"Piston" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this: If you double your fist this way, and tuck your thumb alongside, like that, and aim for this spot right here, about two inches this side of the chin, bringing your arm back, and up, quickly, like a piston, the person you hit will go down, limp. There's a nerve right here that communicates with the brain. That blow makes you see stars, bright lights, and fancy colors. They use ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... a strong iron chest, with a hinged cover, into which the clay is placed, having a piston moving in it, connected by a rod or bar, having cog-teeth, with a cog-wheel, which is moved by horse or hand power, and drives the piston forward with steadiness, forcing the clay through the openings in the die-plate. The clay issues in continuous ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... the last line of the History was written, so Miss Anthony, with vol. III. and bushels of manuscripts, fled to the peaceful home of her sister Mary at Rochester. The expected party sailed from Liverpool the 26th of May, on the America After being out three days the piston rod broke and they were obliged to return. My son-in-law, W.H. Blatch, was so seasick and disgusted that he remained in England, and took a fresh start two months later, and had a swift passage without any accidents. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... not appear in history at all, or in the outer world at all: a greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else. How dare we pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a crucible, that we know the limits ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Rainey's guard and left the arm numb. The next instant they were at close quarters, swinging madly, rife with the one desire to down the other, to maim, to kill. A blow crashed home on Rainey's cheek, sending him back dazed, striking madly, clinching to stop the piston-like smashes of the hunter clutching him, trying to trip him, hammering at the fierce face above him as they both went down and rolled into the ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... of what is due to the game and to his own dignity is then suddenly lost, and a strange sight is often seen. Five, six, and seven more follow in quick succession, the man's arms working like the piston of a locomotive, and his eyes by this time being quite blinded to the ball, the sand, the bunker, and everything else. As an interesting feature of what we might call golfing physiology, I seriously suggest that ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... they inserted a smaller one, joining and fixing them together with gum that the air might not escape from the wrong part. Then at the extremity of a thick stick they fastened a bunch of leaves and grasses large enough to pass with difficulty into the bamboo tube. By working this as a piston the air was expelled from the lower bamboo cane and kindled ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... been experimentally determined at 40-50 cubic meters per minute at 15 lb. pressure. This will be supplied by a single cylinder engine of 900 millimeters blast, and 786 millimeters steam piston, diameter 786 millimeters, stroke making fifty revolutions per minute, which is also to work a Root blower and the accumulator pumps. Having regard to these very different demands upon the power of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... of worried trainmen gathered about the engine, and it needed but a glance to show what the trouble was. The piston rod had broken while the ponderous engine was going at full speed, and the driving rods, which had broken off from where they were fastened to the wheels, had been driven deep into the ground. This had served to fairly lift ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... use as accumulators, secondary zinc batteries may be utilized as regulating voltameters in lighting by incandescence, for deadening piston strokes, attenuating the irregularities in speed, and covering accidental stoppages.—E. Reynier, in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... known it is an unalterable quantity, like gravitation. But he can accomplish the same thing indirectly by weakening the power of the rival force. Thus, if he encloses a portion of gas in a cylinder and drives a piston down against it, he is virtually aiding cohesion by forcing the molecules closer together, so that the hold of cohesion, acting through a less distance, is stronger. What he accomplishes here is not all gain, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... in the world, that I imagine each individual would do well to contribute a moiety to the awfully slender public stock. Suppose you pay tithes to the extent of counting me out of this nest of persecutors? Thank Heaven! I am not a Palma! My soul does not work like the piston of a steam-engine,—is not regulated by a gauge-cock and safety-valve to prevent all explosions, to keep the even, steady, decorous, profitable tenor of its sternly politic way. I am a Neville. The blood in my veins is not 'blue' like the Palma's, but red,—and ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... exhaust stroke, had not entirely evacuated all of the products of combustion. The Atkinson engine, patented in 1887, was one of the attempts to solve this as well as several other problems, thus creating a more efficient cycle. This engine was designed so that the exhaust stroke carried the piston all the way to the head of the engine, while the compression stroke only moved the piston far enough to sufficiently compress the mixture. The unusual linkage necessary to create these unequal strokes in the Atkinson engine made ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile
... objection may be reduced by using the air in a state of compression, and therefore of greater density, throughout its operation. Even then, however, the amount of operative heat is very small in comparison with that which passes through the steam-engine, per cubic foot swept through by the piston, for the change of state which water undergoes in its transformation into steam involves the taking in of much more heat than can be communicated to air in changing its temperature within such a range as is practicable. Another and not less serious objection is the practical ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... leave by the fox to say a prayer before they were eaten, and now went on praying and praying forever and ever. When they came to the end of the three hymns, they began again by themselves. The mill kept getting louder, they kept the time with their feet, and it was like the stroke of a mighty piston, a boom! Fris nodded with them, and a long tuft of hair flapped in his face; he fell into an ecstasy, and could not ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... laugh, ye ragamuffins, laugh all ye want to! It's no laughin' matter with me, I can tell ye. [Blustering:] I'll let the machine squeeze off one of my arms! Or ye can run the piston through me if ye want to! Kill ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... pieces, purify them with more fire, and run them into bars convenient for use. Our bellows," continued the guide, "are not like yours, with two boards and leather between. The rats would soon make short work with these. They are two cylinders formed from the trunk of a tree, with a piston in each, packed with coarse cloth, and having valves. An old musket-barrel carries the air to the furnace, and, by pumping them time about, the blow is kept ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... on the edge of the bed, and began dressing. Slowly one thing after another began to dawn on him. His head throbbed like a piston rod—headache! He heard peculiar sounds: chattering women, hoarse rough laughter, oaths—and from outside came the peal of church bells. Through all the noise and tobacco smoke came visions of a fair fringe, and soft red lips—the princess! But ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... social zones, you may as well reject all seekers after knowledge, all delvers into secrets, repulsed through years in their duel with hidden causes. Beatrix added to the use of contempt as a moral piston, a constant comparison of her own poetic, comfortable home with the hotel du Guenic. All deserted wives who abandon themselves in despair, neglect also their surroundings, so discouraged are they. On this, Madame de Rochefide ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... could be seen a quantity of apparatus resting on the opaque bottom portion. Two mechanics from the Bureau of Standards were making final adjustments of one of the pieces of apparatus, which resembled a tank fitted with a piston geared to an electric motor. From the tank, tubes ran to four hollow pipes, an inch and a half in diameter, which ran through the skin and extended thirty inches from the outer skin of the twenty-foot sphere. Dr. Bird stood near talking with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... Fulton, during the experiments; and further evidence is found in the fact that the engines he ordered of Messrs. Boulton and Watt for the "Clermont" were precisely of the same dimensions as those in the "Charlotte Dundas," with the exception of two inches more diameter in the piston; and the patent of Fulton dates from 1809—twenty years after Symington had propelled a boat by steam on Lake Dalswinton, and eight years after he had himself taken sketches of Symington's engines in ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... catholicity of this loss. Imagine the French Revolution, the Lutheran Reformation, the "Catholic" Reaction, and the like, to be revolutions of the vast human engine. Consider then the loss of power. Consider the impulse, the enormous impulse, applied to the piston, and then look at the result. What losses in leakages, in cooled enthusiasms, in friction-heat, in (pardon the ludicrous analogy) waste gases! Think, too, of the loss involved in unbalanced minds, as in unbalanced engines, one mass of bigoted inertia retarding another mass! Oh, my friend, my friend, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... drawing, and what is the difference between it and fa fine drawing. But perhaps this difference can be brought home a little more clearly if you will pardon a rather fanciful simile. I am told that if you construct a perfectly fitted engine—the piston fitting the cylinder with absolute accuracy and the axles their sockets with no space between, &c.—it will not work, but be a lifeless mass of iron. There must be enough play between the vital parts to allow of some movement; "dither" ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... as may be observed in the soups containing them. Maccaroni, being tubular, is the favorite habitat of a very dangerous insect, which is rendered peculiarly ferocious by being boiled. The government of the island, therefore, never allows a stick of it to be exported without being accompanied by a piston with which its cavity may at any time be thoroughly swept out. These are commonly lost or stolen before the maccaroni arrives among us. It, therefore, always contains many of these insects, which, however, generally die of old age in the shops, so that accidents from this source ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... offered to the notice of the world," he wrote, in 1833, "none have stood the test of practical use and experience. The cause of this uniform failure has been the great difficulty of obtaining, within the machine, a base of resistance on which the steam might act in propelling the moveable piston." He did not quite overcome this difficulty, but he succeeded in producing what the foremost critic in this department of manufacture describes—after a lapse of thirty years unrivalled for their development of ingenuity—as "the most perfect ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... an aviation engine must possess maximum resistance to wear and to fatigue. For this reason, the piston pin is considered, from a metallurgical standpoint, the most important part on the engine to produce in quantities and still possess the above characteristics. The material used for the Liberty engine piston ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... 1624, where he received the title of royal engineer and architect. More than this, he wrote books on mechanics, in one of which, Les Raysons des Forces Mouvantes, he speaks of the expansion and condensation of steam in a manner which has been supposed to suggest the alternate action of the piston, the principle of the steam engine, and, finally, 'the great discovery' of and to the Marquis of Worcester. How far all this may be supposed to contradict the lady's story, I will not say. Certain it is, that many a man who has done quite as well in worldly honors, has, after ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... writing to Dr. Roebuck almost in despair, saying, "My old white-iron man is dead!" feeling his loss to be almost irreparable. His next cylinder was cast and bored at Carron, but it was so untrue that it proved next to useless. The piston could not be kept steam tight, notwithstanding the various expedients which were adopted of stuffing it with paper, cork, putty, pasteboard, and old hat. Even after Watt had removed to Birmingham, and he had the assistance of Boulton's ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... engineer. Mr. Belk's brother had taken him into his works at Durlingham. He wasn't seventeen, yet he knew how to make engines. He had a strong, lumbering body. His heart would go on thump-thumping with regular strokes, like a stupid piston, not like Roddy's heart, excited, quivering, hurrying, suddenly checking. His eyes drew his mother away. You were glad when ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... able to produce, by transformation or by drawing on other sources of energy, new energies unknown to nature. Thus the solar energy transformed into coal is, for instance, transformed into the energy of the drive of a piston, or the rotary energy in a steam engine, and so on. It is obvious that no amount of chemical energy in food can account for such an energy as the time-binding energy. There is only one supposition left, namely, that the time-binding apparatus has a source for its tremendous ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... engine the steam, after having pushed the piston to the end of the stroke, escapes into the atmosphere, and the impelling force is therefore that due to the difference between the pressure of the steam and the pressure of the atmosphere. In the condensing engine the steam, after having pressed the ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... and watch the big machine. Now and then the brushes would sparkle and spit blue flashes, at which Holroyd would swear, but all the rest was as smooth and rhythmic as breathing. The band ran shouting over the shaft, and ever behind one as one watched was the complacent thud of the piston. So it lived all day in this big airy shed, with him and Holroyd to wait upon it; not prisoned up and slaving to drive a ship as the other engines he knew—mere captive devils of the British Solomon—had been, but a machine enthroned. Those two smaller ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... be seen, is simply a small piston, carrying with it a slide valve, which can be moved up or down by increasing or decreasing the pressure in the brake pipe. As soon as the air from the main reservoir is turned into the brake pipe, by means of the driver's valve, the piston is pushed up into the position shown, and air is allowed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... that that journey must have been doomed to disaster from the very outset. It was begun an hour late, and all things seemed to conspire to hinder them. After many halts, the breaking of an engine-piston rendered them helpless, and the heat of the day found them in a desolate place among kopjes that seemed to crowd them in, cutting off every current of air, while the sun blazed mercilessly overhead and the sand-flies ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... applied to many cylindrical objects, as to the drum round which the chain is wound in a crane, a capstan or a watch; to the cylinder studded with pins in a barrel-organ or musical-box; to the hollow shaft in which the piston of a pump works; or to the tube of a gun. The "barrel" of a horse is that part of the body lying between the shoulders and the quarters. For the system of vaulting in architecture known as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... varnished, and labelled with letters of gold. The main-spring, which has grown old and weak, is said to be helped by the secret application of steam,—and the fires are fed with huge bundles of worthless bank-bills and other paper promises. The noise of the clanking piston and wheels is drowned by orchestras of music; the roofs and sides of the machine buildings are covered all over with roses; and the smell of smoke and machine oil is prevented by scattering delicious perfumes. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... was everything! Instead of a single column of smoke he counted thirteen, forced through the soil as if violently propelled by some piston. It was evident that the crust of the earth was subjected in this part of the globe to a frightful pressure. The atmosphere was saturated with gases and carbonic acid, mingled with aqueous vapours. Cyrus Harding felt the volcanic tufa with which the plain was strewn, and which ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... amazed eyes. The Saracen Young Woman and the rest all went to the wall; and when on April 7, 1842, he set out for Dresden he had different plans altogether in his head. Before he could start Schlesinger advanced the money for more cornet-a-piston arrangements of opera-airs, and he had to take the scores of ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... He sometimes takes, that we may be led, in the hour of emptiness and loss, to recognise whose hand it was that pulled up the props round which our poor tendrils clung. But the opposite actions have the same purpose, and like the up-and-down stroke of a piston, or the contrary motion of two cogged wheels that play into each other, are meant to impel us in one direction, even to the heart of God who is our home. A landowner stops up a private road one day in a year, in order to assert his right, and to remind the neighbourhood that he could ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... remarkable structure. It has had, in one sense of the term, a wonderful "evolution." It is based on certain principles, the foundation one of which is the expansibility of steam, and its ability, when confined in a cylinder, to give motion to a piston. The steam-engine was first used for pumping, then for turning machinery, then for propelling boats, and now its crowning department is seen in the locomotive. There is a plan, a likeness, a similarity, which runs through all steam-engines, whether they be found in the mine, in the mill, ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... still something in my lot which I should find intolerable. I should spend my days upon the island's loftiest crag, watching for a sail. The thought of a thousand ships not far away, rushing round the globe, with throb of piston, crack of cordage, strain of timber, buffeting of waves, and shouting crews, would drive me distracted. What to me were blue skies and soft winds when I might be sharer in this elemental strife? How should I covet, in all this adorable and detested beauty of my solitary isle, the grey skies that ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... in Larut. Each man is a law to himself. Some drink whisky, and some drink brandipanee, and some drink cocktails—vara bad for the coats o' the stomach is a cocktail— and some drink sangaree, so I have been credibly informed; but one and all they sweat like the packing of piston-head on a fourrteen-days' voyage with the screw racing half her time. But, as I was saying, the population o' Larut was five all told of English—that is to say, Scotch—an' I'm Scotch, ye know,' ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... many segments, is called a commutator, because it commutates, or changes, the direction of the electric impulses, and delivers them all in one direction. In effect, it is like the connecting rod of a steam engine that straightens out the back-and-forth motion of the piston in the steam cylinder and delivers the motion to a wheel running ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... elementary form of steam engine. But, instead of being operated by steam, it was a chemical machine; Smith's trained eyes told him that the cylinder was really an enormous retort. And he noted with further perplexity that the prodigious piston-rod not only moved with terrific speed, but in a strictly back-and-forth motion; its far end did ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... from Yokohama to San Francisco belonged to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and was named the General Grant. She was a large paddle-wheel steamer of two thousand five hundred tons; well equipped and very fast. The massive walking-beam rose and fell above the deck; at one end a piston-rod worked up and down; and at the other was a connecting-rod which, in changing the rectilinear motion to a circular one, was directly connected with the shaft of the paddles. The General Grant was rigged with three masts, giving a large capacity for sails, and thus materially aiding the steam ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... are sharp and you are fond of engines, and like to "pat" them, as I do, you will notice that the cranks and piston-rods work outside the wheels, not between them, and underneath the boiler, as in the Great Western engines. You will have just time to look at the wheels and the name when the man on the platform will wave his flag, and the "Irishman" will start very gently. As we ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... equipment. The servant comes in, reads off the formula, and immediately becomes an emperor of the elemental spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He summons and dismisses them alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod working at high speed; he keeps them flying between the doctor's house and their own more unmentionable residences till they faint with rage and fatigue. There is all the best of the Middle Ages in that; the idea of the great levellers, luck and laughter; ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... must confess, very much relished, for exercise gives a good appetite, thou knowest. I then set my beans to boil whilst I dusted, and was upstairs waiting, ready dressed, for the sound of the 'Echo's' piston. Soon I heard it, and blew my whistle, which was not responded to, and I began to fear my Theodore was not on board. But I blew again, and the glad response came merrily over the water, and I thought I saw him. In a little while he came, and gave me all your parting messages. On Second Day ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... journey comes a time when one tiredly shrinks from the work of speech, when observation dozes, and thought lolls like a limp sail that only idly stirs at the passing zephyrs; the legs like piston-rods strike on; when the pleasure is like that almost of dull narcotics; one realises only dimly that one is moving. At such times as these, coming from one knows not whence, and one feels too weak to search back to discover, there flit across the mind strange fragments, relevant, as they ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... of his speech was inaudible to Mahony. Just behind him stood one of his brother-in-law's most arrant opponents, a butcher by trade, and directly John began to hold forth this man produced a cornet-a-piston and started to blow it. In vain did Mahony expostulate: he seemed to have got into a very wasps'-nest of hostility; for the player's friends took up the cudgels and baited him in a language he would have been sorry to imitate, the butcher blaring away unmoved, with the fierce ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... cylinders, valve-chests, circulating pumps, steam and exhaust units in main engines; dry-firing boilers, and thus melting the tubes and distorting furnaces, together with easily detectable instances of a minor character, such as cutting piston and connecting rods and stays with hack saws, smashing engine-room telegraph systems, and removing and destroying parts which the Germans believed could not be duplicated. Then there was sabotage well concealed: rod stays in boilers were broken off, but nuts were fastened on exposed surfaces for ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... not frequent them; and the principal food of all is small insects. I have examined scores of them, and never without finding insects in their crops. Their generally long bills have been spoken of by some naturalists as tubes into which they suck the honey by a piston-like movement of the tongue; but suction in the usual way would be just as effective; and I am satisfied that this is not the primary use of the tongue, nor of the mechanism which enables it to be exerted to a great length beyond the end of the bill. The tongue, for one-half of its ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... hekasto proairesis kai dynamis esti; pantos gar nomixeis epi to auto synerchesthai hemas pantas? ouch outos de; dioti ho theos ton Christianon topo ou perigraphetai alla aoratos on ouranon kai ten gen pleroi kai pantachou hupo ton piston prosuneitai kai doxetai. Roustikos eparchos eipen; Eipe, pou synerchesthe e eis poion topon athroixeis tous mathetas sou; Ioustinos eipen; Ego epano meno tinos Martinou tou Timothinou balaneiou, kai para panta ton ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... ourselves, had not been hungry when we arrived, but simply lifeless with fatigue. They were different animals now, and the better ones among them stepped out with tightly curled tails and uplifted heads, their iron legs treading the snow with piston-like regularity and their black muzzles every now and then sniffing the ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... than six inches thick, it'll go this time," muttered Tom, as he gathered all his strength and sent out his fist like the thrust of a piston rod. ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... pressed into a lump, and yet be easily crumbled into powder. Cupel moulds should be purchased. They are generally made of turned iron or brass. They consist of three parts (1) a hollow cylinder; (2) a disc of metal; and (3) a piston for compressing the bone ash and shaping the top of the cupel. The disc forms a false bottom for the cylinder. This is put in its place, and the cylinder filled (or nearly so) with the moistened bone ash. The ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... related in a former chapter, it must be admitted that the corona is not without some functional office in the act of procreation. Its shape indicates a valve action like that of the valve in a syringe-piston, and if we examine the two extremes of these conditions of glans—one devoid of corona, as many are, and the other with the corona in its most pronounced form, when in a state of erection—the difference, either in the appearance of ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Engines. A very simple illustration of the working of a steam engine is given in Figure 128. Steam under pressure enters through the opening F, passes through N, and presses upon the piston M. As a result M moves downward, and thereby induces rotation in the large ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... thinks you're not only a physical virgin, but a psychic-blocked prude. I know better. You're so full of conflict between what you want to do—what you know is right—and what those three-cell-brained nincompoops made you think you ought to do that you have got no more degrees of freedom than a piston-rod. You haven't been yourself for a minute since ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... by the rising piston, and when it is squeezed up as close as it can be an electric spark is introduced into the chamber. That is what the electric battery and ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... vociferous applause as it sped on its way, and as Newtown was approached the travellers found themselves passing under triumphal arches, to the clang of church bells and the blare of bands. On the leading engine rode the young Marquis of Blandford playing "See the Conquering Here Comes" on the cornet-a-piston, Mr. George Owen, Mr. Davies and Mr. Webb. Earl Vane was in the train and received a public welcome at the station. Then the inevitable speeches. The return train was still longer and took two hours to reach Machynlleth, ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... cylinder, the bottom closed while the top remains open, and pour in water to the height of a few inches. Next cover the water with a flat plate or piston, which fits the interior of the cylinder perfectly; then apply heat to the water, and we shall witness the following phenomena. After the lapse of some minutes the water will begin to boil, and the steam accumulating at the upper surface will make room for itself by raising the piston ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... degrees began to form words in Winstanley's fever-heated imagination—meaningless words which seemed to pierce his brain with painful sharpness: "Oh, won't you come across," rose and fell the oily melody, keeping time with the action of the piston-rods of the engine, "Oh, won't you come across," repeated the walls, and "Oh, won't you come across," clattered the water-bottle over in the wooden rack. Again and again Winstanley said the words to himself in an everlasting, ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... of the 'Ramblers' we are informed that the accent in blank verse ought properly to rest upon every second syllable throughout the whole line. A little variety must, he admits, be allowed to avoid satiety; but all lines which do not go in the steady jog-trot of alternate beats as regularly as the piston of a steam engine, are more or less defective. This simple-minded system naturally makes wild work with the poetry of the 'mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies.' Milton's harsh cadences are indeed excused on the odd ground that he who was 'vindicating the ways of God ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... noise, that made the two Enderley men spring back as if the six devils were really let loose upon them, the steam came rushing into the cylinder. There was a slight motion of the piston-rod. ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... steamboat as a ship propelled by wheels, the shaft to which they are attached being moved by the machinery. He follows back to the piston of the engine and finds the motor there,—satisfied that he has discovered in the transference of rectilinear to rotatory motion the reason for the progress of the boat. A more inquisitive friend does not rest here, but assumes that the power of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... a closed pipe connected with a piston pump, as at C, as the piston moves to and fro the water in the pipe will move first one way and then the other. So also when an alternating current generator is connected to a wire circuit, as at D, the current will flow first in one direction and then in the ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... degrees. A considerable time was spent in perfecting the motive power. Compressed air was tried and abandoned. Tappets, cams, and eccentrics were all tried, to work the slide valve, to obtain the best results. The piston rod of engine passed through both ends of the cylinder, and with long connecting rods worked direct on the crank of the propellers. From memorandum of experiments still preserved the following is a copy of one: June, 27th, 1845, water 50 ozs., spirit 10 ozs., ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... on a little iron platform at the top of the ladders, taking the sights and giving the aim, calling in a high, tense, mechanical voice. Out of the sky came the sharp cry of the directions, then the warning numbers, then 'Fire!' The shot went, the piston of the gun sprang back, there was a sharp explosion, and a very faint film of smoke in the air. Then the other two guns fired, and there was a lull. The officer was uncertain of the enemy's position. The thick ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... anagalo. pimple : akno. pin : pinglo, pinglefiksi. pincers : prenilo. pinch : pincxi. pine : pino; konsumigxi. "-apple," ananaso. pink : rozkolora; dianto. pioneer : pioniro. pipe : tubo, pipo; (mus.) sxalmo. pistol : pistol'o, -eto. piston : pisxto. pit : kavo, fosajxo, (well) puto; (theatre) partero. pitch : pecxo, bitumo; tono. pitcher : krucxo. pity : kompati. ("a-"), domagxo. pivot : pivoto, akso. placard : afisxo, place : loko; meti. plague : turmenti, inciteti; pesto. plait : plekti, har'ligo, ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... chief officer; I'm second; young Cleary, whom you remember as apprentice, is now third; and, if I'm not very much mistaken, we'll find old Donald Maclean aboard too, tinkering away at his beloved engines. I don't believe that fellow could take a holiday away from his thrust blocks and piston rods if he were paid to. We'll have a palaver about old times, and I'll put you ashore myself when you want to go. There, what do ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... gentle warmth, her freshness, her nattiness, the very protection she shed over me, were working sad mischief to my peace of mind. I came upon an old shepherd, who, with his music-book thrown into a bush in front of him, was leaning back against a tree and drawing sweet sounds out of a cornet-a-piston. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... themselves upon his consciousness as the signet on soft wax;—a single pressure is enough. Let me strengthen the image a little. Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed steam-engine at the Mint? The smooth piston slides backward and forward as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out of a ring. The engine lays one of its fingers calmly, but firmly, upon a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and tell a new race about it, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... this in steam engine construction. If a cylinder has a piston in it with an area of 100 square inches, and a pipe one inch square supplies steam at 50 pounds pressure, the piston will have 50 pounds pressure on every square inch of its surface, ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... the enormous fees which he had arranged for me! He put down: 'La Favorita, complete arrangement for pianoforte, arrangement without words, for solo; ditto, for duet; complete arrangement for quartette; the same for two violins; ditto for a Cornet a piston. Total fee, frcs. 1100. Immediate advance in cash, frcs. 500.' I could see at a glance what an enormous amount of trouble this work would involve, but I did not hesitate ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... roar, "I've got it! I've got it, Con! 'Pro-Pellets.' Tell people what they're for, not what they're against. Besides, the name has got the idea of pro-pulsion. See? Pro-Pellets, pro-pel!" His big fist shot forward like a piston-rod. "Just the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... often be bent or curved to single or double curvature and sometimes to a warped surface to fit the form of the ship. There are several methods of bending plates. One method employs a cast iron slab of the required form, which is placed on the piston of a hydraulic press. The armor plate is placed face down on this slab, and on top of the plate are laid packing blocks of cast iron, of such sizes and shapes as to conform to the required curve. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... of men, some twenty of them, cleaving their way through the crowd like a wedge. At their head, and taller than the others, fought two men, whose arms worked with the systematic precision of piston-rods, and before whom men fell on either hand as ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... hitherto sacred to the accents of transoceanic celebrities and Eleanor Roosevelt. There they competed on alternate forums with literate gardeners and stuttering horticultural amateurs. Stolon, rhizome and culm became words replacing crankshaft and piston in the popular vocabulary; the puerile reports Gootes fabricated under my name as the man responsible for the phenomenon were syndicated in newspapers from coast to coast, and a query as to rates was received ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... said Mr. Ditmar, "but really it's very simple. The gasoline comes in here from the tank behind—this is called the carburetor, it has a jet to vaporize the gasoline, and the vapour is sucked into each of these cylinders in turn when the piston moves—like this." He sought to explain the action of the piston. "That compresses it, and then a tiny electric spark comes just at the right moment to explode it, and the explosion sends the piston down again, and turns the shaft. Well, all four cylinders ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was replaced I started back from the wagon lines, carrying a piston rod of the buffer, with Downey assisting me. We were on horseback and getting into Labazell Valley, when a shell passed over our head so close that we felt the wind of it; it was accompanied by a great flare over to our right. The shell struck one of our ammunition dumps containing about 50,000 ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... specimens had a case to themselves, and tickets with writing on them in a character which I could not understand. There were fragments of steam engines, all broken and rusted; among them I saw a cylinder and piston, a broken fly-wheel, and part of a crank, which was laid on the ground by their side. Again, there was a very old carriage whose wheels in spite of rust and decay, I could see, had been designed originally for iron rails. Indeed, there ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... is described as the piston of an ocean greyhound making twenty-seven knots," said the man, taking no notice of the answer, and speaking in awestruck tones. "Do you know, one paper describes Johnson as the best piece of fighting machinery the world ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... designated it, proved, however, to be no difficult proceeding. The crowd of hoodlums had got a set-back from the boy with the piston-rod arm, it seemed. They scanned Ralph and Clark keenly as they passed by, but made no attempt to either hail ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... cylinder, E, and the piston, F, in combination with the lever, D, or their equivalent, operated by the means and in the manner and for the ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... joint of bamboo is inserted into each, which serve as nozzles, pointing to, and meeting at, the fire. To produce a stream of air bunches of feathers or other soft substance, being fastened to long handles, are worked up and down in the upright tubes, like the piston of a pump. These, when pushed downwards, force the air through the small horizontal tubes, and, by raising and sinking each alternately, a continual current or blast is kept up; for which purpose a boy is usually placed on a high seat or stand. I cannot retrain ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... with one of the hot chills, the needle and little glass piston out of the hand-bag and with a dry little insuck of breath, pinching up little areas of flesh from her arm, bent on a good firm ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... sufficiently ingenious machine, in very small portions, to the bottom of an upright cylinder, which is immediately shut perfectly close. A flint and steel are at the same time made to strike directly over it, and to ignite the powder. The air that is thus generated, forces up a piston through a cylinder, which piston, striking the arm of a wheel, puts it in motion, and with it the machinery of the mills. A complete revolution of the wheel again prepares the cylinder for a fresh supply of gunpowder, which is set on fire, and ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... hinges, rolling Right and left like very doom, Till our fate nigh past controlling Brake in glory out of gloom. While upon those awful stages Throbbed a world's great piston beat, And the moments seemed as ages Rung from death and red defeat. Ah, we lived, indeed, and no man Recked of wound or any ill, As we grimly faced the foeman— If we ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... 1853, some specimens of which are still in use.[1] These engines have ten wheels, the single drivers in the center, 9 ft. in diameter, and a four-wheeled bogie at each end. The driving wheels have no flanges. The bogie wheels are 4 ft. in diameter. The cylinders have a diameter of 161/2 in. and a piston stroke of 24 in. The boiler contains 180 tubes, and the total weight of the engine is 42 tons. These locomotives, constructed for 7 ft. gauge, have attained a speed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... place, and therefore the least chance of getting the Chinaman. He sat up on a little iron seat attached to the boiler, holding on to the piston for dear life, and every time the whistle went off—and it went off very often—he nearly did the same. The fireman was obliged every other minute to whistle to frighten the cows away from the track. We others were more fortunate, having only to balance ourselves and clutch our neighbor. The least ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... in productive machinery is not confined to the brains of the gifted inventors and their colleagues. It is incorporated in, and identified with, the actual machines themselves. The lever, the cam, the eccentric, the crank, the piston, the turbine, the boiler with the vapour imprisoned in it—devices which it has taxed the brains of the greatest men to elaborate and to co-ordinate—were all latent in nature before these men made them ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... Apaches could not understand what the young ensign said to them, they knew the drift of his jeering words. Their faces contorted with rage, they struck at him, Dave's arms working like piston rods in his efforts to ward ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... go through an ordinary house, train and all, as a rifle-bullet would go through a cheese. It was an eight-wheeled engine, and the driving-wheels were eight feet in diameter. The cylinder was eighteen inches, with a piston of two feet stroke, and the total weight of engine and tender was fifty-three tons. The cost of this iron horse with its tender was about ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... athletic young man, who had borne a captain's commission in Papineau's patriot army. He rode a sorel horse—a great, wiry raw-bone, with a lunge like a moose, and legs that struck the ground with the precision of a piston-rod. As soon as his nose was turned towards Bonaventure he smelt the wind of home in his nostrils; his hatchet head jerked till he got the bit straight between his teeth; then, gripping it as a fretful dog clamps the bone which his master pretends ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... backward by means of straps fastened to a large roller underneath the bed, a tympan frame and frisket arranged to open and close automatically with the movement of the bed, and an inking apparatus, consisting of an ink-box with a narrow slit in the bottom through which the ink was forced by a piston upon a roller below, from which it was transmitted by two intermediate rollers to another and lower roller which inked the form as it passed underneath. The two intermediate rollers had an alternating, lateral motion which ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... steel. He turned one thrust, turned another, turned another. Then suddenly he went forward at the lunge with his whole living weight. Turnbull leaped back, but Evan lunged and lunged and lunged again like a devilish piston rod or battering ram. And high above all the sound of the struggle there broke into the silent evening a bellowing human voice, nasal, raucous, at the highest pitch of pain. "Help! Help! Police! Murder! Murder!" The gag was broken; and the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... named Kremer, i.e. dealer.] the two languages being represented by those important tradesmen Baker and Butcher. The former is reinforced by Bollinger, Fr. boulanger, Pester, Old Fr. pestour (Lat. piston), and Furner— ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... dies. These dies are grooved to fit each other, and shut together; and the plate of iron which is to be corrugated being placed between them, is pressed into the requisite form, with all the force of the hydraulic piston—the greatest force, altogether, that is ever employed ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... "Yuh, piston-ring burnt off and put the exhaust-valve on the blink. That means one cylinder out of business," growled Hawk Ericson. "I could fly, maybe, but I don't like to risk it in this wind. It was bad enough this morning when ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... position on the sofa without almost treading upon Stoffles, whose bristling back was not a yard from my feet. At last, I thought—as the Blue Dryad, for one second coiled close as a black silk cable, sprang out the next as straight and sharp as the piston-rod of an engine,—this lump of feline vanity and conceit is done for, and—I could not help thinking—it will probably be my turn next! Little did I appreciate the resources of Stoffles, who without a change in her vigilant pose, without a ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... helmet and sabre stood a piano open, and with a piece of music on the stand—a movement by Chopin; a violoncello leaned in its case in one corner, a cornet-a-piston showed itself, like an arrangement in brass macaroni packed in red velvet upon a side-table; and in front of it lay open a small, flat flute-case, wherein were the two halves of a silver-keyed instrument ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... house at a trot, he stood in moonlight. Then, for involuntarily he now did everything running, with a dash up the steps he seized the sullen pendant bell-handle, and worked it pumpwise, till he perceived a smaller bell-knob beside the door, at which he worked piston-wise. Pump and piston, the hurly-burly and the tinkler created an alarm to scare cat and mouse and Cardinal spider, all that run or weave in desolate houses, with the good result of a certain degree of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fierce forces mastered by rules and laws into the benignant power that was bearing him so gently over summer seas, held him breathless with interest and delight. Even the clang of the first dinner gong could not distract him from his study of cylinder and piston and shaft and driving-rod, and all shining mechanism working without pause or jar at ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... half a mile in diameter was this shaft, and ringed regularly along its height by wide amethystine bands—like rings of a hollow piston. They were, in color, replicas of that I had glimpsed before our descent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the outlines of the incredible city had lowered. And they were in motion, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... mother, and the smell carried him back to days before those in which he had begun to bruise himself against the great outside world. "I always think one of the best parts of going abroad is the first thud of the piston, and the first gurgling of the water when the paddle ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... party have arrived. The weather has been talked over for the last time (for the present); a harp, violin, and a cornet-a-piston from the county town, influenced by the spirit of gin-and-water, are heard discoursing most eloquent music in the dining-room, which has been cleared out for the dance. Miss Patty Honeywood, accepting the offer of Mr. Verdant Green's ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the man's effort at pugilism was almost ridiculous. His arms appeared to go round like windmills beating the air. It really seemed as though he had rushed upon the point of Sir Timothy's knuckles, which had suddenly shot out like the piston of an engine. The carter lay on his back for a moment. Then he staggered viciously ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he would, and she at once sat down before the little instrument. It was scarcely more to be compared with the magnificent machines of our day than the flageolets of Virgil's shepherds with the cornet-a-piston of the modern star performer, but Mozart, Haydn, Handel, or Beethoven never lived to see a better. It was only about two feet across by four and a half in width, with a small square sounding board at the end. The almost threadlike wires, strung on a wooden frame, gave forth a thin and tinny sound ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... a cloudless sky, a tranquil sea. The piston- rods of the engines so regularly coming up from below, to look (as well they may) at the bright weather, and so regularly almost knocking their iron heads against the cross beam of the skylight, and never doing it! Another Parisian actress ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... the business at the window. He took a neck in each hand and cracked their skulls together until the whack-whack-whack of it was like the exhaust of a Ford with loose piston rings; and when they fell from his grip, unconscious, he came to my rescue. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... true, but is an inch thick and weighs about 10 cwt. Its diameter is about as much above 18 inches as the tin one was under, and therefore it is become necessary to add a brass hoop to the piston, which is made ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... affinity breaks up the chemical composition of the coal, how the heat thus liberated is applied to the water to vapourize it; how the vapour is collected in the boiler under pressure; how this pressure is applied to the piston in the cylinder, and how this finally results in the revolution of the fly-wheel. It is true that we do not understand the underlying forces of chemism, etc., but these forces certainly exist and ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... your paddles now, Mr. Potter," Brent said, edging to the left. His arms were working like slowly moving piston-rods of an engine, that is capable of great speed. He was on his toes, and his sinuous movements seemed to speak of highly tempered springs and oil. He was indeed a different Brent from any which the countryside had heretofore seen. "Come ahead, ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... worth consideration. The forward engine had no more work to do. Its released piston-rod, therefore, drove up fiercely, with nothing to check it, and started most of the nuts of the cylinder-cover. It came down again, the full weight of the steam behind it, and the foot of the disconnected connecting-rod, useless as the leg of a man with ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... what gave him his value to humanity, and hence his greatness, was the fact that his attention had been arrested by the sight of the lid of a saucepan of boiling water raised by the steam. "Steam is a force which could lift a piston as it lifts the cover of a saucepan, and become the motor power of a machine." Papin's famous saucepan is a kind of magic wand in the history of mankind, which thenceforth began to work and travel without fatigue. How wonderful are such stories of great discoveries arising from humble ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... came the beat of a horse's hoofs, and the sound of human voices. Dick's first thought was of his pursuers, the troopers; his second of his escape; his third sent the blood surging through his veins and his heart beating like a piston. A grand thought, a magnificent thought! He could have cried out with exultation as it swept into his mind. Creeping around the tree he silently unearthed the gold-stealers' bag and dragged it after ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... different construction, which had given great results in a ship of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company, and was afterwards exhibited in the docks at Southampton, here claims a passing notice. This propeller is so constructed as to enable the engineer to regulate the speed of the piston; for the pitch of the screw can be increased or diminished at pleasure. Thus, with a fair wind, by increasing the pitch, without increasing the revolutions, the full power of the engine is effectually exerted in driving the ship, instead of consuming fuel in driving the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in which it was placed before—when we bear in mind all this, is it possible not to connect the facts together, and to refer cycles of living generations to the same unalterableness in the action of like matter under like circumstances which makes Jupiter and Saturn revolve round the sun, or the piston of a steam-engine move up and down as long as ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... below the bottom lip of the groove, the steam is cut off from the space between it and the main valve, which is fitted with packing rings and works over a latticed port. This port opens directly into the cylinder. The exhaust takes place chiefly through a port uncovered when the piston is approaching the end of its stroke. The remaining vapor left in the cylinder is exhausted under the lower edge of the main valve, until cushioning commences, and the steam from both upper and lower ports is discharged into the exhaust box shown in Fig. 2. The speed of the engine is controlled ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... they were. For a gruff word, for an awkward movement in lading the pianos, for a surly look or a muttered oath, the dentist's elbow would crook and his hand contract to a mallet-like fist. As often as not the blow followed, colossal in its force, swift as the leap of the piston from its cylinder. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... shock must follow shock, Until the sole remaining Rock That all one's hopes exist on, Crumbles beneath the crushing force Of Conscience, kicking like a horse, And pounding like a piston. ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... the waste-pipe. Then he extinguished the fire and let the furnace cool, and when Dorothy entered the workshop for the last time to take her mournful leave of the place, there lay the bones of the mighty creature scattered over the floor—here a pipe, there a valve, here a piston and there a cock. Nothing stood but the furnace and the great pipes that ran up the grooves in the wall outside, between which there was scarce a hint of connection ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... then fell heavily on his hands. He looked down at them; they seemed to have grown shorter and fatter, and were encased in black fur gloves. He felt a desire to walk on all fours—tried it—did it. It was very odd—the movement of the arms straight from the shoulder, more like the movement of the piston of an engine than anything Maurice could ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... born at Dartmouth; invented a steam-engine in which the piston was raised by steam and driven down by the atmosphere after the injection into the cylinder of a squirt of cold water, which cooled it, so that the steam when injected did not raise the piston at once up. By James Watt's invention ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the cylinder from the boiler, varying in degrees of heat from 300 to 500. After acting on the piston head, it is exhausted directly into the chamber or hollow bed-plate through which the pipes pass. The water, when it enters the heater, is as cold as when it left the tank, but the steam which surrounds the pipes has lost but little of its heat, and by the time the water passes through ...
— Rough and Tumble Engineering • James H. Maggard
... that waved to and fro, slowly rising, until a breeze caught and carried them away. The sight alone would suffice to inspire terror, without the oppressive smoke and the uncanny noise far down in the depths. Dull and regular, it sounded like the piston of an engine or a great drum, heard through the noises of a factory. Presently there was silence, and then, without any warning, came a tearing crack, the thunder as of 100 heavy guns, a metallic din, and a cloud of smoke rose; and while we forced ourselves to stay and watch, the ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... had experienced in getting his paddle-wheels turned round. On which Symington immediately asked, "Why don't you use the steam-engine?" The model which Symington exhibited, produced rotary motion by the employment of ratchet-wheels. The rectilinear motion of the piston-rod was thus converted into rotary motion. Mr. Miller was pleased with the action of the ratchet-wheel contrivance, and gave Symington an order to make a pair of engines of that construction. They were to be used on a small ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... water pipes at high pressure, and of various diameters. Of machines worked by water pressure the author proposes to refer only to two which appear to him in every respect the most practical and advantageous. One is the piston machine of M. Albert Schmid, engineer at Zurich. The cylinder is oscillating, and the distribution is effected, without an eccentric, by the relative motion of two spherical surfaces fitted one against the other, and having the axis of oscillation for a common axis. The convex surface, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... his nephews, who was too small to be allowed to join in the field sports of the others, was playing at being a railway train. He had travelled in a train once, and now passed Hugh's door under easy steam, working his arms and legs like piston-rods, and giving piercing imitations ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... compression and decompression of the granular carbon between the electrodes, there exists another action due to the agitation of the granules as the chamber is caused to vibrate by the sound waves. In other words, in addition to the ordinary action, which may be termed the piston action between the electrodes, it is claimed that the general shaking-up effect of the granules when the chamber vibrates produces an added effect. Certain it is, however, that transmitters of this general type are very efficient and have proven their ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... piston of the cylinder first to be cleaned to the top of the compression stroke and continue this from cylinder to ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... stirred with a long brass spoon. A portable iron stand is generally to be seen somewhere in the tent, upon which the hot vessels are placed, as they are removed from the fire. Close to these is the toxzum or dongbo, a cylindrical wooden churn, with a lid through which a piston passes. This is used for mixing the tea with butter and salt, in the way I have described as also adopted by ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... in the engine-room tinkled softly once, and then rang savagely again and again to "hoist away." The great wheel turned fast and faster; the piston-rods flew in and out; the iron ropes hummed as they cut the air; and the people at the shaft's mouth waited, breathless with suspense, to see what the blackness would yield up to them. The carriage rose swiftly to the surface. On it four men, tottering and exhausted, were supporting an ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... outcome of human ingenuity—Mr. Buchanan says so," squealed the high-pressure cylinder. "This is simply ridiculous!" The piston went up savagely, and choked, for half the steam behind it was mixed with dirty water. "Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help I'm choking," it gasped. "Never in the history of maritime invention has such a calamity over-taken ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... at Feeling, the procession wabbles. Steam is of main importance, not for sounding the whistle, but for moving the wheels; and if there is a lack of steam we shall not remedy it by attempting by our own effort to move the piston or blow the whistle, but by more water in the boiler, and more fire under it. Feed Faith with Facts, ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... But not unequal work. The work must be unequal if the conditions are unequal. It's not the same machine. To turn a woman on to a man's work is like trying to run an express train by clock-work, with a pendulum for a piston, and ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... and weight of steam expended at each oscillation by one of Newcomen's engines of known dimensions; the quantity of cold water that must be injected into the cylinder to give a certain force to the piston's descending oscillation; and finally the elasticity of steam at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... being aimed such an unceasing, unending, rain of blows in the space of two minutes as had Trooper Matthewson. His arms had worked like the piston rods of an express engine—as fast and as untiringly. He had taken the Gorilla by surprise, had rushed him, and had never given him a fraction of time in which to attack. Beneath the rain of sledge-hammer blows the Gorilla had shrunk, guarding for dear ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... The cylinder is 10-inch bore, and 14-inch stroke; steam chest extends enough beyond the ends of the cylinder so that the steam travels only 21/2 inches, the shortest distance possible, after leaving the valve before it reaches the piston-head, and the space between the piston-head and cylinder-head is only one-fourth of an inch, the bolt heads being counter-sunk until even. Other things about this engine are in proportion. With this engine attached to a direct acting circular ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... opposite sides of a first-class carriage these two looked cheerfully at one another. The Channel was safely behind them, London was close ahead, and the piston of the engine seemed to thump a ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... cast-brass, with a piston made of two circular pieces of the same metal, each put into a strong leather cup, and bolted to the other. The bottoms of the cups being together, when the piston becomes loose in the barrels, and there is not sufficient ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... seemed to understand, for she turned away a few steps and then looked at him pleadingly, standing with her jaws open, and her long dripping tongue working like a piston ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... no sides or floors (Plate LXII). At one end is a raised bamboo bench in front of which stands the forge. This consists of two upright wooden cylinders, usually logs hollowed out, known as po-opan. In each of these is a piston or plunger (doeydoyog) at the lower end of which is a wooden ring packed with corn husks and chicken feathers. When this is pushed downward in the cylinder, it compresses the air and forces it out of the small opening in the base, but when it is drawn up, the packing collapses and allows ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... now and then, the cross-head ascends, the steam hisses below, the condenser rumbles, the steam from the funnel roars furiously forth, spreading its scalding vapour through the air. Again, the man, almost imperceptibly touches the iron rod with his finger, the magic monster again moves its piston downward, the wheels make a turn, the massive vessel surges upon her lines, as if eager to press forward on her course. Another gentle touch, and, obeying the summons, the motive power is still; the man subjects the monster with his little finger. He has stopped ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... repeated Hal, all the soul of the young engineer swelling to the surface. "Take this piston, sir, and examine it. Could such a job have been done, unless ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham |
