cross-head ascends, the steam hisses below, the condenser rumbles, the steam from the funnel roars furiously forth, spreading its scalding vapour through the air. Again, the man, almost imperceptibly touches the iron rod with his finger, the magic monster again moves its piston downward, the wheels make a turn, the massive vessel surges upon her lines, as if eager to press forward on her course. Another gentle touch, and, obeying the summons, the motive power is still; the man subjects the monster with his little finger. He has stopped ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... consistent; are there not as many terms of praise which signify rest as which signify motion? There is episteme, which is connected with stasis, as mneme is with meno. Bebaion, again, is the expression of station and position; istoria is clearly descriptive of the stopping istanai of the stream; piston indicates the cessation of motion; and there are many words having a bad sense, which are connected with ideas of motion, such as sumphora, amartia, etc.: amathia, again, might be explained, as e ama theo iontos poreia, ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... beyond the tips came the beat of a horse's hoofs, and the sound of human voices. Dick's first thought was of his pursuers, the troopers; his second of his escape; his third sent the blood surging through his veins and his heart beating like a piston. A grand thought, a magnificent thought! He could have cried out with exultation as it swept into his mind. Creeping around the tree he silently unearthed the gold-stealers' bag and dragged it after him, retreating to ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... wherein in wild fear the Rose clung to ease the dreadful bruisings that each oscillation gave her; as it were a ton-weight did that hand-bag drag his right arm, thud his thigh; as he were breathing fire did his tearing respirations sear his throat; as a great piston were driving in his skull did the blood hammer ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... the outer world at all: a greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else. How dare we pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a crucible, that we know the limits of natural and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... power to propel a charge of carbide out of a reservoir into the generator. Sometimes the propulsive effort is obtained from a train of clockwork, sometimes from a separate supply of water under high pressure. The clockwork or the water power is used either to drive a piston travelling through the vessel containing the carbide so that the proper quantity of material is dropped over the open mouth of a shoot, or to upset one after another a series of carbide receptacles, or to perform some analogous ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... before—when we bear in mind all this, is it possible not to connect the facts together, and to refer cycles of living generations to the same unalterableness in the action of like matter under like circumstances which makes Jupiter and Saturn revolve round the sun, or the piston of a steam-engine move up and down as long as the steam acts ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... steam, does it not? And what is to be done with the steam that comes off the 'boiling' spirit? You may either let it go roaring through a waste-pipe and do nothing but make a noise and be idly dissipated in the air, or you may lead it into a cylinder and make it lift a piston, and then you will get work out of it. That is what the Apostle desires us to do with our emotion. The lightning goes careering through the sky, but we have harnessed it to tram-cars nowadays, and made it 'work for its living,' to carry our letters and light our rooms. Fervour ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... and was promptly repaired, but was not successful when put in operation. Steam enough could not be obtained, although the boiler seemed of ample capacity. The fire was urged by blowing and more steam generated, and still it would not work; a few strokes of the piston and the engine stopped. Smiles says that exactly at the point when ordinary experimentalists would have abandoned the task, Watt became thoroughly aroused. "Every obstacle," says Professor Robison, "was to him the beginning of a new and serious study, ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... organized: a fly-wheel, large enough to keep the knobbiest of asteroids revolving without a wabble; a cross-head, cross-tail, and piston-rod, to help a great sea-going steamer breast the waves; a light walking-beam, to whirl the paddles of a fast boat on the river; and other members of machines, only asking to be put together and vivified by steam and they would go at their work with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... But not unequal work. The work must be unequal if the conditions are unequal. It's not the same machine. To turn a woman on to a man's work is like trying to run an express train by clock-work, with a pendulum for a piston, ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... the procession wabbles. Steam is of main importance, not for sounding the whistle, but for moving the wheels; and if there is a lack of steam we shall not remedy it by attempting by our own effort to move the piston or blow the whistle, but by more water in the boiler, and more fire under it. Feed Faith with Facts, not with ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... than for the purpose of withstanding any internal pressure of steam. The necessary consequence was, that the manufacturing engines of those days were compelled to work with steam of from only 31/2 lb. to 5 lb. per square inch of pressure above atmosphere. The piston speed rarely exceeded 250 feet per minute, and as a result of the feeble pressure, and of the low rate of speed, very large cylinders indeed were needed relatively to the power obtained. The consumption of fuel was heavy, being commonly from 7 lb. to 10 lb. per gross indicated horsepower per ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... transverse slit (shown in Fig. 54). To use it we open the valve and deftly place the mouth of the drum over the insect which, in nineteen cases out of twenty, flies towards the gauze. We then seize the opportunity to close the valve, and pushing the corked piston represented at the right side of the figure against it, once more open the valve, and force the capture up to the gauze, through which it may be pinned, and the piston should then be withdrawn with the insect ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... steam-engine from the first stroke of its piston-rod begins to wear out, and before long needs repair. All work involves waste. The engine, unless kept in thorough repair, would soon stop. So with our bodies. In their living cells chemical changes are constantly going on; energy, on the whole, is running down; complex ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... operation, the acid cock, c, is opened and the wheel, A, is turned, thus setting in motion both the pump piston, P, and the agitator, within S and D. Then the play of the pump produces a suction in the washers and from thence in the generator and causes the acid in the vessel, C, to flow into the generator through the leaden siphon tubes, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... his lines on hinges, rolling Right and left like very doom, Till our fate nigh past controlling Brake in glory out of gloom. While upon those awful stages Throbbed a world's great piston beat, And the moments seemed as ages Rung from death and red defeat. Ah, we lived, indeed, and no man Recked of wound or any ill, As we grimly faced the foeman— If ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... noblest outcome of human ingenuity—Mr. Buchanan says so," squealed the high-pressure cylinder. "This is simply ridiculous!" The piston went up savagely, and choked, for half the steam behind it was mixed with dirty water. "Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help I'm choking," it gasped. "Never in the history of maritime invention has such a calamity over-taken one so young and strong. And if ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... 1) is provided with a steam cylinder, similar to the cylinder of a steam engine, containing a piston, the rod of which is attached to a crosshead, A, that slides on ways, B, secured to the ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... The cylinder, E, and the piston, F, in combination with the lever, D, or their equivalent, operated by the means and in the manner and for ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... poured out of the rocks in white and brownish clouds that waved to and fro, slowly rising, until a breeze caught and carried them away. The sight alone would suffice to inspire terror, without the oppressive smoke and the uncanny noise far down in the depths. Dull and regular, it sounded like the piston of an engine or a great drum, heard through the noises of a factory. Presently there was silence, and then, without any warning, came a tearing crack, the thunder as of 100 heavy guns, a metallic din, and ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... on a pile of broad leaves the Hun tried to fall asleep, but in vain. Racked in every limb, his head throbbing as if it harboured a rapidly working piston, he endured—waiting for the dawn that would give him ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... death, and he always crossed the road to avoid it; but this afternoon he went down the cinder pathway so close that he could touch it with his stick. It was incredible that so terrible a thing could dwindle in a few years to the dimensions of a motor piston. The crank that moved up and down like a bending, gigantic knee looked almost ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... into smaller pieces, purify them with more fire, and run them into bars convenient for use. Our bellows," continued the guide, "are not like yours, with two boards and leather between. The rats would soon make short work with these. They are two cylinders formed from the trunk of a tree, with a piston in each, packed with coarse cloth, and having valves. An old musket-barrel carries the air to the furnace, and, by pumping them time about, the blow is ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... they seemed to have grown shorter and fatter, and were encased in black fur gloves. He felt a desire to walk on all fours—tried it—did it. It was very odd—the movement of the arms straight from the shoulder, more like the movement of the piston of an engine than anything Maurice could think ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... cook!—scatter them all over the persecuted place till it looks like a zinc-plated, spiral-twisted, silver-mounted canebrake! Move! Use up all the material you can get your hands on, and when you run out of lightning-rods put up ramrods, cam-rods, stair-rods, piston-rods—anything that will pander to your dismal appetite for artificial scenery, and bring respite to my raging brain and healing to my lacerated soul!" Wholly unmoved—further than to smile sweetly—this iron being simply turned back his wrist-bands daintily, and said he would now ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... line of the History was written, so Miss Anthony, with vol. III. and bushels of manuscripts, fled to the peaceful home of her sister Mary at Rochester. The expected party sailed from Liverpool the 26th of May, on the America After being out three days the piston rod broke and they were obliged to return. My son-in-law, W.H. Blatch, was so seasick and disgusted that he remained in England, and took a fresh start two months later, and had a swift passage without any accidents. The ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... pressure engine the steam, after having pushed the piston to the end of the stroke, escapes into the atmosphere, and the impelling force is therefore that due to the difference between the pressure of the steam and the pressure of the atmosphere. In the condensing ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... he must turn such and such a tap or valve in order to produce such and such a desired result: he wanted to see for himself how and why the engine did this or that, what was the use and object of piston and cylinder and crank and joint and condenser—in short, fully to understand the underlying principle of its construction. He took it to pieces for cleaning whenever it was needful; he made working models of it after his old childish pattern; he even ventured to tinker ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... cella contained one central and ten side niches, in which eleven masterpieces of Greek chisels were placed, namely, the Apollo and Hera, by Baton; Leto nursing Apollo and Artemis, by Euphranor; Asklepios and Hygieia, by Nikeratos; Ares and Hermes, by Piston; and Zeus, Athena, and Demeter, by Sthennis. The name of the sculptor of the Concordia in the apse is not known. Pliny speaks also of a picture by Theodoros, representing Cassandra; of four elephants, cut in obsidian, a miracle of skill and labor, and of ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... enthusiasm passes over it. Indeed, mental power is not in the multitude of knowledge acquired, but in the powerful enthusiasms that drive the informed soul along some noble path. Power is not in the engine, but in the steam that pounds the piston; and the soul is a mechanism driven forward by those motives called enthusiasm for learning or influence or wealth. Success might be defined as a full casting of the heart into ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... great relief she had. He told her to wash it out thoroughly with the hot water, unscrew the top, and take out the piston. While giving his directions, he unbound the arm, enlarged the wound in the vein longitudinally, and re-bound the arm tight below the elbow, then quickly opened a vein of his own, and held the syringe ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... Juan district; he is in a fair way to a princely fortune. I fear golden apples will not be strewn on our paths, even though we are bound the furthest west. Fifteen days have we been out of sight of land; two days out from Queenstown we broke a piston-rod, which obliged us to lay to, in a fearfully rough sea, for five hours. Next day one of our four boilers burst, and again another piston-rod; which accidents, combined with contrary winds and heavy seas, reduced our speed to nearly half for the remainder ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... away hastily. He began battering at King's face, battering like a steam-piston. The blows sounded loudly; blood broke out under the terrific pounding. King's grip did not alter, did not shift. His eyes were shut but he clung on, grim, looking a dead man, but a man whose will lasted on after death. Brodie wrenched; they rolled over. Still King's hands did ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... the sufferer from fever, (or one stunned by some sudden and violent grief,) when certain sounds, words, or tunes, accidentally determined, thrill through the head with the steadiness and vehement action of the piston of a steam-engine—beat, beat, beat!—every note seeming to fall on the excited brain like the blow of a hammer; while, as the fever and pain increase, the more rapidly and heavily do those torturing notes pursue their furious chase. We well remember, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... came dashing toward the camp, his arms were outstretched as if in entreaty, and his long legs going up and down like piston rods, at ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... point of view broadly of two types,—the first, in which the drill is the piston extension; and the second, a more recent development for mining work, in which the piston acts as a hammer striking the head of the drill. From an economic point of view drills may be divided into three classes. ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... beginning of his researches in this direction, he adopted the Woolf system, which is one that permits of great variation in the expansion, and one in which the steam under full pressure acts only upon the small piston. There are many types of this engine in use, all of which present marked defects. In one of them, the large cylinder is arranged directly over the small one so as to have but a single rod for the two pistons; and the two cylinders have then one bottom in common, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... compare the rotation of the earth with the rotation of the fly-wheel belonging to a steam-engine. The rotation of the fly-wheel is really a reservoir, into which the engine pours energy at each stroke of the piston. The various machines in the mill worked by the engine merely draw upon the store of energy accumulated in the fly-wheel. The earth may be likened to a gigantic fly-wheel detached from the engine, though still connected with the machines in the mill. From its stupendous dimensions ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... stop or reverse it, one merely has to press a button or move a switch. The fascinations of a model steam locomotive, with its furnace, hissing of steam, business-like puffings, and a visible working of piston and connecting rods, are not to be denied, any more than that a full-sized steam locomotive is a more imposing object at rest or in motion than its electric rival. On the other hand, the ease of control already noticed, and the absence of burning fuel, water leakage, smoke and fumes, ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... and ocean; were set up in startling type in hundreds of newspaper offices while he who did not know heroism by name was breathing his last on a mattress laid on the yellow-painted floor of the room he had seen so "clear" when the engine-throb and piston-beat played Home, Sweet Home. The sunshine that had followed the rain touched the white cheek of the opened lily before falling on his sightless eyes and charred ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... and skinny smokestack was like a perpetual exclamation point. Her gait resembled that of a sprightly old horse who makes a great to-do with his feet on the road but somehow gets nowhere. At the end of each stroke of her piston she seemed to stop for an instant and then with a wheeze and a clank from below, and a violent tremor from stem to stern, started all over. Her paddle-wheels kicked up alarming looking rollers behind, ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... now,' said he, 'actually within the hydraulic press, and it would be a particularly unpleasant thing for us if anyone were to turn it on. The ceiling of this small chamber is really the end of the descending piston, and it comes down with the force of many tons upon this metal floor. There are small lateral columns of water outside which receive the force, and which transmit and multiply it in the manner which is familiar to you. The machine ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... said to the fireman, "We must oil our engine well." So they took oil cans with funny long noses and they oiled all the machinery, the piston-rods, the levers, the wheels, everything that moved or went round. And all the time ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... it, saying no word. His mind was active. He noted his enemy's long hair, reaching to the waist—a fashion among the border beaux. An idea occurred to him. He grasped one of the piston-like legs and sank his teeth into it. Yelling, Leitchman dragged him and sought to get free. Down he tumbled, also, tripped in his efforts. Simon grabbed at his hair, wound it around the trunk of a small sapling, ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... these lengthened terms, give you the complete force of the passage; especially of the [Greek: apiston emesato piston]—"made it trustworthy by passionate desire that it should be so"—which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the present day, who are kindly and sincere, in clinging to the forms of faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they feel to have been without ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... and for the last time, they returned to the charge, but the plucky scout was awaiting them, and his club whizzed through the air like the piston rod of a steam engine. The grizzlies found it more than they could stand, and tumbling back to solid earth they gave up the contract in disgust. Carson tarried where he was until they were beyond sight, when he descended and hastily ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... her go somehow," answered Tom. "Even if I have to shove the piston rod myself," and at this remark both of his brothers had ...
— The Rover Boys in Southern Waters - or The Deserted Steam Yacht • Arthur M. Winfield
... when I sat, an hour later, disgustedly reflecting on this incident, that I remembered that there was always some 'hand-working' of the engine during the cage-descents, an engineman reversing the action by a handle at every stroke of the piston, to prevent bumping. However, the only permanent injury was to the lamp: and I found ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... evacuated all of the products of combustion. The Atkinson engine, patented in 1887, was one of the attempts to solve this as well as several other problems, thus creating a more efficient cycle. This engine was designed so that the exhaust stroke carried the piston all the way to the head of the engine, while the compression stroke only moved the piston far enough to sufficiently compress the mixture. The unusual linkage necessary to create these unequal strokes in the Atkinson engine made it seem impractical for a carriage ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile
... noise behind me, and, turning, found myself almost face to face with a great she-bear, with two cubs of the year running gambolling about her. I had not even so much as a fish-spear with me. With my heart leaping like the piston-rod of an engine, I sat as still as though I had been a pillar of ice carved out of the hummock. The cubs were within twenty paces, and the mother would have passed by but for the roystering youngsters. They came galloping awkwardly up, and nosed all over me, rubbing themselves against my ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... old cast-iron kettle which hangs on the crane in the fireplace be not frozen. As soon as the fire is started he goes outdoors to thaw out the pump, if they have a wooden pump. But that is all frozen up, and he has to get some hot water from this kettle to pour down over the piston till he can thaw it out. Sometimes he would have an old-fashioned well, sunk too low in the ground for the frost to reach it, and could get water with the old ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... proved to have a burnt-out bearing and Jason rebuilt it by melting down the original bearing metal and casting it in position. When he unbolted the head of the massive single cylinder he shuddered at the clearance around the piston; he could fit his fingers into the opening between the piston and the cylinder wall; by introducing cylinder rings he doubled the compression and power output. When Edipon saw the turn of speed the rebuilt engine gave his caroj he hugged Jason to his ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... academic drawing, and what is the difference between it and fa fine drawing. But perhaps this difference can be brought home a little more clearly if you will pardon a rather fanciful simile. I am told that if you construct a perfectly fitted engine—the piston fitting the cylinder with absolute accuracy and the axles their sockets with no space between, &c.—it will not work, but be a lifeless mass of iron. There must be enough play between the vital parts to allow of some movement; "dither" is, I believe, the Scotch word ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... the signet on soft wax;—a single pressure is enough. Let me strengthen the image a little. Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed steam-engine at the Mint? The smooth piston slides backward and forward as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out of a ring. The engine lays one of its fingers calmly, but firmly, upon a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and tell a new race about it, when the date upon it is crusted over with twenty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... himself. Some drink whisky, and some drink brandipanee, and some drink cocktails—vara bad for the coats o' the stomach is a cocktail— and some drink sangaree, so I have been credibly informed; but one and all they sweat like the packing of piston-head on a fourrteen-days' voyage with the screw racing half her time. But, as I was saying, the population o' Larut was five all told of English—that is to say, Scotch—an' I'm Scotch, ye know,' said ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling |
