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Vacuum   Listen
noun
Vacuum  n.  (pl. E. vacuums, L. vacua)  
1.
(Physics) A space entirely devoid of matter (called also, by way of distinction, absolute vacuum); hence, in a more general sense, a space, as the interior of a closed vessel, which has been exhausted to a high or the highest degree by an air pump or other artificial means; as, water boils at a reduced temperature in a vacuum.
2.
The condition of rarefaction, or reduction of pressure below that of the atmosphere, in a vessel, as the condenser of a steam engine, which is nearly exhausted of air or steam, etc.; as, a vacuum of 26 inches of mercury, or 13 pounds per square inch.
Vacuum brake, a kind of continuous brake operated by exhausting the air from some appliance under each car, and so causing the pressure of the atmosphere to apply the brakes.
Vacuum pan (Technol.), a kind of large closed metallic retort used in sugar making for boiling down sirup. It is so connected with an exhausting apparatus that a partial vacuum is formed within. This allows the evaporation and concentration to take place at a lower atmospheric pressure and hence also at a lower temperature, which largely obviates the danger of burning the sugar, and shortens the process.
Vacuum pump. Same as Pulsometer, 1.
Vacuum tube (Phys.),
(a)
a glass tube provided with platinum electrodes and exhausted, for the passage of the electrical discharge; a Geissler tube.
(a)
any tube used in electronic devices, containing a vacuum and used to control the flow of electrons in a circuit, as a vacuum diode, triode, tetrode, or pentode.
Vacuum valve, a safety valve opening inward to admit air to a vessel in which the pressure is less than that of the atmosphere, in order to prevent collapse.
Torricellian vacuum. See under Torricellian.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vacuum" Quotes from Famous Books



... said camel could remain in that attic. Indeed we might go on at some length expounding further this profound law of human nature that where there are camels there will be small boys; that, as it were, under such circumstances Nature abhors an infantile vacuum. ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... no difficulties to experienced glass-workers, even with tubes of about one inch in diameter, but to the amateur it is very difficult. I always look on a large U-tube with feelings of envy and admiration, which the complex trick work of an elaborate vacuum tube does not excite in the least. It will be noted that this method may, and often does, involve a preliminary thickening ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... only needed to look at him to know that he took a cold plunge every morning, and liked to walk ten miles a day, and could digest anything and go to sleep the minute his head touched the pillow. And he had no tact. When Mrs. Biggs went to him and explained that the vacuum cleaner must not be used in her room—that it exhausted the air or something, and she could hardly breathe after it—he only looked bewildered and then drew a diagram to show her it was impossible that it could exhaust the ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... it flow too fast at first. Space is a vacuum, which means it's a good insulator. We had to cut the air down to a trickle. Then Wilcox ran into trouble because his engines wouldn't cool with that amount of air. He went back to supervise a patched-up job of splitting the coolers into sections, which ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey

... young feller," said the other, cheerily. "Find seats on that log yonder. I ain't got much in my larder today, but what there is will fill a mighty big vacuum in my interior, let me tell you. This here is coffee in the first can—-mebbe not just what you boys is accustomed to at your breakfast tables, but good enough for me when it's piping hot. I don't take any frills with wine either, in the way of cream and sugar, leaving all that for those that sit ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson

... within his heart, a want or craving for something, something indefinite, intangible certainly—something that no sensual indulgence could appease, that no light pleasure could distract, and now all at once it seemed to him that long-felt vacuum was filling up. A something, just as ethereal as his craving had been, was creeping into his heart. It felt like the liquid music of a low, serious voice, or it may have been a passion, such as he had seen in the depths of two large, sad, gray eyes, or it might have been the soft soothing influence ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera

... shake with the tremor of the detonation, shake and quiver like a ship pounded by strong head seas. A remote window splintered and crashed to the floor, sucked in by the atmospheric inrush following the explosion-vacuum. He noticed, too, as he mounted the narrow stairs before him, that he was bleeding at the nose. But this, he told himself, was no time for resting. For at the head of the second stairway still another ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... All's hard that has not you for goal; I scarce can move my hand to write, For love engages all my soul, And leaves the body void of might; The wings of will spread idly, as do The bird's that in a vacuum lies; My breast, asleep with dreams of you, Forgets to breathe, and bursts in sighs; I see no rest this side the grave, No rest nor hope, from you apart; Your life is in the rose you gave, Its perfume suffocates my heart; There's no refreshment in the breeze; The heaven o'erwhelms ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore

... manufacture rather than in newness of purpose. It is true that in modern household economy some of the present-day household utensils are the outcome of modern invention, having no similarity in form to the simpler primitive contrivances which they have superseded. Thus, for instance, the vacuum cleaner has little in its appearance to associate it with the old-fashioned carpet brush, neither has the modern knife cleaner much in common with the old knife board. There are some articles, however, which have ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess

... skinned his teeth, and growled to himself, 'By the prophet, but I can almost love her again; she distinguished herself by that kick, which was aimed with infinite tact; it went right to the spot, and struck me like a discharge from a catapult, drove all the wind out of me, and left an absolute vacuum, as if a stomach-pump had sucked me out. Yap—yow—eaow—yeaow—yap—snif—xquiz;' and, after a good deal of panting and distress, he at last yawned so wide as nearly to dislocate his jaws, sneezed once or twice, and then trotted off on three legs, with his half a tail tucked up underneath, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Edgerton supplied a vacuum which my bosom had long felt. He was, however, very unlike, in most respects, to myself. He was rather phlegmatic than ardent—slow in his fancies, and shy in his associations from very fastidiousness. He was too much governed by nice tastes, to be an active or performing youth; and too much ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... south, and daily he traverses the firmament in a chariot. He sleeps in a sea-nymph's bosom or rises from the dawn's couch. In all this we see clearly a scarcely figurative description of the material sun and its motions. A quasi-scientific fancy spins these fables almost inevitably to fill the vacuum not yet occupied by astronomy. Such myths are indeed compacted out of wonders, not indeed to add wonder to them (for the original and greatest marvel persists always in the sky), but to entertain us with pleasant consideration of them and with their assimilation to our own fine feats. This assimilation ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... is merely a colonial name for a violent gust of wind, which, succeeding a season of great heat, rushes in to supply the vacuum and equalises the temperature of the atmosphere; and when its baneful progress is marked, sweeping over the city in thick clouds of brick-coloured dust (from the brickfields), it is time for the citizens to close the doors and ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... his orders. Through a window I saw men carrying apparatus from the house. A small metal frame of sun-mirrors, prisms and vacuum tubes. Georg ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... engine; the whole ventilator gets covered with sea every now and then, during which period until the baffle drains get the water away no air can get in, so the engine has a good suck at the air in the boat, the result of all this being a slight vacuum in the boat. It is a very unpleasant sensation, and made me very sick. This is really a form of sickness due ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon

... of no thickness whatever—and yet actual enough to stop even a Millikan ray that travels a hundred thousand light-years and then goes through twenty-seven feet of solid lead just like it was so much vacuum! That's what we're up against! However, I'm going to try out that model, Mart, right now. Come on, guy, snap into it! Let's ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... Russia as to make her exploitation easy. Those who look with equanimity even on this prospect forget that the creation in Europe of a new area for colonization, a knocking out of one of the sovereign nations, will create a vacuum, and that the effort to fill this vacuum will set at loggerheads nations at present friendly and so produce a struggle which may well do for Western Europe what Western Europe will have ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome

... wind, and now it seemed we were in danger not because they were in the wind, but because they were not sufficiently in it. The main force of the hurricane, deflected by the ridge behind, fled over our heads and appeared to form by suction a vacuum below. Our tent had either been sucked upwards into this, or had been blown away because some of it was in the wind while some of it was not. The roof of our igloo was being wrenched upwards and then dropped back with great crashes: the drift was spouting in, not it seemed because it was blown ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... carried out in a steam-jacketed vacuum chamber provided with an elaborate arrangement of stirrers; in the other process fat is allowed to fall in a thin stream into the amount of lye required for saponification, previously placed in the saponification vessel, which is ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons

... so? The "hole in head top" is evidently Li Ho's picturesque figure for "mental vacuum." Therefore I gather that our yellow brother suspects his honorable boss of being weak-headed, a condition aggravated by the direct rays of the sun and especially by the full moon. He may be right—though the old man seems harmless enough. "Childlike and ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... system, the sewer connection or its substitute, and the lighting apparatus are already installed, so that the turn of a switch or a faucet, the pull of a chain, sets one or all to work for us. We are now to consider whether we shall buy a vacuum cleaner or a broom and dustpan; a washing machine and electric flatiron or the services of a washerwoman, or shall telephone the laundry to call for the wash. Shall we invest in a "home steam-canning outfit" at ten dollars, or make up ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson

... I opened the conversation by making some delicate allusions to breakfast. The truth is that the bread-and-cheese supper was nothing to me now but an unsatisfactory recollection, and, with the sense of vacuum that distressed me, I was unwilling to follow the monk upon the promised round, lest I should die of inanition on the way. He asked me what I would like to eat, and I said, 'Anything that is near at hand.' Had I suggested that a chop or a steak would be suitable after ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... waking up in bed. He remembered them clearly and in order as mere delusions of the nerves—how the fear of the Professor had been the fear of the tyrannic accidents of nightmare, and how the fear of the Doctor had been the fear of the airless vacuum of science. The first was the old fear that any miracle might happen, the second the more hopeless modern fear that no miracle can ever happen. But he saw that these fears were fancies, for he found ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... of money by dressing that portion of young America which sells motors and vacuum cleaners and gramaphone records and hangs about stage ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... to our ear drums," answered Paul. "It is the concussion, that is, the rushing back of air into the vacuum caused by the shot, that does the damage. By opening your mouth you equalize the air pressure on the inside and the outside of your ear drums, just as you do when you go through a river tunnel. When there is a partial vacuum outside your ear, the air inside you presses the drum outward, and by ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope

... of mercury before it is turned up, yet directly it stands in the cup the mercury falls, till there is a height of about 30 inches between the surface of the mercury in the cup, and that of the mercury in the tube. As it falls it leaves an empty space above the mercury which is called a vacuum, because it has no air in it. Now, the mercury is under the same conditions as the water was in the U tube, there is no pressure upon it at the top of the tube, while there is a pressure of 15 lbs. upon it in the bowl, and therefore it remains held ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley

... effects of physical weakness when she was ill for a desire to die. Such feelings were the result of a void which the whole universe, as she thought, never could fill, but it was really a temporary vacuum, like that caused by the loss of a first tooth. These teeth come out with the first jar, and nature intends them to be speedily replaced by others, much more permanent; but children cry when they are pulled out, and fancy they are in very tight. ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon

... the doubts and discouragements, the humiliations and disappointments, through which he had passed to win her, came back to mock him, now he had lost her. The world had suddenly become an intolerable vacuum in which he ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... of paper mills, cloth manufactories, etc., and, at the same time, for purifying such waters, Mr. Schuricht, of Siebenlehn, employs a sort of filter like that shown in the annexed Figs. 1 and 2, and underneath which he effects a vacuum. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various

... to see the railway station, which has been much damaged. The only two locomotives here have been outraged; vacuum gauges have been broken, dome-covers torn, and taps smashed; and bullets have been fired at the steel-plated boilers, which, however, they did not penetrate. But it is only outrage, and it seems that with materials left in the workshops ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young

... pulse, the stride of walking. All action and reaction whatever is rhythmic, both in nature and in man. "Rhythm is the rule with Nature," said Tyndall; "she abhors uniformity more than she does a vacuum." So deep-rooted, in truth, is this principle, that we imagine it and feel it where it does not exist, as in the clicking of a typewriter. Thus there is both an objective rhythm, which actually exists as rhythm, and a subjective rhythm, which ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... who ask for bread and receive ideas. What more harmless than the attempt to lift and distribute water by pumping it; what more absolutely and grossly utilitarian? But out of pumps grew the discussions about Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum; and then it was discovered that Nature does not abhor a vacuum, but that air has weight; and that notion paved the way for the doctrine that all matter has weight, and that the force which produces weight is co-extensive with the universe,—in short, to the theory of universal ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... successfully used in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, was designed by Mr. Scowden and introduced into these works. It was found that the sedimentary matter of the Ohio river cut the valves in the condensing apparatus, and so destroying the vacuum, rendered the working of the engine ineffective. This Mr. Scowden overcame by introducing vulcanized india rubber valves, seated on a grating. Since that time he has designed several low pressure engines for the Mississippi river, which ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... made of oilcloth, underneath the chairs; but in spite of this the dining-room rug, after a meal, looked much as the desert place must have after the feeding of the multitude. Fuji, who was pensive, recalled the five loaves and two fishes that produced twelve baskets of fragments. The vacuum cleaner got clogged ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley

... increase my anguish when she had departed. Her attachment to me, and the cordiality with which she distinguished herself towards the Duc de Penthievre, gave her a place in that heart, which had been chilled by the fatal vacuum left by its first inhabitant; and Marie Antoinette was the only rival through life that usurped his pretensions, though she could never wean me completely ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... had seemed when they looked from the observation windows. It was absolutely still. Not a breath of wind fanned their cheeks, for where there is no air to be heated and cooled there could be no wind which is caused by the differences of temperature of the air, the cold rushing in to fill the vacuum caused by the rising of the hot vapors. Clad in their fur-lined garments, which effectually defied the cold, the adventurers ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood

... Though everybody who goes there finds something to abuse or to ridicule in the mistress of the house, or its ways, all continue to go; all like it more or less; and whenever, by the death of either, it shall come to an end, a vacuum will be made in society which nothing will supply. It is the house of all Europe; the world will suffer by the loss; and it may with truth be said that it will 'eclipse the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville

... off that ignominious idea. A sense of curious pause, stillness, enveloped Lee and surprised him, startled him really, into sitting forward and attentive. The wind had dropped, vanished into the night and sky: the silence without was as utter as though Lee Randon were at the center of a vacuum. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... from air exists in this tube, and that this matter must have penetrated the glass or the quicksilver, either one or the other, though they are both impenetrable to the air. And when, in the same experiment, one makes the vacuum after putting a little water above the quicksilver, one concludes equally that the said matter passes through glass ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens

... by their supposed sacred origin, the secularisation of morals is becoming imperative. Few things can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative system no longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has grown up to replace it.... Those who believe that the vacuum can be filled, and that it must be filled, are called on to do something in pursuance of their belief."[1] But more than fifty years after the publication of this first essay, as, with the completion of the 'Principles of Ethics,' ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley

... and other cities it was found that volunteer contributions were readily made by manufacturers of, or dealers in, trade-marked articles, such as pianos, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, electrical equipment, etc. As these articles, because of the trade name affixed, received special advertising in the Demonstration Home, it was considered proper to accept contributions from the dealers. The selection of trade-marked articles which may be shown in a Demonstration ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney

... mysteries of the cosmos, the most phenomenal is light. Unlike sound-waves, whose transmission requires air or other material media, light-waves pass freely through the vacuum of interstellar space. Even the hypothetical ether, held as the interplanetary medium of light in the undulatory theory, can be discarded on the Einsteinian grounds that the geometrical properties of space render the theory ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... first great emigrations of ancient people, fleeing from the Roman invasions, had been seen such a movement of terror and perturbation as this, which cast forth from the territory all the clergy and all the aristocracy of a nation. An immense vacuum was created in France: first, in the steps of the throne itself; next, in the court, in chateaux, in ecclesiastical dignities; and finally in the ranks of the army. Officers, all noble, emigrated in masses; the navy followed somewhat later, the example ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... was quite as likely to retard as to advance his interests. He had, however, become a popular leader in the Legislature, and the fact that Governor Banks was opposed to him and cast his influence in favor of a Pittsfield candidate, left a sort of political vacuum in the more populous portion of the State, which Frank W. Bird and Henry L. Pierce took advantage of to bring his name forward. Sumner and Wilson threw their weight into the scales, and Andrew was ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... not precisely analyse. But when I lay down on my couch, I perceived that, although the splendour of the rites were but faint in my recollection, the image of the sweet girl kneeling before the altar was engraven on my heart. I felt an uneasiness, a restlessness, a vacuum in my bosom, which, like that in the atmosphere, is the forerunner of the tempest. I could not sleep; but, tossing from one side to the other during the whole night, rose the next morning feverish ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat

... expression of stern investigation in his quick wandering eye, as it roved from object to object in the equipment of the vessel; and at moments, as his look appeared fastened on some one of the light fleecy clouds that floated in the blue vacuum above him, there gathered about his brow a gloom like that which is thought to be the shadowing of intense thought. Indeed, so dark and threatening did this lowering of the eye become, at times, that ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper

... Florence that they could not raise water in an ordinary pump more than thirty-two feet above the reservoir. The water, having reached this height, would rise no higher. Galileo was appealed to for a solution of the difficulty. {29b} Imbued with the ancient notion that Nature abhors a vacuum, and that this was, as then prevalently believed, the explanation of the water following the elevation of the piston in the pump, the philosopher replied in effect that there were limits to the action of this principle, and that Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum did not ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch

... noon before Helen Starratt finished her housework next morning—an unusually late hour for her, but she had been preoccupied, and her movements slow in consequence. A four-room apartment, with hardwood floors and a vacuum cleaner, was hardly a serious task for a full-grown woman, childless, and with a vigor that reacted perfectly to an ice-cold shower at 7 A.M. She used to look back occasionally at the contrast her mother's life ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... new thing under the sun. It is always the unexpected that happens. Nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum. The late Lord Coleridge once electrified his court by ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... away space, and deny the possibility of a vacuum, and then think of Divine Love and of Divine Wisdom as being Essence itself, space having been put away and a vacuum denied. Then think according to space; and you will perceive that the Divine, in the greatest and in the least things of space, is the same; for in essence abstracted ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg

... enduring from the north wind, were seeking to divine the cause of its unvarying direction. The theory was advanced that, since his departure for the antarctic pole, the sun, by heating the southern hemisphere, had rarefied all its currents of air, elevated them, and left on the surface of that zone a vacuum, into which the currents of air of ours, which were lower on account of being more dense, were violently rushing. That thus the northern pole, loaded with these denser vapors, which had been collecting and cooling since the preceding summer, was discharging them by an impetuous and icy current, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote

... as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them in the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... to say," he remarked, "that I have already received five barbed-wire-cutters, three vacuum flasks, eleven ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various

... blockheads. Conscious of their lack of ideas, they think to earn the reputation of men of sterling sense, by inveighing continually against what they deem to be frivolity; while they only expose more clearly to all observers the sad vacuum which exists in their pericraniums. Far, far from us be such dullards, and such opinions; and let us continue to laugh heartily at our Pantomimes, undisturbed by their tedious harangues; "Do they ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent

... Sub hoc marmore, vel sub hac humo, seu Sub quicquid voluit benignus haeres, Sive haerede benignior comes, seu Opportunius incidens viator; Nam scire haud potuit futura, sed nec Tanti erat vacuum sibi cadaver Ut urnam cuperet parare vivens; Vivens ista tamen sibi paravit, Quae inscribi voluit suo sepulchro Olim siquod ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... long, 380 tons, and 80 to go horse-power, under charge of the English or rather Scotch engineer, Mr. David Duguid, who had taken the place of the two Arab firemen, began with 7 1/2 knots an hour, 68 revolutions per minute, and a pressure of 9 lbs. to the square inch. The condenser-vacuum was 26 inches (30 being complete)—13 lbs. Next morning the rate declined to six miles in consequence of the boiler leaking, and matters became steadily worse. As a French writer says of the genre ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... the glowing specks seemed to scale the heights of a sable vacuum. Once a section of the rail went ripping away in the gloom and once a shredded small boat was torn ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry

... without personal friends be to you a blank? Then the time will come when you will be solitary, left without sympathy; but this 266:9 seeming vacuum is already filled with divine Love. When this hour of development comes, even if you cling to a sense of personal joys, spiritual Love will 266:12 force you to accept what best promotes your growth. Friends ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... soldered. The platinum and carbon become incandescent, the bicarbonate is decomposed, and a fresh deposit of carbon solders the filament to its support. The system thus mounted is placed within the permanent globe, and a vacuum is obtained in the ordinary way, while the testing and finishing details present nothing of special interest. The finished lamp is then photometrically tested, and placed on a support something like the Edison mounting. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... silk of his parachute bellied out in the denser air of the lower heights. His respirator tube was still in his mouth, and the double, vacuum-interlined leather of his safety suit had kept him from freezing in the spatial cold of ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat

... happens what our Lord warned us against in profound words. The house may be emptied of the evil tenant in some measure by our own resolution and self-reformation. But if it is not occupied by Him, it remains 'empty,' though it is 'swept and garnished.' Nature abhors a vacuum, and into the empty house there come the old tenant and seven brethren blacker than himself. The only way to keep the world out of my heart is to have Christ filling it. If we will ask Him He will come to us. And if He has the scourge ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... are inconceivable when not filled with something real and existent. The ideas of space and time are therefore no separate or distinct ideas, but merely those of the manner or order, in which objects exist: Or in other words, it is impossible to conceive either a vacuum and extension without matter, or a time, when there was no succession or change in any real existence. The intimate connexion betwixt these parts of our system is the reason why we shall examine together the objections, which have been urged against both of them, beginning with ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... quieting his wife's ill humor. The morning meal went by in silence, but little food passing the lips of either. How could it, when the thermometer was ninety-four at eight o'clock in the morning, and the leaves upon the trees were as motionless as if suspended in a vacuum. Bodies and minds were relaxed—and the one turned from food, as the other did from thought, ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur

... the needle valve with much care, and had Foster on the front seat trying to start her afterwards. He looked for short circuit. He changed the carburetor adjustment, and Foster got a weary chug-chug that ceased almost as soon as it had begun. He looked all the spark plugs over, he went after the vacuum feed and found that working perfectly. He stood back, finally, with his hands on his hips, and stared at the engine and shook his ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower

... between their molecules might be supposed to offer to the heat waves, were, in many cases, able effectually to bar their passage. It was then proved that while the elementary gases and their mixtures, including among the latter the earth's atmosphere, were almost as pervious as a vacuum to ordinary radiant heat, the compound gases were one and all absorbers, some of them taking up with intense avidity the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various

... floor of the stage to the ceiling. One says, that Phaeton is able to fly by the potency of certain numbers of which he is composed; another, that a secret virtue carries him aloft; still another, that Phaeton travels through the air because he abhors to leave a vacuum in the upper corner of the stage; and so on, with a hundred and one speculations which, as Fontenelle remarks, should have ruined the reputation of antiquity. Finally, he pictures Descartes coming along and saying: "This actor is able to ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... of late years, it has given a new significance to the act of chemical combination. Take, for example, the air we breathe. It is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen; and it behaves towards radiant heat like a vacuum, being incompetent to absorb it in any sensible degree. But permit the same two gases to unite chemically; then, without any augmentation of the quantity of matter, without altering the gaseous condition, without interfering in any way with the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... using a vacuum cleaner in the upper hall when he saw something in a dark corner that he couldn't quite make out. The thing got stuck in the cleaner, and he put down his hand to see what it was. The next minute he let out a yell like a wild ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield

... fields suitable for legislative cultivation, lying outside the domain of state power but not within the scope of any express grant of power to the nation. As practical men they abhor the existence of such a constitutional no man's land as nature abhors a vacuum. ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson

... to be met by a "Tu quoque." It is one which raises the most fundamental issues of educational theory. To develop, we are told, and not to mould, is the aim of education; and every genuine educationist will eagerly agree. Yet you cannot develop in a vacuum. You must impart some background for the young mind, give it some material on which to work. How, then, can the compromise be effected? How can we inculcate and yet at the same time aim above every thing at the development ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell

... down our throats in spite of our teeth, and we wear them all over our bodies; they creep up one's clothes and die, and others go after them to see what they died of. The instant I inhale a fly it acts as an emetic. And if Nature abhors a vacuum, she, or at least my nature, abhors these wretches more, for the moment I swallow one a vacuum is instantly produced. Their bodies are full of poisonous matter, and they have a most disgusting flavour, though they taste sweet. They also cause great pains and discomfort ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... sheltered from the wind, and watching it drift to and fro, as the air, offering unequal resistances to its uneven surface, counteracts its weight with varying success, until it slowly settles upon the ground,—we take it up and drop it again in a vacuum, when it falls like lead. Here we have the tendency of a certain cause (namely, the relation between the feather and the earth) free from counteraction: and this is called the Elimination of the counteracting circumstances. In this case indeed there ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... had no little weight with the French philosopher Descartes, whose divisions and definitions so profoundly affected the course of thought in these matters after the sixteenth century. Holding also "that a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely no body is repugnant to reason," and that an indivisible space-filling particle is self-contradictory, he was led to identify space and matter; that is, to make matter ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... that takes place? The cylinder once lighted, the hydrogen in the spiral and in the concave cone becomes heated, and rapidly ascends through the pipe that leads to the upper part of the balloon. A vacuum is created below, and it attracts the gas in the lower parts; this becomes heated in its turn, and is continually replaced; thus, an extremely rapid current of gas is established in the pipes and in the spiral, which issues from the balloon and then ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... reading, he regretted a moment spent away from his books; and every day, when not engaged in writing, devoured the compositions of the ancient Greeks and Romans": ("Erat in hoc homine inexhaustus quidem legendi amor; nullum enim patiebatur esse vacuum tempus. Quotidie aut scribebat, aut aliquid ex Graecis Latinisque litteris mandabat"):—"Mittas ad me, rogo, singula commentariola mea, hoc est, excerpta illa ex variis libris, quos legi, quae sunt plurima, ac dispersa; collige simul omnia, oro te, et ad me quamprimum mittas" (Ep. ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... head pumped out like a vacuum pan, or stuffed full of odds and ends like a bologna sausage, and do his work right. It doesn't make any difference how mean and trifling the thing he's doing may seem, that's the big thing and the only thing for him just then. Business is like oil—it won't mix with ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer

... the home almost all the manufactures—as of wine, beer, soap, candles, pickles and other specialties, and part of the laundry work; that the other processes of cleaning are also being socialized, as by the vacuum cleaners, the professional window-washers, rug cleaners, and similar professional workers; and that even in the preparation of food many kinds are now specialized, as by the baker and confectioner. That in service itself we were now able ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... knight-errantry of speculation. Every man who lays claim to a direct knowledge of something different from himself, perishes impaled on the contradiction involved in the assumption, that consciousness can transcend itself: and every man who disclaims such knowledge, expires in the vacuum of idealism, where nothing grows but the dependent and transitory productions of a delusive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... agreed in the same religion, impressing them with reverence to all allowed muniments! whilst our civil wars, founded in faction and variety of pretended religions, exposed all naked church records a prey to armed violence; a sad vacuum, which will be sensible in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... cleaned cotton is taken away from the action of the beater by an air current produced by a powerful fan. This latter creates a partial vacuum in the beater chamber by blowing the air out of certain air exit trunks specially provided. To supply this partial vacuum afresh, air can only be obtained from the beater chamber, and the air current thus induced, takes the cotton along with ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson

... support. A premature American departure from Iraq would almost certainly produce greater sectarian violence and further deterioration of conditions, leading to a number of the adverse consequences outlined above. The near-term results would be a significant power vacuum, greater human suffering, regional destabilization, and a threat to the global economy. Al Qaeda would depict our withdrawal as a historic victory. If we leave and Iraq descends into chaos, the long-range consequences could eventually ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace

... distinctions meant little when you were in the dill, and you didn't become an old pro without having been in spots where matters had pickled. Joe would have been welcome on the strength of his performance in the most recent fracas in which he had participated as a mercenary, that between Vacuum Tube Transport and Continental Hovercraft. But he didn't ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... out fresh and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a girl's face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring—her age ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... would go on. Ye Mariners, tis I that fill your sails, And speed you to your port with wished gales. When burning heat doth cause you faint, I cool, And when I smile, your ocean's like a pool. I help to ripe the corn, I turn the mill, And with myself I every Vacuum fill. The ruddy sweet sanguine is like to air, And youth and spring, Sages to me compare, My moist hot nature is so purely thin, No place so subtilly made, but I get in. I grow more pure and pure as I mount higher, And when I'm thoroughly ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... with one vertical half in mercury, the other in a vacuum: the drum, I suppose, working round forever to find an easy position. Steam to be superseded: steam and electricity convulsions of nature never intended by Providence for the use of man. The price of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... had been behind the grille, would think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would say rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good, and I would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless statement of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in our minds for some other ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... corkscrew fashion, disappearing at the bottom into darkness under a yawning arch. The place possessed the curious property of being ever filled with a ceaseless murmur, as though it were some aerial maelstrom, drawing into its silent vacuum all wandering waves of sound from the restless human ocean flowing round it. No single tone could one ever distinguish: it was a mingling of all voices, heard there like the ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... formed twenty leagues, a hundred leagues away, in the bosom and with the assent of a Christian community. Every day, too, the domestic slave-trade carries on its work; merchants in human flesh ascend the Mississippi, to seek in the producing States wherewith to fill up the vacuum caused unceasingly by slavery in the consuming States; their ascent made, they scour the farms of Virginia or of Kentucky, buying here a boy, there a girl; and other hearts are torn, other families are dispersed, other nameless crimes are accomplished coolly, simply, legally: it ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... seemed to disturb the vacuum about. Lambert, shivering and shaking with pain, was aware that great eyes, similar to those which they had thought they saw above, were now upon them. Squeaks were impressed upon him, squeaks which expressed disapprobation. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... The vacuum left by departed greatness was everywhere observable, whilst the battles and processions portrayed on the walls told you who had here excited revelry after retiring from slaughter, or dismissed pageantry in search of pleasure. It seemed a vast tomb full of the shadowy phantoms of those ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... With this particular vacuum tube, which will amplify sounds three or four times over any other I have tried, we expect to talk with ground stations or other aircraft at a distance of three thousand miles. Notice what a simple thing it is, dad," ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser

... is valuable, if the perspective is maintained. Nevertheless, in the narrow individualistic novels of English literature—and in some of the best—you will find a domestic organism described as though it existed in a vacuum, or in the Sahara, or between Heaven and earth; as though it reacted on nothing and was reacted on by nothing; and as though it could be adequately rendered without reference to anything exterior to itself. How can such novels satisfy a reader who has acquired ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett

... inch and he'll take an ell; give him an ell and he is no man if he doesn't improve even on that. Moreover, how is one to fill in the dismal vacuum subsequent on the return from one leave otherwise than by the discussion of subtle schemes for the betterment of the next leave? The duration of it having assumed a cast-iron rigidity, it only remained to improve the manner of travelling to and fro. John ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various

... pointed at the box—"a vacuum is created. Instantly the powder becomes a gas, which shoots forth through this aperture with the speed of a projectile, taking the form of a beam of absolute blackness. Or it can be discharged from cylinders in such a way as to extend ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... currents giving an initial impulse to bodies of air by which they begin to rotate." Cyclones having thus originated, Professor Maury considers that they are continued and intensified by the vapour condensed in their vortex forming a vacuum.* (* "Quarterly Journal of Science" ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt

... a deception of any of the five senses, in which there is no starting point but it is fabricated in a disordered mind. Illustrations of hallucinations are the hearing of voices when none are present, smelling of odors, the seeing of visions in a vacuum. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... will also appear in regard to ligatures, and wherefore they are said to draw; though this is neither from the heat, nor the pain, nor the vacuum they occasion, nor indeed from any other cause yet thought of; it will also explain the uses and advantages to be derived from ligatures in medicine, the principle upon which they either suppress or occasion hemorrhage; how they induce ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... prejudice. All men are more or less indolent and prejudiced; but savants as a class are certainly less indolent, and probably less prejudiced, than any other class that one could name. We must not count upon finding our savant "semper vacuum, semper amabilem," any more than Horace found his young ladies always in that condition of affable receptivity. The main reason why so many eminent men neglect our work may be stated in a much less offensive way. The minds of all of us move in certain orbits, from which we are ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various

... teasing his friends with his new mathematics; he even frantically talks of purchasing Manning's Algebra, which shows him far gone, for, to my knowledge, he has not been master of seven shillings a good time. George's pockets and ——'s brains are two things in nature which do not abhor a vacuum.... Now, if you could step in, in this trembling suspense of his reason, and he should find on Saturday morning, lying for him at the Porter's Lodge, Clifford's Inn,—his safest address—Manning's Algebra, with a neat ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... the door. This might be interesting, like a vacuum-cleaner salesman who had cleaned her drapes last week for free. And Kitty Kyle Battles Life wouldn't be on ...
— Teething Ring • James Causey

... precocious boy had worked out the solutions of the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid unaided. While at Rouen he invented a calculating machine, and got a workman in the town to set it up. In 1646 he made his famous experiments on the vacuum before more than five hundred people, including half a dozen sceptical Jesuit fathers. Though his famous letters on the burning question of Jansenism were not written until 1656, after he had returned to Paris, yet the religious influence of the family must have been a strong one upon all their ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... of the Petit Courier Illustre is one of the best fellows in the world, and occasionally (when my pockets represent that vacuum which Nature very properly abhors) he advances me a couple of Napoleons. I wipe out the score from time to time by furnishing a design for the paper. Now to-day, you see, I'm in luck. I shall pay off two obligations ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... those who are drunk. But what could they do in opposition? Many had started little magazines, reviews whose ephemeral lives were snuffed out after the first numbers for lack of air; the censorship produced a vacuum; the entire thought of France was under the pneumatic exhausting bell. Among these young fellows the most distinguished ones, too feeble to rebel and too proud to complain, knew beforehand that they were delivered up to the sword of war. ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland

... stream of muddy liquid issuing from the crushed canes and trickling gaily down its wooden gutters, would ultimately figure as the lump-sugar of our breakfast-tables. There is also a peculiarly fascinating apparatus known as a vacuum-pan, peeping into which, through a little tale window, a species of brown porridge transforms itself into crystallised sugar of the sort known to housekeepers as "Demerara" under your very eyes; and another equally attractive, rapidly revolving machine in which the molasses, by centrifugal force, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... name out in three long booming triumphancies—pausing for it to produce its magical effect. Then he read two more letters, one from a manufacturer of vacuum cleaners and one from the president of the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... a vacuum bottle, and a big gallon bottle of mineral water. This Paul broke, and, dipping a handkerchief in it, made a wet bandage for the German's head. Then he dropped the vacuum bottle where the officer must find it when he recovered ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske

... unsettled nature of its government, all these natural advantages are neutralized; its course amongst the nations is erratic in the extreme, a spectacle of feeble administration; and it would offer no more resistance to a colliding Power than the empty vacuum of a comet's tail. This example will demonstrate to you the truth of our theory with regard to the instability of a social system which is geometrically represented by a ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson

... suppose that corporeal substance is composed of bodies or parts than to suppose that a body is composed of surfaces, surfaces of lines, and that lines, finally, are composed of points. Every one who knows that clear reason is infallible ought to admit this, and especially those who deny that a vacuum can exist. For if corporeal substance could be so divided that its parts could be really distinct, why could not one part be annihilated, the rest remaining, as before, connected with one another? And why must all be so fitted together that ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza

... And one might add that whatever is deeply observed is well said. The artist in design is by the very nature of his work compelled to observe deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is never able to revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in a morass, or run after a mirage. When there is nothing there he is still. He is held by his art to Nature. So, when he takes up his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, he still follows with ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... mass, or moles,—supple and elastic as all flesh is, and fitting into the hard corners of the inert matter,—such a subtraction, Mrs. Primmins, would leave a vacuum which no natural system, certainly no artificial organization, could sustain. There would be a regular dance of atoms, Mrs. Primmins; my books would fly here, there, on the floor, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Remember that, 'Faith and persistency are life's architects; while doubt and despair bury all under the ruins of any endeavor.' When I have trilled a fortune into that abhorred vacuum, my pocket, I shall go down to the Tigris, and catch the mate to Tobias' fish, and by the cremation thereof, fumigate my pestiferous soul, and smoke out the Asmodeus that has so long ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest scene of a salmon ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... of an elongated shot would move parallel to itself only if fired in a vacuum; but in air the couple due to a sidelong motion tends to place the axis at right angles to the tangent of the trajectory, and acting on a rotating body causes the axis to precess about the tangent. At the same time the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... manner that it will operate with, or a little behind, in the matter of time, the sixth valve. The machine is intended to carry full load with only the first bank of five valves in operation, with proper steam pressure and vacuum. If the steam pressure is under 150 pounds, or the vacuum is less than 28 inches, the sixth valve may operate at or near full load, and also open the stage valve and allow steam to pass to the second-stage nozzles at a much higher rate of speed than the steam which has already done some ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins

... prove too hot for us," observed the professor. "However, I provided a water jacket for the ship, and we may need it, as well as the vacuum chambers to keep the heat ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood

... such thing as nothingness! There is no vacuum! Everywhere there are bodies moving over the unchangeable realms of space—and, as if it had any bounds it would not be space but a body, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... the rarest of power, and so as to reduce the reader to despair, till he realises that the author has emptied the life of which he treats of everything else, except a fair background of nature which is introduced only to exhibit the evil facts in more horrid relief. The author studies sin in a vacuum, an impossible situation. God has been left out, and the conviction of His pardon. Left out are the power of man's heart to turn, the gift of penitence, the mysterious operations of the Spirit, and the sense of the trustfulness and patience of God with the worst souls of men. These are ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith

... say a few words, before I resume my seat, on the motion now pending. That motion is to strike out the specie-paying part of the bill. I have a suspicion, Sir, that the motion will prevail. If it should, it will leave a great vacuum; and how ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... of what women are able to do, or the moral fact of what women ought to do, it is equally necessary to abstain from making any decision prior to experiment. We see plainly enough the waste of time and thought among the men who once talked of Nature abhorring a vacuum, or disputed at great length as to whether angels could go from end to end without passing through the middle; and the day will come when it will appear to be no less absurd to have argued, as men and women are arguing now, about what woman ought ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... the naked truth!" answered the old man. "That is good in theory and practicable in the world of which youth dreams. Here is the schoolmaster, who has struggled in a vacuum; with the enthusiasm of a child, he has sought the good, yet he has won only jests and laughter. You have said that you are a stranger in your own country, and I believe it. The very first day you arrived you began by wounding the vanity of a priest who is regarded by the people as a saint, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... of its constant direction. According to them, since his departure for the antarctic pole, the sun, by warming the southern hemisphere, converted all its emanations into vapour, elevated them, and left on the surface of that zone a vacuum, into which the vapours of our hemisphere, which were lower, on account of being less rarefied, rushed with violence. From one to another, and from a similar cause, the Russian pole, completely surcharged with vapours which it had emanated, received, and cooled ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... well-known letter to Bentley, Newton writes as follows: "That Gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body can act upon another body at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has any philosophical nature or competent faculty of thinking ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... By observation on the one hand, and by reasoning on the other. By observation, and reasoning applied to observation, we obtain the science of nature and the science of humanity. But do we wish to rise above nature and humanity? We fail of all basis of observation; and reason works in a vacuum. There is therefore no possible way of reaching to God. Is God an object of experience? No. Can God be demonstrated a priori by syllogisms? No. The idea of God therefore cannot be established, as answering to a reality, either ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville

... in a vacuum. The more you feel the force, the more you must act. The more you can act. And in the long run it doesn't matter what you do, if you do ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley

... an invalid's cup of liquid food prepared for this emergency, kept hot in a vacuum flask. "No you're not dreaming me," I cheerfully replied as I made him drink. "It's Peggy, taking care of you. Now go to sleep again. I'll still be here when you ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... Coffee-house, economical in its charges and pleasurable in the variety of its visitors, where I might, at will, extend or abridge my evening intercourse, and in the retirement of my own apartment feel myself more at home than in the vacuum of an hotel." ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... pursued maddeningly elusive animals through a growing jungle of toppled and overturning equipment. At the far end there was a shower of sparks and a flash of flame as something furry plunged into a network of wires and vacuum tubes. ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia

... eyes." The dead hand of Aristotle barred the advance in every department of research. Physicians would have nothing to do with Harvey's discoveries about the circulation of the blood. "Nature is accused of tolerating a vacuum!" exclaimed a priest when Pascal began his experiments on the Puy-de-Dome to show that the column of mercury in a glass tube varied in height with ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman

... erat cava, recessusque habuit, et saxeos specus, euntes in vacuum montem; sive natura pridem factos, sive exesos mari, et undarum crebris ictibus: In hos enim cum impetu ruebant et fragore, aestuantis maris fluctus; quos iterum spumantes reddidit antrum, et ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... when by hunger overcome He felt a trifle limp, What joy within his vacuum To stow the passing shrimp, And afterwards to sink and snooze, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various

... know—that's hazardous. Nevertheless, if she were placed on a beetling cliff, overhanging the tempestuous ocean, lashing the rocks with its wild surge; of a sudden, after she has been permitted to finish her soliloquy, a white cloud rising rapidly and unnoticed—the sudden vacuum—the rush of mighty winds through the majestic and alpine scenery—the vortex gathering round her—first admiring the vast efforts of nature; then astonished; and, lastly, alarmed, as she finds herself compelled ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... the ladders in place. Olaf I assigned to stand before the door and watch for the first signs of its opening—if open it should. The Becquerels were set within three-inch tripods, whose feet I had equipped with vacuum rings to enable them to ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... many days after the departure of Julie, he seldom spoke, never made his appearance, except at dinner-time, and as soon as the meal was finished hastened to his chambers, where he remained very late. Intense application was the remedy which he had selected to dispel his care, and fill up the vacuum created by the absence of his ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... her grace and her persuasion. Diverse et ondoyante—so he had seen her from the first. But was not that merely the sign of a quicker response to the world's manifold appeal? There was Harriet Ray, sealed up tight in the vacuum of inherited opinion, where not a breath of fresh sensation could get at her: there could be no call to rescue young ladies so secured from the perils of reality! Undine had no such traditional safeguards—Ralph guessed Mrs. Spragg's opinions to ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... of words in combination. But as you go out into life you will find that these things, however complete they may seem, are not in practice sufficient. Another factor—the human—must have its place in our equation. You do not speak or write in a vacuum. Your object, your ultimate object at least, in building up your vocabulary is to address men and women; and among men and women the varieties of training, of stations, of outlooks, of sentiments, of prejudices, of caprices are infinite. To gain an unbiased hearing you must take persistent ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... carloads of wild black walnuts to make one carload of kernels of the same weight. More and more English walnuts and pecans are being sold in the form of kernels, and black walnuts also will best be sold in kernels. These can be canned in vacuum glass or metal cans, and the housewife will use more nuts when she can get the shell-free meats with her favorite cooking utensil, the can-opener. Confectioners and bakers will take black walnut meats by the carload in preference to other ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various

... the circuit indicated he would probably be there in twelve or fifteen minutes. Running up an angle of 45 degrees seems quite easy work for a four-footed beast like a dog or a fox, but for a two-legged animal like a man it is very heavy and awkward. Before I got halfway up there seemed to be a vacuum all about me, so labored was my breathing, and when I reached the summit my head swam and my knees were about giving out; but pressing on, I had barely time to reach a point in the road abreast of ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... lower range of hills. By degrees as the sun advances in its southern declination, and warms the lower half of the great African continent, the current of heated air ascending from the equatorial belt leaves a comparative vacuum, towards which the less rarefied atmospheric fluid is drawn down from the regions north, of the tropic, bringing with it the cold and dry winds from the Himalayan Alps, and the lofty ranges of Assam. The great change is heralded as before by oppressive ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log — shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, .. perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... Hawaiian, who shuns work, dresses only for decorative purposes, and is willing to subsist on fruits that grow without teasing, life is not so simple as we should suppose, to look at him. Nature abhors a vacuum, even in a man's head, and when the man cares to put nothing in his noddle that will increase his understanding and resource, his ancestry will have planted something there which is sure to swell and grow until it may dominate his ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner

... landed," answered the good canon; "the intense heat that a day like this creates in our valleys and on the lakes so weakens the sub-strata, or foundations of air, that the cold masses which collect around the glaciers sometimes descend like avalanches from their heights, to fill the vacuum. The shock is fearful, even to those who meet it in the glens and among the rocks, but the plunge of such a column of air upon one of the lakes is certain to ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... presented. At last, observing me, he came forward, but halted on surveying the luggage, and screamed hoarsely to the last attendant who was now boarding the train. The latter vanished, but reappeared, as the train moved off, with two more articles, a vacuum night-flask and a tin of charcoal biscuits, the absence of which had been swiftly detected ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... defying the law of gravity. They need no supporting tail, and have only the usual number of eight toes, but they traverse the bark, up or down, head often pointing toward the ground, as if their feet were small vacuum cups. Their note is an odd nasal ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... give place to others without losing one's own position was the secret of success in the mundane drama. We must know the whole play in order to properly act our parts; the conception of totality must never be lost in that of the individual. This Laotse illustrates by his favourite metaphor of the Vacuum. He claimed that only in vacuum lay the truly essential. The reality of a room, for instance, was to be found in the vacant space enclosed by the roof and the walls, not in the roof and walls themselves. The usefulness of a water pitcher dwelt in the emptiness where water might be put, ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura

... collisions with the air-molecules, the effect can only be studied satisfactorily in a glass bulb from which the air has been evacuated. Crookes made great improvements in air-pumps during an investigation on thallium, and consequently was able to obtain the high vacuum required for the experiment with the electron streams. It was afterwards found by Roentgen that when an electron stream in an evacuated bulb was directed upon a target placed within the bulb, a remarkable radiation ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... on, fluently. "And I think this is a wonderful club we have started. We need a club. It gives us—us married women—something to do. That's the real answer—the real cause, I think, of the woman question. These men have gone on inventing vacuum cleaners and gas-stoves and apartment hotels and servants that know more than we do. They haven't treated us fairly. They've taken away all our occupation, and now we've got to retaliate. We can't keep house for them any more, and, if we—if ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan

... wrenching sickness. Out there in the colorless vacuum, hundreds of replicas of the Cosmos XII rode along beside him, above him, below him, stretched out in ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke

... responded that the vacuum was due to the fact that his breakfast had consisted of a piece of bread and his last night's supper of a dish of soup, but the Dunne pride inclined to reservation on family and personal matters. He speared another small potato and paused, with fork ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates

... household equipment which keep causing unnecessary pain, labor, and irritation: that leaky faucet, that worn-out washing machine, that broken light switch, that asthmatic vacuum sweeper, that torn rug, that decrepit snow ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... Paul, Swedenborg, Edwards have seen the pit. It opens only in the holiness of such men,—is a thunder out of clear sky, before which generations of the impure, like brute beasts, tremble and cower. An equal moral genius will see that the ascension of an immortal Love has left behind this vacuum, mitigated, not deepened, by the furniture of devils and their flame. Men strive in vain to be afflicted by a revelation of the best and worst. The mind is naturally a form of gladness, and every window in us takes the sun. Our genuine trouble is not extreme dread, but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... greatness in the eyes of his countrymen, to show that his countrymen were anxious to explain why he was so great in A.D. 1070, and why before that date he was unknown to them. This is an important point to have gained. It shows the vacuum which was occupied by tradition because contemporary, or nearly contemporary, thought required it to be filled up. The popular mind abhors a vacuum as much as the material world of nature does. It will fill it with its own conceptions, if it cannot fill it with recognised facts. Hereward ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... an instance of endosmosis? Might it not rather be atmospheric pressure that stimulates the flow of nourishing fluids and distils them into the Anthrax' cup-shaped mouth, working, in order to create a vacuum, almost like the suckers of the Cuttlefish? All this is possible, but I shall refrain from deciding, preferring to assign a large share to the unknown in this extraordinary method of nutrition. It ought, I think, to provide physiologists with a field of research in which new views ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... documents which you have in your hand, you will have some faint idea. Ivor, when it's your funeral, I'll smile. Mabel, Duchess of Datchet, it is beginning to dawn upon the vacuum which represents my brain that I've been the victim of one of the prettiest things in practical jokes that ever yet was planned. When that fellow brought you that card at Cane and Wilson's—which, I need scarcely tell you, never ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... describing an area of infinite extent. This area, as soon as it became conscious of its own existence, would begin to ascend or descend, according as its specific weight might determine, forming an immense solid space filled with vacuum, and capable of containing ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... as they have been trained to yield only to well-grounded syllogisms, it is the illogical mode of assault that vanquishes them unguarded; that their reasonable minds have nothing to say to such, perfectly unreasonable fascinations; that, in short, the enemy succeeds by supplying a vacuum, as the walls of Visibis gave way under the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... were times when the grief itself came uppermost; there were nights when she lay awake crying for her mother, when she was nothing but a bereft child in a vacuum of love. Her father's tenderness could not make up to her for the loss of her mother's. Very soon after her mother's death, his mercurial temperament jarred upon her. She could not understand how he could laugh and talk as if nothing had happened. She herself ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... them, yes! But the imagination is not voluntary; it works to supply a necessity; its function is creation, and creation is needed only to fill a vacuum. The wild Arab, feeling his own insignificance, and comprehending the necessity for a Creating Power, finds between himself and that Power, which to him, as to you the other day, assumes a personality, an immense distance, and fills the space with a race half divine, half human. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... enhance U.S. defense capabilities, we must not lose sight of the need to assist others in maintaining their own security and independence. Events since World War II, most recently in Southwest Asia, have amply demonstrated that U.S. security cannot exist in a vacuum, and that our own prospects for peace are closely tied to those of our friends. The security assistance programs which I am proposing for the coming fiscal year thus directly promote vital U.S. foreign policy and national security aims, and are integral parts ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... seized upon every passing moment, wringing the uttermost out of it that she might have something put by with which to fill in the blanks of the drear future, the vacuum where should have been a tumultuously throbbing heart of love, and a pulse of life ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest



Words linked to "Vacuum" :   emptiness, make clean, vacancy, vacuum-clean, vacuity, vacuum pump, thermionic vacuum tube, vacuum bottle, clean, void, dust bag, vacuum cleaner, vacuum chamber, vacuum aspiration, part, region, vacuum bomb, vacuum gage



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