"Electric current" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a nitric acid solution are readily decomposed by the electric current, but the deposited bismuth is not coherent. It comes down in shaggy tufts which are difficult to wash and ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... the precise instant of start to within a thousandth of a second being automatically registered. Velocimeters are a familiar application of electricity somewhat analogous. In these, wires are cut by the projectile at different points in its flight, and the breaking of the electric current causes the appearance of marks on a surface moving along at a known speed. The velocity of the projectile in going from one wire to another ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... most essential of all contrivances in the operation and use of electricity. It is the piece of mechanism which does the physical work of almost every electrical apparatus or machine. It is the device which has the power to convert the unseen electric current into motion which may be observed by the human eye. Without it electricity would be a useless agent ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... usually results from dropping a little water a long way. In the mountains water is dropped many hundreds of feet upon the turbines which move the dynamos that produce the electric current. Water power on navigable streams is usually produced by dropping immense volumes of water a short distance, as twenty feet, fifteen feet, or even less. Every stream is a unit from its source to its mouth, and the people have the same stake in the control ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... but dead matter; the productive efficiency is in the vital energy of the intelligent laborer. The most complicated and ingenious tool ever made is useless without the operator. It is as helpless as the wire without the electric current; as helpless as the body without its life, for the body is but man's tool, preserved, and kept efficient, and made productive, by the living ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... a patient may with safety be flipped off with a dry board or stick. A live wire may be safely cut by an axe or hatchet with a dry wooden handle and the electric current may be short circuited by dropping a crowbar or a poker on the wire. They should be dropped on the side from which the current is coming and not on the further side as the latter will not short circuit the current before it has passed through the patient's body. Drop the metal ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... be scattered through it all at once. It is set off by concussion, you see," he went on. "A sort of cartridge is buried in the middle of it, after it has been inserted in the cannon breech. The cartridge is exploded by a primer, which responds to an electric current. The thin plates, with holes corresponding to the centre hole in a big grain of the hexagonal powder, will, I hope, cause the stuff to burn quickly, and give a tremendous pressure. Now we'll put some in the steel ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... those who rail and snarl at everything that is noble and good, to whom a joke is an assault and battery, a laugh is an insult to outraged dignity, and the provocation of a smile is like passing an electric current through the facial muscles ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... committed suicide by Esoteric Buddhism, as witness his devotion to Mme. Blavatsky, or he had been murdered by his Mahatma, or victimized by Hypnotism, Mesmerism, Somnambulism, and other weird abstractions. Grodman's great point was—Jessie Dymond must be produced, dead or alive. The electric current scoured the civilized world in search of her. What wonder if the shrewder sort divined that the indomitable detective had fixed his last hope on the girl's guilt? If Jessie had wrongs why should she not have avenged ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... between man and his fellow, and pleasure,—the most casual consideration of such will serve to show distributed throughout almost the entire fabric of our civilization dependence at some point on the power of the steam-engine, the water-wheel, or windmill, the subtle electric current, or the heat-energy of coal, petroleum oil, or natural gas. The harnessing and efficient utilization of these great natural energies is the direct function of the engineer, or more especially of the dynamic engineer, and in this noble guild of workers, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... or filament of carbon, and lo! the current is transformed into light. Use another kind of channel of transmission, and the current is transformed into heat. Every electric light, or electric heating apparatus is proof of this. In the same way, the electric current is sent into space in the form of wireless waves. These waves coming in contact with certain forms of apparatus are transformed into forms of force which are registered and interpreted ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... glances of the musician, evidently excited her. I saw that, after the first interview, her eyes were already glittering, glittering strangely, and that, thanks to my jealousy, between him and her had been immediately established that sort of electric current which is provoked by an identity of expression in the ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... of inducing muscular action in a corpse, by applying galvanism, is sufficiently well known. To borrow an illustration from Sidney Smith, it would seem, that, if we only knew to what organs of the brain to direct an electric current, an automaton, or a dead man, might be made to hold an argument, "at least as ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... calm entirely different from that stern composure which was merely a point of style and not an attitude of the heart with the old Greek tragedians—a calm which, unlike theirs, insulates, so to speak, and is intended to insulate, the writer, to the end that his individuality, of which only the electric current of sympathy ever makes a reader conscious, may disappear, and the characters of the drama stand forth the more life-like from the complete concealment of the hand ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... of their fingers was to become rigid and incapable of pain. The patient's hands were thrust through a screen; on the other side of which the hypnotist made passes above the finger which was to become rigid. The lookers-on selected the finger, and the insensibility was tested by a strong electric current. The effect was also produced without passes, the operator merely pointing at the selected finger, and 'willing' the result. If he did not 'will' it, nothing occurred, nor did anything occur if he willed without pointing. The proximity of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... the wall were the remains of an electric switchboard. The copper switches were fused, the wires burned through. The huge cables that brought the electric current to the switchboard lay ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... salon I wondered what she would do. I did not speak. She took my crutch and shook up my cushion, taking great care not to touch me. I could not look up. I knew that a powerful electric current would pass from my eye to hers, if I did, and that she would see that I was only longing to take her to ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... hitching strap. The knot was covered with a thin coating of ice, and it was several minutes before he could loosen it. But his teeth finally pulled it apart, and with the reins in his hands he sprang upon the wheel. And as he stood so, a shock of fear ran down his back like an electric current, his breath left him, and he stood immovable, gazing with wide eyes ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... direct to a 2-kilo watt alternator. At one end of the shaft of the latter the disk discharger is mounted, its function being to break up the train of waves into groups of waves, so as to impart a musical sound to the note produced in the receiver. A flexible cable transmits the electric current from the generator to the wagon containing the instruments. The aerial is built up of masts ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... come!" whispered Irene, stooping towards me with an expression of the utmost anxiety. "Now you must obey me absolutely, or we shall both incur the wrath of the Unseen Powers. No wavering! We have gone too far to recede! First, to establish the electric current between us, you must hold me firmly by the wrist and pass your hand slowly up and down my arm, repeating ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... application of electrolysis to chemical analysis was made by Gaultier de Claubry, in 1850, who employed the electric current for the detection of metals when in solution. Other early workers followed in this direction, and in 1861 Bloxam published two papers (J. Chem. Soc., 13, 12 and 338) on "The application of electrolysis ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... quarrel? Do we ever know what electric current precipitates the avalanche or decides a revolution? It may result from anything or nothing. But finally, Adolphe, after a period to be determined in each case by the circumstances of the couple, utters this fatal phrase, in the ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... lightning are well known. There is nothing inherently impossible, therefore, in supposing that a table can be "levitated" into the air, under unusual conditions; it is simply the manifestation of an unknown energy—of which, doubtless, there are many. We can manipulate and control the electric current; but we do not know yet precisely what it is. Similarly, we can study the effects of many of these curious biological forces, without understanding their true nature. Above all, it behooves us to keep an open mind, and not to cry "impossible," just because ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... were hardly spoken when a single shot startled the echoes of the rocks, and instant alertness passed like an electric current through the squadron. The advance guard, which had already entered the defile, consisted of three promising young Pathans from Denvil's troop; and anxiety for the fate of his favourites pricked the Boy to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Morse laid the first submarine telegraph in the world, from Governors Island in New York harbor to New York city. It consisted of a wire wound with string and coated with tar, pitch, and india rubber, to prevent the electric current running off into the water. It was laid on October 18, and the next morning, while messages were being received, the anchor of a vessel caught and destroyed ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... whole, articles are not of any use, now, no more than are friends at the theatre. I have told you that it is the struggle of one against all, and the mystery, if there is one, is to turn on an electric current. The subject then is very important in the theatre. In a novel, one has time to win the reader over. What a difference! I do not say as you do that there is nothing mysterious in that. Yes, indeed, there is something very mysterious in one respect: namely that one can not ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... wire telephone works by a metal disc in the receiver, vibrating in exactly the same way as does the microphone in the transmitter. According to the vibrations of the voice of the person sending the spoken message, the electric current along the wire, acted upon by the microphone in the transmitter, increases or decreases. This increasing and decreasing current acts on a thin metal disc or diaphragm in the receiver which is held to the ear of the person listening to ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... "high commandment," consisting at the most of forty or fifty men, while the remaining sixty-five millions of the people are obedient puppets, nourished on falsehoods, where the popular emotion can be turned on like an electric current at the order of the "high commandment,"—now against this enemy, now against that one,—first hate of English, then hate of Italians, now hate of Americans—it is natural that a high government functionary ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... lead, but the smile does not subside; it only passes through the endless variations that succeed each other from the inane grin to the affected simper which is meant to be tender. The whole face moves perpetually, as the facial muscles of a corpse, excited by an electric current, seem to parody all the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... hand thrill us, while another's leaves us quite impassive? Whence springs that personal magnetism which has the power to set the very atoms of our being into new vibrations, like a highly charged electric current? ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... needle in the galvanometer will move from west to south; if, in like manner, you exert the left arm, leaving the right arm passive, the needle will deflect from west to north. Hence, it is argued that the electric current is induced through the agency of the nervous system, and that, as human Will produces the muscular contraction requisite, so is it human Will that causes the deflection of the needle. I imagine that ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the difference in the chemical action on the substances, the greater will be the electrical pressure, and if the substances are connected together outside of the liquid by a wire or other conductor of electricity, an electric current will flow through the path or "circuit" consisting of the liquid, the two substances which are immersed in the liquid, and the external wire ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... called "cryolite," which had already been used for making a kind of porcelain. The name of this stone comes from two Greek words meaning "ice stone," and it is so called because it melts so easily. The young student melted it and found that it would dissolve alumina. Then he ran an electric current through the melted mass, and there was a deposit of aluminum. This young man, just out of college, had discovered a process that resulted in reducing the cost of aluminum from twelve dollars a pound to eighteen cents. Meanwhile a Frenchman of the same age had been working away ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... steam-engines on the other hand, were ready for the application of steam transport, and the only work that remained to be accomplished in the half century indicated was the bringing of the two things together. The dynamo, as a factor in human life—or, in other words, the electric current as a form of energy producing power and light—is an invention of the second half of the nineteenth century, although the main principles upon which it was built were worked out ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... him to expel him and give him a tongue-lashing for his impudence, when a hand was thrust out, and they beheld upon a finger a great green stone. They stopped as suddenly as though they had met an invisible electric current. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... action and re-establishes the original conditions, thus enabling the cell to repeat its electrical work. Cells which can thus be "re-charged'' by the action of a reverse current are called accumulators because they "accumulate'' the chemical work of an electric current. An accumulator is also known as a "reversible battery,'' "storage battery'' or "secondary battery.'' The last name dates from the early days of electrolysis. When a liquid like sulphuric acid ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... alphabet of his knowledge: he knew that under ordinary circumstances the presence of an electrified body was sufficient to excite, by induction, an unelectrified body. He knew that the wire which carried an electric current was an electrified body, and still that all attempts had failed to make it excite in other wires a state ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... wounded, and we persuaded her to stay with us for a week. One of our storerooms was rapidly fitted up as an impromptu radiographic department, the windows painted over and covered with thick paper, a stove introduced, and a dark-room contrived with the aid of a cupboard and two curtains. Electric current was obtained from a dynamo bolted on to the step of a twenty-horse-power car, and driven by a belt from the flywheel of the engine. The car stood out in the courtyard and snorted away, whilst we worked in the storeroom alongside. The coil and mercury break were combined in one piece, and the whole ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... circumstance which happened to a lady who was regarding a thunderstorm from her window. At a flash of lightning her bonnet was reduced to ashes, nothing else about her being affected. Brydone supposes the electric current to have been attracted by the metallic wire which maintained the shape of her bonnet. Hence he proposes that either these wires be abandoned or in times of danger a metallic chain be attached to the bonnet, by which the charge might pass to the earth. Accordingly, we find that it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... continuous electrical effects had far-reaching results, one of which was the discovery of the magnetic properties of the electric current by the Dane, Oersted - once again a purely accidental discovery, moving directly counter to the assumptions of the discoverer himself. About to leave the lecture room where he had just been trying to prove the non-existence of such magnetic properties (an attempt seemingly crowned with ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... shall never forget, the longest day I live, just where our table for four stood, and how a group of gabbling tourists had the three or four tables nearest to us, and how the lights, due to some trouble with the electric current, winked now and then, like the stage lights in a theater ticking off ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... the Edison incandescent lamps encircle the head of the statue, while at the base are three semi-circles of nine lamps in each, which form the crescent moon. These, together with the lights in the halls of the college, are fed with the electric current by a powerful dynamo, situated in the rear of the building. Thus the visitor to Notre Dame, as he comes up the avenue at night, or the wayfarer for miles around, can realize and revere that glorious tribute to the Queen of Heaven, the Protectress of Notre Dame, as he sees her figure surrounded with ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... rumor reached the Palais Royal, and from there ran through the streets like an electric current, that the king's soldiers were marching upon the Assembly to disperse it. Mad with wine and excitement, a common impulse seized the entire populace, to destroy the Bastille, that old stronghold of despotism, that symbol of royal tyranny. ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... electrolytic process, of course. Ordinarily, when—say—ammonium chloride is broken down by an electric current, ammonium is deposited at the cathode and instantly becomes a gas which dissolves in the water or bubbles up to the surface. With a mercury cathode, it is dissolved and becomes a metallic amalgam, which also breaks down into gas with much ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... was ready. Good things of this kind, as I have said, were plentiful in Tennyson's repertory. But what, to pass from the materials to the method of his conversation, eminently marked it was the continuity of the electric current. He spoke, and was silent, and spoke again: but the circuit was unbroken; there was no effort in taking up the thread, no sense of disjunction. Often I thought, had he never written a line of the poems so dear to us, his conversation ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... coquetting women, the fat drowsy old dowagers, all rushed, scrambling and screaming, to the caldron, tore from their heads and bodies the superb jewels and ropes of gold with which they were bedecked, and flung them into the molten mass, which rose like a tide. The electric current sprang to the people; their baubles sped like hail through the air. So great was the excitement that a sudden convulsing of the earth was unfelt. When not a jewel was left to sacrifice, the caldron held enough element for five bells—the ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... into these moulds liquid metal—an alloy mainly composed of lead—is run, and left to cool. All these five toys have wheels that move. They are electro-gilt—that is, the gilding is fixed on them by means of a bath through which an electric current passes. ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... point of view, much the same thing—an easily portable substance, which could be decomposed electrically by wind or water power, and which would then recombine and supply force, either in intermittent thrusts at a piston, or as an electric current, would be infinitely more convenient for all locomotive purposes than the cumbersome bunkers and boilers required by steam. The presumption is altogether in favour of the possibility of such substances. Their advent will be the beginning of the end for steam traction ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... April 4th, John Winslow brought from Virginia the rumor of the English Revolution and the landing of the Prince of Orange, it went through their blood like the electric current, and thrilled from the city along the byways into every home. Men got on their horses and rode onward to the next house to carry the tidings that the popish King was down and William was up, and that there was hope; through town and country ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... the extraordinary vitality of the skin, emphasized by Woods Hutchinson, it may be added that, when experimenting on the skin with the electric current, Waller found that healthy skin showed signs of life ten days or more after excision. It has been found also that fragments of skin which have been preserved in sterile fluid for even as long as nine months may still be successfully transplanted ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... at the bottom, as in the case of the Nanshan Heights defences. These pitfalls were arranged in regular lines, interrupted at intervals by patches of mined ground, while outside these again there ran a practically continuous girdle of barbed wire entanglements, the wire being charged with an electric current powerful enough to instantly destroy any one who should be unfortunate enough to come into contact with it. Liao-yang defences were, in fact, a repetition of the defences of the Nanshan Heights—where the Japanese suffered such ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... fellow-creature is a horrid crime, even if done in self-defense. Therefore, my second gift to you is this little tube. You may carry it within your pocket. Whenever an enemy threatens you, be it man or beast, simply point the tube and press this button in the handle. An electric current will instantly be directed upon your foe, rendering him wholly unconscious for the period of one hour. During that time you will have opportunity to escape. As for your enemy, after regaining consciousness ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... suggested, a good many years ago, by Dr Johnstone Stoney, for the unit charge of electricity which is carried by an atom of hydrogen when hydrogen atoms move in a liquid or gas under the directing influence of the electric current. Some chemists speak of the electrons, which are the [beta]-rays from radium, and the kathode rays produced in almost vacuous tubes, as non-material particles of electricity. Non-material means devoid of mass. The method by which approximate determinations have been made of the ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... mounting as they made their way southward, "is how we're going to cross the frontierr when we get to it. They've got a big tangled fence of barrbed wirre all along, even across the mountains, to where the battleline cuts in. And it's got a good juicy electric current running through it all the time. If you ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... of a sudden sensation of infinite joy; it seemed to spring up like an electric current from somewhere deep within him, and tingled ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... first they used the voltaic pile, but abandoned it in favour of Faraday's recent discovery that electricity could be generated in a wire by the motion of a magnet. The magnetic key with which the message was sent Produced by its action an electric current which, after traversing the line, passed through a coil and deflected a suspended magnet to the right or left, according to the direction of the current. A mirror attached to the suspension magnified the movement of the needle, ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... undergo some change. For example, the physicist determines the density, elasticity, hardness, electrical and thermal conductivity, thermal expansion, &c.; the chemist, on the other hand, investigates changes in composition, such as may be effected by an electric current, by heat, or when two or more substances are mixed. A further differentiation of the provinces of chemistry and physics is shown by the classifications of matter. To the physicist matter is presented in three leading forms—solids, liquids and gases; and although further ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... lightning, and we naturally seized on whatever was before us to await the opening of "Hell." After more sheet lightning the veil was drawn aside and there were before us representations of human beings in every attitude of agony. At the same moment the electric current was passed through certain bars before us, on one of which the boatman held a firm grip, but no sooner was he charged with electricity than his hair flew on end, he looked the picture of terror, shouted in a loud voice, "O, hell!" and broke for the door. Soon after ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... these numerous improvements, we select two that appear peculiarly attractive. The first is the method of precipitating the copper, in our second process, from the fused silicates containing it, by the action of the electric current—the negative pole of the battery terminating in an iron plate, which replaces the copper in the liquid mass. The second method is an improvement on this. From some experiments made at the School ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... electric current warmed the carburetor sufficiently before Jack returned, carrying a rifle, together with a quantity of cartridges. These he ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... more—He was first and foremost the world's Saviour and Redeemer. Other great men have been valued for their lives; He, above all, for His death, around which God and man are reconciled. The Cross is the magnet which sends the electric current through the telegraph between earth and heaven, and makes both Testaments thrill, through the ages of the past and future, with living, harmonious, and saving truth. Other men have said: "If I could only live, I would establish and perpetuate an empire." The Christ ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... near each other, that he could count the fierce throbbing of the artery in her round snowy throat, and see the shadow of her long lashes; and again some electric current flashed from her feverishly bright eyes, burning its way to the secret chambers of his selfish heart, melting the dross that ambition and greed had slowly cemented, and dropping one deathless spark into a deep adytum, of the existence of which he had never even dreamed. Unconsciously he ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the section of Italian literature, my love," said Dr Middleton. "Well, Mr. Whitford, the laboratory—ah!—where the amount of labour done within the space of a year would not stretch an electric current between this Hall and the railway station: say, four miles, which I presume the distance to be. Well, sir, and a dilettantism costly in time and machinery is as ornamental as foxes' tails and deers' horns to an independent gentleman whose fellows ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... our balls are self-finding," said Adonis. "The ball in use now is a recent invention of Vulcan's. They cost twelve hundred dollars a dozen. They are made of liquefied electricity. We take the electric current, liquefy it, then solidify it, then mould it into the form of a sphere. Inside we place a little gong, that begins to ring as soon as the ball lands. The electricity in it is what makes it fly so rapidly ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... now twenty minutes past ten. At 10 46' 40'', precisely, Murphy will send the electric current into the gun-cotton. We have, therefore, twenty-six minutes ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... must be feeling now. She got up and went over to his side; she did not dare place her hand in his. Never must there be again that electric current between them. "But you're all right now, aren't ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... company will proceed immediately to introduce its new electric lamps in the offices in the business portion of the city around Wall Street. It consists of a small bulbous glass globe, four inches long, and an inch and a half in diameter, with a carbon loop which becomes incandescent when the electric current passes through. Each lamp is of sixteen candle power with no perceptible variation in intensity. The light is turned on or off with a thumb screw. Wires have already been ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... determination was not altered. The mystery of that great pageant, the mental life of William Dale, could not be permitted to unfold itself any further. It must cease with a snap and a jerk, much as when the electric current becomes too strong for a small incandescent lamp and the bulb bursts, the filaments fuse, and all that the lamp was showing ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... importance, it was charged with expressionless heat. For example, Miss Shipton's parasol dropped and she stooped to pick it up. "Let me pick it up," he said, and his lips quivered, and the let me pick it up—a poor, little, thin wire of words—was traversed by an electric current raising them to white-hot glow, and as powerful as that which flows through many mightier and more imposing conductors. What are words? "Good-bye," for example, is said every morning by thousands of creatures in the London suburbs as they run to catch their ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... been erected on the south side of the temple, whereon the authorities of the Church were seated. There were services of singing, prayer, and speaking, and then President Woodruff touched a button which sent an electric current up a wire to the top of the tower. The electricity set free the capstone which settled into its place. President Lorenzo Snow led the vast audience in giving the ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... Zeppelin airship carries at present a powerful wireless-sending apparatus, the electric current for which is furnished by one of the motors. These motors, five in number, are of the six-cylinder Mercedes type, furnishing a total of 1,200 horsepower. Four of the motors are usually in service, the fifth being held in reserve, and used ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... nor any other physician can tell you. Life 'goes out,' like a lamp when the materials supplying the electric current are exhausted; and yet here all the waste of which physic can take cognisance is fully repaired, and ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... to me. As he spoke, I remembered suddenly about those mysterious flashes when you burst all at once on my sight from behind the screen. Till that moment, I thought of them only as some result of your too suddenly turning off the electric current. But then, it came home to me in a second that Mr. Callingham must have set out his apparatus all ready for experimenting—that the electric apparatus was there to put it in working order. The button you turned must ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... in charge of the hydro-electric plant of the Woodbridge Quarry Company, became interested in the "Scout Engineers," and through him the officials of the quarry company were persuaded to allow the lads to use as much electric current as they required without cost. The youngsters quickly built a transmission line to the electric station, which was located a few miles north of the town on ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... quite unlike each other. Thus, besides the sense of taste, there is the sensation of touch, pressure, heat and cold, burning or acrid feelings, and those produced by the application of the tongue to an interrupted electric current. These are distinct sensations, due to some chemical action excited probably in the touch cells, although the true tastes may be excited by causes not strictly chemical. Thus a smart tap on the tongue may excite the ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... not sure that she hated Paul. Toward Etta, there was no mistake in her feeling, and this was so strong that, like an electric current, there was enough of it to pass through the ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... of the British fleet at Sebastopol, and upon the Niagara, a magnificent new frigate of the United States Navy; but, when five miles of cable had been paid out, it caught in the machinery and parted. On the second trial, when two hundred miles at sea, the electric current was suddenly lost, and men paced the decks nervously and sadly, as if in the presence of death. Just as Mr. Field was about to give the order to cut the cable, the current returned as quickly and mysteriously ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the brain might be inferred. But how inferred? It would be at bottom not a case of logical inference at all, but of empirical association. You may reply that many of the inferences of science are of this character; the inference, for example, that an electric current of a given direction will deflect a magnetic needle in a definite way; but the cases differ in this, that the passage from the current to the needle, if not demonstrable, is thinkable, and that we entertain no doubt as to the final mechanical solution of the problem. ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the man's dazed sensibilities a sound different from those he had been hearing: it was a human voice, mingled with the measured thud of oars in their sockets. It roused him like an electric current and gave him strength to cry out hoarsely. Some one answered him; then out of the darkness to seaward emerged a deeper blot, which loomed up hugely yet proved to be no more than a life-boat banked full of people. It came to a stop within an oar's-length of him. From the ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... electric current available, matches or candles may be used and inserted through the holes H, as shown in the ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... eminent men had been educated, was founded in 1549. Among its old pupils was included Sir Humphry Davy, born in 1778, the eminent chemist who was the first to employ the electric current in chemical decomposition and to discover nitric oxide or "laughing gas." He was also the inventor of the famous safety-lamp which bears his name, and which has been the means of saving the lives of ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... at the window. She trembled from head to foot, as if an electric current had passed through her, and terror was reflected on her face. Then she sprang up, and, going to the window, placed her face against the window-pane. The expression of terror did not leave her even when, shading her eyes with the palms ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... its existence but of its effects upon health, so then for us it existed in a latent state and we did not see, feel, or notice it because of lack of preparation. It is identical to what happens when at the foot of a post charged with electric current is placed the sign: "Danger to life." Such a sign is practically useless and is no means of safety to the individual who does not know how to read. The one who can read knows the danger; he who does not read does not avail himself of ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... also produced to some extent by electrolytic processes, depending upon the splitting up of a solution of common salt into caustic soda and chlorine by the use of an electric current. ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... with a wire or rail carrying an electric current will transfer the current to the rescuer. Therefore he must not touch the unfortunate victim unless his own body is thoroughly insulated. The rescuer must act very promptly, for the danger to the person in contact is much increased the longer the electric ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... uninitiated children of nature, the art of reading and writing seemed at first as great a mystery as the electric current. How those scrawls of black lines were words, that could be spoken just the same as in conversation, was beyond their comprehension. At first, they gathered around every time a letter was received and listened eagerly. Then arose the desire for them to be able to make out those intelligible ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... broken; for, the whole chain being but an electric current from a vicious imagination, I have destroyed the whole by breaking the first link. Or was it but a cluster from a poisonous vine, then I have killed the branches by cutting the vine. I will, however, expose the other three sequences ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... tested the electric signals from the gatling platform to the cave, and made sure that they were all right; I tested and retested those which commanded the fences—these were signals whereby I could break and renew the electric current in each fence independently of the others at will. I placed the brook-connection under the guard and authority of three of my best boys, who would alternate in two-hour watches all night and promptly obey my signal, if I should have occasion ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... are on board again and ready for the supermarine voyage, the engineer loads up with a much more powerful charge than before. He prepares at the start for a speed of a mile in three seconds, then, when fairly out over the sea, a stronger electric current is applied to the huge charge, and a speed of a mile, or even more, a second is obtained. This fearful velocity is not permitted overland, for fear of collisions, as car routes cross each other. But no ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... How quickly did this common interest banish all the strangeness and shyness which the artificial manners of social intercourse impose. A kind of confidential familiarity arose between us, which, burning through me like an electric current, consumed the timorous nervousness and constraint which had lain like ice upon my heart. That peculiar mood of diffused melting sadness which is engendered of such love as mine was had quite left me; and accordingly, when the pianoforte was brought ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... that the solution would not be easy. The guards were many and were changed frequently. The windows of the old barracks where he slept were fortified with steel bars, and the open camp where the prisoners were employed in outside work was surrounded with wires through which a strong electric current ran. To touch them would mean instant death, and they were so close together that it would be impossible to squeeze ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... tell us of the dipping of the needle as the vessel sails in regions of the farthest north known. In reality, they are at the curve; on the edge of the shell, where gravity is geometrically increased, and while the electric current seemingly dashes off into space toward the phantom idea of the North Pole, yet this same electric current drops again and continues its course southward along the inside surface of the ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... wings. In one poem she apostrophizes Marie Bashkirtseff as warring with vast genius against unknown powers, but who now is in her coffin among worms, her skull grinning and showing its teeth. She would be possessed by her and thrilled as by an electric current. A dwarf beggar wrings her heart with pity, but she will not be overwhelmed. Though a daring peasant, she will be free and sing out her paean to the sun, though amid the infernal glow of furnaces, forges, and the ringing noise ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... upon vegetation has been the subject of numerous investigations. Some have been made to ascertain the effects of the electric current through the soil; others to ascertain the effect of the electric light upon growth through the air. Among the latter are those of Prof. L.H. Bailey of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station. In Bulletin No. 30 of the Horticultural Department is given an ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... other men that exceedingly faint sound would have been as inaudible as silence itself; but to Bell it was a thunder-clap. It was a dream come true. It was an impossible thing which had in a flash become so easy that he could scarcely believe it. Here, without the use of a battery, with no more electric current than that made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of a sound had been carried along a wire and changed back to sound at the farther end. It was absurd. It was incredible. It was something which neither wire nor electricity had been known to do ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... men who at midnight had been stern and silent were now emitting that terror-instilling sound known as the "rebel yell." A space was quickly cleared in the crowd, and a rope placed about his neck, when from somewhere came the suggestion, "Burn him!" It ran like an electric current. Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings into savage beasts? Nothing can be more terrible. A railroad tie was sunk into the ground, the rope was removed, and a chain brought and securely coiled around the victim and the stake. ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... each of the three in order. The forerunners of de-electroniration were the Martel effects—the experiments of Charles Martel, in Paris, in 1937. A new electric current, of a different character—now called the oscillating current as distinct from the alternating and direct—was developed. Metallic plates were electro-magnetized to produce an enveloping magnetic field of somewhat a different character ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... the actual pump efficiency being about 60% in well-constructed plants; the efficiency is therefore greater than direct steam or compressed air. Where the mine is operated with water-power, purchased electric current, or where there is an installation of electrical generating plant by steam or gas for other purposes, electrically driven pumps take precedence over all others on account of their combined moderate capital outlay, great flexibility, and ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... day, the 11th of November, Harding again sent the electric current along the wire and received ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... certain invisible rays resembling, in many respects, rays of light, which are set free when a high pressure electric current is discharged through a vacuum tube. A vacuum tube is a glass tube from which all the air, down to one-millionth of an atmosphere, has been exhausted after the insertion of a platinum wire in either end of the tube for connection with the two poles of a battery ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... the next day. We preferred, after the Barmecide lunch at our hotel, taking the tram-car that noisily and more noisily clambers up and down, and descending into the town by it. The ascent is so steep that at a certain point the electric current no longer suffices, and the car bites into the line of cogs with its sort of powerful under-jaw and so arrives. Yet it is a kindly little vehicle, with a conductor so affectionately careful in transporting the stranger that I felt after a single day we should ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... worked steadily and carefully. Night was their best time to escape, but somehow the electric lighting system, as well as the electric current in the wire fences, must be shut off. To do this, it was necessary to find strips of wire for making short-circuiting chains. A few of these strips they cut from the fencing back of the tennis courts. Most of them, however, were taken ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... was a Jew. Bessie and me he placed at machines side by side, and Eunice a little farther down the line. Then my first lesson began. He showed me how to thread bobbin and needle, how to operate ruffler and tucker, and also how to turn off and on the electric current which operated the machinery. My first attempt to do the latter was productive of a shock to the nerves that could not have been greater if, instead of pressing the harmless little lever under the machine with my ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... discouragement and failures, we claim our great heritage, "life and truth and force, like an electric current," will permeate our lives until we enter ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... The electric current passing through salt water in these cells decomposes the salt into caustic soda ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... strange, occult, Called magnetism, lacking better word, Which moves the world, achieving great result Where genius fails completely. Touch his hand, It thrilled through all your being—meet his eye, And you were moved, yet knew not how, or why. Let him but rise, you felt the air was stirred By an electric current. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the electron as the common constituent of all the bodies previously described as chemical elements, the minute particles of matter in question had been identified with the cathode rays observed in Sir William Crookes' vacuum tubes. When an electric current is passed through a tube from which the air (or other gas it may contain) has been almost entirely exhausted, a luminous glow pervades the tube manifestly emanating from the cathode or negative pole of the circuit. This effect was studied by Sir William Crookes very profoundly. Among other characteristics ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... in these things, I reached the railway station at Lauterbruennen, from whence the little train is driven far up the mountain, even into the very heart of the Jungfrau, by an electric current generated by a turbine, itself driven by the torrent at our feet, the waters of which have descended from the glaciers far above, to which it will carry us. In a few minutes I was gently gliding in the train up the to the "Wengern Alp" and the "Little Scheidegg"—a slope up which I ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... glow in his eyes. Her wondrous, yellowish orbs looked steadily into his, and he was satisfied. They paid tribute to the emotion that moved him to the depths of his being. Love leaped up to him from those sweet, tired eyes; leaped with the unerring force of an electric current that finds its lodestone in spite ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... it into the hole, and welded the seams closed. The tube was sealed. When electric current fired the rocket head, the thorium carrying the plutonium wedge would be driven forward to meet the wedge in the back. And, unless Rip had miscalculated the mass of the two pieces, they would have their nuclear blast. Rip surveyed the crystal with ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... sound-vibration, for air is only incidentally a sound-conductor. Earth, metal, water, and especially wood (along the grain), are better media than the atmosphere, for the transmission of sound. But sound may be transmitted without vibration of intervening sound-media. The electric current, passing along the telephone wire, picks up the sound waves at one end, and instantaneously deposits them, in good order and condition, at the other end—say, a couple of hundred ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... had made an upward movement of his hands, as if they had been jerked by an electric current, then ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The scientists, Niardet, Wilde, Brush, Fuller, and many others of less note, busied themselves with the work of invention. Especially did Gramme and Siemens devote their scientific genius to the work of turning to good account the knowledge now fully possessed of the transformability of the electric current ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... youth and gaiety, the sombre, student atmosphere became charged with a new, electric current. It was not owing solely to Miss Bentley, however, for Sunday evening now frequently found the Candy Man dropping in sociably to chat with ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... potash, or muriate of soda, saturated with chloride of silver. The copper plate, varnished on one side, is united, by means of a copper wire, with a plate of zinc. The zinc plate being immersed in the acid, and the copper in the salt, a weak electric current is generated, which precipitates the silver in a very uniform manner over the ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... and held it up on the point of the needle. "This particle," he said, "is so small that it cannot be seen except with the aid of a microscope. I will now place needle and all on the machine and touch it off with electric current;" and as his hand hovered over the push-button there were cries of "Stop! stop!" but the finger descended, and instantly there was a terrific explosion. The very foundation seemed shaken, and a dense cloud of smoke rolled over the heads of the ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... powers of Messrs. CROSSE and WEEKES has been established. These gentlemen are said (p. 190) to have introduced a stranger in the animal kingdom, a species of acarus or mite amidst a solution of silica submitted to the electric current. The insects produced by the action of a galvanic battery continued for eleven months are represented as minute and semi-transparent, and furnished with long bristles. One of the creatures resulting from this elaborate term of gestation was observed in the very act of emerging, in its first-born ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... grasshopper were scratching at my brain. Nevertheless, I had sufficient lucidity left to understand that, if the grasshopper were turned, it would hop ... and with it many members of the human race! There was no doubt but that the grasshopper controlled an electric current intended ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... Exhibition. But since then achievements in steam have dwarfed even the great work of Corliss. And to do a kind of herculean task that was hardly dreamed of in 1876 another type of engine has made its entrance: the steam turbine, which sends its awful energy, transformed into electric current, to light a million lamps or to turn ten thousand wheels ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... remark, he took in one hand the Ruhmkorff coil apparatus, which hung round his neck, and with the other he put the electric current into communication with the worm of the lantern. And a bright light at once illumined ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... means of an electric current, a metal is volatilized and subjected to spectrum analysis, the "reversal" of the bright band of the incandescent vapor is commonly observed. This is known to be due to the absorption of the rays emitted by the vapor by the partially cooled envelope ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... snuffed out of him like the switching off of an electric current. The dull heavy cloud descended on him again. He stared vacantly at the others, shrugged his shoulders slightly, and ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... among the flowers. The next instant he saw a squad of Grays who sprang up to rush toward the linden stumps go down under the hose stream from the automatic with the precision of having been struck by an electric current. Not occupied, as he had been yesterday, with the business of keeping to his part as a physical cog in the machine, he was seeing war as a spectator—as Marta saw it, as only a privileged few ever see it. Society, ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... look at the safe this morning," the man went on presently. "It is one of the best makes, and would resist anything, except, of course, the electric current." ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... School, were about this time studying in Italy, under the great Politian and Hermolaus Barbarus. Oxford, which had so long been in hostile communication with Italy as represented by the Papal Courts, at last touched, and was thrilled by the electric current of Italian civilisation. At this conjuncture of affairs, who but is reminded of the youth and the education of Gargantua? Till the very end of the fifteenth century Oxford had been that "huge barbarian pupil," and had revelled in vast Rabelaisian suppers: "of fat beeves he ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... and tense voice of the old woman held Harry. She pointed with a withered forefinger which she held aloft and he felt as if an electric current were passing from it to him. A chill ran down his back and the hair lifted a little on his head. Jarvis and his ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... us almost incalculable time, in the safe and convenient transportation of our persons and our property. We read in our newspapers messages that are brought instantaneously, from points far as well as near, by a simple electric current, governed by machinery, which prints its thought in plain Roman characters, at a rate of speed defying the emulation of the most expert penman. These, among many illustrations of scientific progress, occur in our daily experience. Manufacture, agriculture, and commerce would yield ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... offer more or less resistance to the flow of an electric current. Silver offers the least resistance, and German silver the greatest. Temperature also affects the flow. It passes more easily over a cold than ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... have an opposite. If there is an up there must be a down; there would be no darkness without light; no heat without cold; no strength without weakness, and no joy without sorrow. Like all these things, the electric current flows from one to ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... some 800 yards behind us, coming down like a bolt, I saw a horse, at full gallop. Its rider was gesticulating wildly. Strange to say, though not a word had been said, as though awakened by an electric current, every man had got up and had fixed his astonished eyes on the newcomer. He was an artillery non-commissioned officer; his face was crimson, his hair unkempt, his cap had come off his head and was dangling behind by the chin-strap. With a violent ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont |
