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Vacuum   /vˈækjum/   Listen
Vacuum

noun
(pl. E. vacuums, L. vacua)
1.
The absence of matter.  Synonym: vacuity.
2.
An empty area or space.  Synonyms: emptiness, vacancy, void.  "The emptiness of outer space" , "Without their support he'll be ruling in a vacuum"
3.
A region that is devoid of matter.  Synonym: vacuity.
4.
An electrical home appliance that cleans by suction.  Synonym: vacuum cleaner.



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"Vacuum" Quotes from Famous Books



... should be constructed at a minimum of cost and may later, after you have become familiar with the operation of radio appliances, easily be converted into a set of much greater range by the use of a vacuum tube as detector and may even, by slight changes, be given the much ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge

... the little wind-turbine that you blow with your breath spins very rapidly; so, too, do the wheels spun by the steamy breath of the boilers, and Mr. Parsons found that the propeller fastened to the shaft of his engine revolved so fast that a vacuum was formed around the blades, and its work was not half done. So he lengthened his shaft and put three propellers on it, reducing the speed, and allowing all of the blades to ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday

... you ever go down the streets of Boston and notice the number of signs of palmists and astrologers and vacuum cures?" exclaimed Davison. "But perhaps it ain't fair to ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter

... completely moulded into that shape and baked into that mould, that a Rockville would be a Rockville to the end of time, if God and Nature would have allowed it. But such things wear out. The American Indians and the Australian nations wear out; they are not progressive, and as Nature abhors a vacuum, she does not forget the vacuum wherever it may be, whether in a hot desert, or in a cold and stately Rockville;—a very ancient, honorable, and substantial family that lies fallow till the thinking ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... air-holes of the pie, and acting upon the surface of the juice round about the cup, forces a portion of it into the cup, just on the same principle that water rises into the chamber or cylinder of a pump when a partial vacuum is formed in it. Having once risen into the cup, the same law of hydrostatic pressure keeps it there until the cup is raised sufficiently to admit air under its edge, when the juice of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various

... steps and gave way to his anguish. There was no one to see and no one to hear. All the doubts and discouragements, the humiliations and disappointments, through which he had passed to win her, came back to mock him, now he had lost her. The world had suddenly become an intolerable vacuum in which he ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

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

... as in the case of difficulty in breathing, where the atmospheric density is chemically insufficient for the due renovation of blood in a ventricle of the heart. Unless for default of this renovation, I could see no reason, therefore, why life could not be sustained even in a vacuum; for the expansion and compression of chest, commonly called breathing, is action purely muscular, and the cause, not the effect, of respiration. In a word, I conceived that, as the body should become habituated to the want of atmospheric pressure, the sensations of pain would ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

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

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

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

... Judith was much gratified with the letters that first met her eye. They contained the correspondence of an affectionate and inteffigent mother to an absent daughter, with such allusions to the answers as served in a great measure to fill up the vacuum left by the replies. They were not without admonitions and warnings, however, and Judith felt the blood mounting to her temples, and a cold shudder succeeding, as she read one in which the propriety of ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... for their object less the independent appearance than the needy appearance. Not only do they attack the artificial coloring that hides truth and replaces reality, but also the beneficent appearance that fills a vacuum and clothes poverty; and they even attack the ideal appearance that ennobles a vulgar reality. Their strict sense of truth is rightly offended by the falsity of manners; unfortunately, they class politeness in this category. It displeases them that the noisy and showy so often eclipse ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... Harrik, must die?" Harrik's voice seemed far away. In his own ears it sounded strange and unusual. All at once the world seemed to be a vast vacuum in which his brain strove for air, and all his senses were numbed and overpowered. Distempered and vague, his soul seemed spinning in an aching chaos. It was being overpowered by vast elements, and life and being were atrophied in a deadly smother. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

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

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

... theory was finally to emerge that art and literature, like laws and institutions, are an expression of society and therefore inextricably linked with the other elements of social development—a theory, it may be observed, which while it has discredited the habit of considering works of art in a vacuum, dateless and detached, as they were generally considered by critics of the seventeenth century, leaves the aesthetic problem ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... of the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid unaided. While at Rouen he invented a calculating machine, and got a workman in the town to set it up. In 1646 he made his famous experiments on the vacuum before more than five hundred people, including half a dozen sceptical Jesuit fathers. Though his famous letters on the burning question of Jansenism were not written until 1656, after he had returned ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... was this transformation which was now brought about through the agency of steam. Engines in which steam was used as a means of draining mines had long been in use; but the power relied on was mainly that of the weight of the air pressing on a piston beneath which a vacuum had been created by the condensation of steam; and the economical use of such engines was checked by the waste of fuel which resulted from the cooling of the cylinder at each condensation, and from the expenditure of heat in again raising it to its ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green

... is something open, and a little green in spring, and the nights are calm. It seems the least little bit like what it used to be in Wisconsin on the lake. But there we had such lovely woodsy hills, and great meadows, and fields with cattle, and God's real peace, not this vacuum." Her ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... the stronger will prevailed. Self-control and judgment are qualities among the first to succumb to opium. Rita ceased to think longingly of the clean, fresh air, of escape from these sickly fumes which seemed now to fill the room with a moving vacuum. She bent forward, her chin resting upon her breast, and gradually the deathly sickness passed. Mentally, she underwent a change, too. From an active state of resistance the ego traversed a descending ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... of language, and finish of diction, when even ideas fail, words come to his aid—arranging themselves, as it were, so completely, that they not only captivate, but often deceive us for ideas; and hence the vacuum that would necessarily occur in the address of an ordinary speaker is filled up, presenting the same beautiful harmony as do the lights ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various

... upward, and with such force that it cannot descend again immediately and follow the downward curve of the surface. So, between this swiftly-moving air stream, and the slope to the rear of the plane, a partial vacuum is formed, and this sucks powerfully upward. With a single wing, therefore, it is possible to gain a double lifting influence—one above ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White

... before—it's a splash of some molten stone, which fell plop into a cool sea-current, I suppose. I wish I knew all about it. The question, is, why is it so beautiful? It couldn't help it, I suppose! But for whose delight?" Then he said, "I suppose this was a vacuum in here till it was broken? That is why it is so clear and fresh. Good Heavens, what would I not give to know why this thing cooled into these lovely little shapes. It's no use talking about the laws of matter—why are the laws of matter what they are, and not different? ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... society at Monte Carlo and invited few people to his house was because the constant babble about the "Rooms" and the "tables" exhausted his vitality, making him feel, as he said, "like a field-mouse in a vacuum." Sometimes it had seemed to him that, if once again he heard any one say, "Oh, if only I had played on seventeen!" he would be forced to strike the offender, or rush ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... science has not, and never can, resolve into their individual selves. These atoms are rings of the atomless ether, which, thus differentiated from the formless ether, become centers of force, the center of such force being a vacuum within the atomic ring—a center so small that a microscope with lens one thousand times as powerful as the most perfect modern instrument would fail to reveal it. These atoms form systems, under the control of another apparent vacuum; or, rather, this vacuum seems ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... "I've got a vacuum where my stomach ought to be," moaned Billy. "Gee, wouldn't I like to be streaking it for ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall

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

... to assert that extended substance is made up of bodies or parts, than it would be to assert that a solid is made up of surfaces, a surface of lines, and a line of points. This must be admitted by all who know clear reason to be infallible, and most of all by those who deny the possibility of a vacuum. For if extended substance could be so divided that its parts were really separate, why should not one part admit of being destroyed, the others remaining joined together as before? And why should all be so fitted into one another as to leave no vacuum? Surely in the case of ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza

... inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which supplied the electric ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... we were both speaking of the same idea," replied Jim. "You see, my father is financing the wonderful patent Ken's father invented. Dr. Evans is a great inventor, and every once in a while he has a big idea. That was how he planned the vacuum sweepers, and the self-stop on the victrolas. He has lots of unusual patents granted him, and now he has ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... happenin'? I was bein' pumped. It was more'n that too. Everything I knew about Mildred, and a lot I guessed at, was emptied out of me like she was usin' one of these vacuum cleaners on my head. When I gets to telling about the place out West where Mildred lived before she and her maw hit New York, Aunt ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford

... politically motivated assassinations since the death of Rafiq HARIRI. Lebanese politicians in November 2007 were unable to agree on a successor to Emile LAHUD when he stepped down as president, creating a political vacuum until the election of Army Commander Michel SULAYMAN in May 2008 and the formation of a new ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... though not playing into the smiles of his companions; "the wind will blow straight thither where there is a vacuum; and all that we can state of the king is, that there is a positive vacuum here. It would be difficult to predict the king's movements save by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... requiring study. The difficulty Hester found in his song came of her trying to see more than was there; her eyes made holes in it, and saw the less. Vavasor's mental condition was much like that of one living in a vacuum or sphere of nothing, in which the sole objects must be such as he was creator enough to project from himself. He had no feeling that he was in the heart of a crowded universe, between all whose great verities moved countless small and smaller truths. Little notion had he that to learn these ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... were to leave you together awhile? I shall not be far off. It is,' she explained, as if into a huge vacuum, 'it is a terrible visitation.' She moved gravely round the table and very softly and firmly closed ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... manner that the cushions of a cat's paw overlap its claws when the animal is in a state of tranquillity; and by means of the projecting membrane, the hollow interior was rendered air-tight, and the vacuum completed: but in dealing with the hand—a soft substance—the thorns were laid bare, like the claws of a cat when stretched out in anger, and at least a thousand minute prickles were fixed in the skin at once. They failed to penetrate ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... accumulated wisdom of the past and the new resources of the present, and as he grows older, he will live in a mental atmosphere which is always growing thinner and emptier. Do we not all know many people who seem to live in a mental vacuum—to whom indeed, we have great difficulty in attributing immortality because they apparently have so little life except that of the body? Fifteen minutes a day of good reading would have given any one of this multitude a really human life. The uplifting of the democratic masses depends ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman

... Agincourt[260]; but it was observed, it had men in it. Mr. Davies suggested the speech of Juliet, in which she figures herself awaking in the tomb of her ancestors[261]. Some one mentioned the description of Dover Cliff[262]. JOHNSON. 'No, Sir; it should be all precipice,—all vacuum. The crows impede your fall. The diminished appearance of the boats, and other circumstances, are all very good description; but do not impress the mind at once with the horrible idea of immense height. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... that we pick up some decent clue around here," said Lil Artha; "Yes, and a bully supper in the bargain, that'll fill a horrible vacuum, and put us ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas

... the sun, rarify the air over the surface of the soil, and this rises, to be at once replaced by the cold air from the Alps and Cevennes; the air off the snow pours down with headlong violence to occupy the vacuum formed by the heated ascending column of air off the plain, sweeping the valley of the Rhone, and reaching its maximum of intensity between Avignon and the sea, where it meets, and is blunted in its force by ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... refining is entirely obviated. It is obtained in perfectly pure, transparent, granular crystals, being entirely free from any portion of uncrystallisable sugar or colouring matter, and is prepared by the improved process of effecting the last stages of concentration in vacuum, and at a temperature insufficient to produce any changes in its chemical composition; the mode of operation first proposed by the late Hon. Ed. Charles Howard, and subsequently introduced, with the most important advantages ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various

... parson's moderate demand a long lifetime, are whirled with the fury and fleetness of Jove's thunderbolts. After exhausting his sweet-scented receiver of this floral elocution, he pauses four seconds; pointing to vacuum, over the heads of his audience, he asks, in an anxious tone, "Do you see that?" Of course the audience are not expected to be so unmannerly as to ask "What?" If they were, Ralph would not give them time to "go in," for after asking them ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... settled that the term nature only comprehends the people with sleek coats and full stomachs. Nature abhors a vacuum,—therefore has nought to do with empty bellies. Happy are the men whose fate, or better philosophy, has kept them from the turnips and the heather—fortunate mortals, who, banned from the murder of partridges ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various

... pressure, which, acting equally on every point of the surface, would tend to consolidate rather than to break the metal. His proposal to exhaust the air from the globes by attaching to each a tube 36 ft. long, fitted with a stopcock, and so producing a Torricellian vacuum, suggests that he was ignorant of the invention of the air-pump by Otto von ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... one is that, though at the present moment we are moving through a vacuum, our Projectile, steeped in the solar rays, revels in their light and heat. Hence great saving in gas, an important ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... what I expected. We'd better bring the vacuum cleaner out from the city, Miss Agnes. Them carpets haven't ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart

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

... said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent. positive audacity; 100 per cent. will made it ready to trample on all human ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... must have heard of the Eveleth smash a couple of months ago. Or—let me see!—I think it was just when you were in New York. No; you'd be likely not to hear of it. The Eveleths have so carefully cut their American acquaintance for so many years that they've created a kind of vacuum around themselves, out of which the noise of their doings doesn't easily penetrate. They belong to that class of American Parisians who pose for going only into ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King

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

... easily heard in the silent vacuum of the storage cabin, alerted him. The crack of the sliding panel door opened and Vye crouched, his hand cupping the only possible weapon, the ration container. Hume edged through, shut the door behind him. He stood there, his head turned so his ear rested against ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton

... Haswell, or rather Grace Martin, appeared the next day, forgave and was forgiven with much weeping, although the old man still refused resolutely to be reconciled with and receive her husband. Mrs. Martin started in to clean up the old house. A vacuum cleaner sucked a ton or two of dust from it. Everything was changed. Jane grumbled a great deal, but there was no doubt a great improvement. Meals were served regularly. The old man was taken care of as never before. Nothing was too good ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... by using vacuum pans. These are great cans out of which the air is pumped, and into which the brine flows. This brine, heated by steam pipes, begins to boil, and as the steam from it rises, it has to pass through a pipe at the top and is thus carried ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan

... Moving Fur case. It was only a partial 'defense' therefore, and I nearly died in the pentacle. After that I came across Professor Garder's 'Experiments with a Medium.' When they surrounded the Medium with a current, in vacuum, he lost his power—almost as if it cut him off from the Immaterial. That made me think a lot; and that is how I came to make the Electric Pentacle, which is a most marvelous 'Defense' against certain manifestations. ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson

... comprehended only too well. The rolling of the wreck had lifted a portion of the open hatchway above the undulating surface of the sea, and a large quantity of the pent air within the hold had escaped in a body. The entrance of water to supply the vacuum had produced the groan. Mulford had made new marks on the vessel's bottom with his knife, and he stepped down to them, anxious and nearly heart-broken, to note the effect. That one surging of the wreck had permitted air enough to ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper

... advice to guide them—my friendship to sustain—and my purse—hem!—ha, ha, ha—I think. I may clap a payriod or full stop there," he added, laughing, "inasmuch as the last approaches very near to what philosophers term a vacuum or nonentity. Gintlemen," he proceeded, addressing the scholars, "I am going over to Lanty Hanratty's for a while to enjoy a social cup wid Mr. Burke here, and as that fact will cause the existence of a short ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

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

... I can send them?" asked Mrs. Horton. "Harriet will heat up some soup and you can carry it in the vacuum bottle." ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White

... manifest itself as sheer horse-play; and less frequently it would become sardonic or even savage. It was in this latter spirit that he once described a trio of Washington statesmen, whose influence he abhorred as, "three minds that occupy a single vacuum." He once convulsed a Scottish audience by describing the national motto of Scotland—and doing so with a broad burr in his voice that seemed almost to mark the speaker a native to the heath—as "Liber-r-ty, fra-a-ternity and f-r-r-u-gality." The policy ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick

... worthless story books. They will rob you of your time, and the taste for the Bible and other good books. Time wasted in idleness or reading worthless books means bad companions, bad habits, and the loss of opportunity, energy and vitality. Learn to abhor idleness as nature does a vacuum. ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... in returning again to Woodrock late that afternoon. Craig hastened to warn Brixton of his peril from the contaminated atmosphere of the den, and at once a servant was set to work with a vacuum cleaner. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

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

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

... should really separate, let those who stand on the eminence beware that the chasm is not mining at their feet. The orders of society, in all well-constituted governments, are mutually bound together, and important to each other; there can be no such thing in a free government as a vacuum; and whenever one is likely to take place, by the drawing off of the rich and intelligent from the poor, the bad passions of society will rush in to fill up the space, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... Extensive bogs were in the neighbourhood, connected with the huge bog of Allan, the Palus Maeotis of Ireland. Here and there was seen a ruined castle looming through the mists of winter; whilst, at the distance of seven miles, rose a singular mountain, exhibiting in its brow a chasm, or vacuum, just, for all the world, as if a piece had been bitten out; a feat which, according to the tradition of the country, had actually been performed by his Satanic majesty, who, after flying for some leagues with the morsel in his mouth, becoming weary, dropped it in ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... in the lamps. When you knock the point off the globe, it leaves a space into which the water can be pushed. Since the air is pressing hard on the surface of the water except in the one place where the vacuum in the lamp globe is, the water is forced violently into ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne

... in the air, not the natural stillness of the Wild, but an unhealthy one, as of a suspension of something, of a vacuum, of bated breath. It was curiously full of terror. More and more he felt like a trapped animal, caught in a vast cage. The sky to the north was glooming ominously. Every second the horizon grew blacker, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... troubles, and matters were approaching the breaking point. We were threatened with one of those "sympathetic" strikes that drive business men crazy. There was no question at issue between ourselves and our employes; but the thing ramified off somewhere to the sugar vacuum-boiler riveters' union. Finally the S.V.B.R.U. came to a settlement with their bosses, and peace was permitted to descend on ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various

... I call up every black and threatening cloud of domestic sorrow, which was to meet me on my return home—the dreadful vacuum occasioned by my mother's death—the grief of my father—my brother and my sisters in deep mourning, and the couch on which I had left the best of parents, when I turned away my thoughtless head from her in the anguish of her grief. I renewed my promise of amendment, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... "In any event, it's not who—but how. How does the man breathe? Vacuum sucks a man's lungs up out of his mouth, bursts ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance

... grew on Beppo's make-believe grave in the garden, and Fronto's problems filled the vacuum in their hearts. Fronto gave his lessons to Marcus, and Marcus gave them to Faustina—thus do we keep things by giving ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... under her. "You've come along just in time, I wanted a woman to test it—men are no judges of chairs. There's a vacuum behind the small of your back, isn't there? Augusta will have to put a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... feet in the hall. Some of the gray poetry of loneliness began to spread around my disturbed and anxious soul for fear no drippings like that would ever fall on me. Race suicide conscientiously practiced is a hard game. Nature abhors a vacuum, and especially human nature. Perhaps this girl had a sister. A comfortable introspection began to take the contract of illuminating my mind. Agreeable family scenery was thrown around by the magic of the thought. It scattered about six kids for Jim and the same-sized ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... he said, "you are exactly right. And, from now on, the barometer will drop suddenly, for the whirl of the wind will make a partial vacuum in the very ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... all the human values and the complexes of association which have invested the visible world with beauty for men, proves to us in his tortured diagrams that he has found nothing to take their place, He gives us a Chimaera bombinans in vacuo, that vacuum which the universe is to the human spirit when it denies itself. He tries to make art, having cut himself off from all the experience and belief that produce art. For art springs always out of ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... smokestack is of the bonnet type commonly used on wood-burning locomotives in this country between about 1845 and 1870. The exhaust steam from the cylinders is directed up the straight stack (shown in phantom in fig. 27) by the blast pipe. This creates a partial vacuum in the smokebox that draws the fire, gases, ash, and smoke through the boiler tubes from the firebox. The force of the exhausting steam blows them out the stack. At the top of the straight stack is a deflecting cone which slows ...
— The 'Pioneer': Light Passenger Locomotive of 1851 • John H. White

... magnesium; these four elements comprise the so-called metals of the "alkaline earths." It combines directly with most elements, including nitrogen; this can be taken advantage of in forming almost a perfect vacuum, the oxygen combining to form the oxide, CaO, and the nitrogen to form the nitride, Ca3N2. Several of its physical properties have been determined by K. Arndt (Ber., 1904, 37, p. 4733). The metal as prepared by electrolysis ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... outlets. Not less serious is exaggerated emphasis upon drill exercises designed to produce skill in action, independent of any engagement of thought—exercises have no purpose but the production of automatic skill. Nature abhors a mental vacuum. What do teachers imagine is happening to thought and emotion when the latter get no outlet in the things of immediate activity? Were they merely kept in temporary abeyance, or even only calloused, it would ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... interesting fact—what seems to us quiet in the beginning of our attempt, will seem like noise and whirlwinds, after we have gone further along. Some one may easily say that it is absurd to take half an hour a day to do nothing in. Or that "Nature abhors a vacuum, and how is it possible to do nothing? Our minds will be thinking of or working ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call

... any apparatus that will permit a certain piece of work to be accomplished with less exertion than would be necessary to do the same thing without it. A sink and a dustpan are labor-saving devices just as truly as are a bread mixer and a vacuum cleaner, but because a sink and a dustpan are necessities as well, they are not usually thought of as true labor-saving devices. The newer appliances for saving labor are often considered to be quite unnecessary, ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences

... lode-stone seeds Innumerable, a very tide, which smites By blows that air asunder lying betwixt The stone and iron. And when is emptied out This space, and a large place between the two Is made a void, forthwith the primal germs Of iron, headlong slipping, fall conjoined Into the vacuum, and the ring itself By reason thereof doth follow after and go Thuswise with all its body. And naught there is That of its own primordial elements More thoroughly knit or tighter linked coheres Than nature and cold roughness of stout iron. Wherefore, 'tis less a marvel what I said, That from ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... intellect. This was peculiarly the case in the instance of Mr. Lowndes. As the disease progressed, attenuating and debilitating the physical man, his intellectual faculties grew brighter, and brighter, assuming a lucidity almost supernatural. At length he passed from time while yet young, leaving a vacuum which in South Carolina has never been filled. His death was at a time his services were most needed, and as with Clay, Jackson, and Webster; his death ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

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

... of 'Wallenstein', in the spring of 1799, Schiller was not long in selecting a new dramatic theme. The unwonted leisure was irksome to him, so that he felt like one living in a vacuum. At first, being weary of war and politics, he was minded to try his hand upon something altogether imaginary, some unhistorical drama of passion. But the aversion to history and the balancing of attractions did not last long. On the 26th ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... darkness and unconsciousness. It might be years, it might be ages. Even in after-life, looking back, he never broke that time into weeks or days: people might so divide it for him, but he was uncertain, always: it was a vague vacuum in his memory: he had drifted out of coarse, measured life into some out-coast of eternity, and slept in its calm. When, by long degrees, the shock of outer life jarred and woke him, it was feebly done: he came back reluctant, weak: the quiet clinging to him, as if he had been ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

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

... one reflection he could always cause you to make: "What a wondrous system it indeed must be which insists on flourishing to all appearance under such an absence of advertised or even of confessed relation to it as would do honour to a vacuum produced by an air-pump!" The formulation, the approximate expression of what the system at large might or mightn't do for those in contact with it, became thus one's own fitful care, with one's attention for a considerable period doubtless dormant enough, but with the questions ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

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

... mortgage and spending the money on improvements that'll hold us up for more than two weeks—and here Anna and I are going to live in a couple of box-stalls (every time you take a long breath in that flat you create a vacuum!)—and here I've been going to the City Commercial School every afternoon for two solid hours, and studying like a dog every night—and here I've resigned from the Golf Club, and everything else but the Citizens—and if they do put the ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall

... interval seen betwixt two lofty mountains; an interval which, being filled only by air, that is, by a body which at a certain distance makes no sensible impression on us, must have given us an idea of a vacuum; being nothing more than a power of representing to ourselves mountains separated from each other, and the intervening distances not being filled by other bodies. With regard to the idea of Infinite, comprehended ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... reality. The spirit only is real. The flesh is phantasmagoria and apparitional. I ask you how—I repeat, I ask you how matter or flesh in any form can play chess on an imaginary board with imaginary pieces, across a vacuum of thirteen ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... thought as the declaration that the perfect line is a circle, and hence that the planets must move in absolute circles—a statement which led astronomy astray even when the great truths of the Copernican theory were well in sight; also, the declaration that nature abhors a vacuum—a statement which led physics astray until Torricelli made his experiments; also, the declaration that we see the lightning before we hear the thunder because "sight is ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... tried to sweep out the White House. Had little heart for it. The dust gathers in the corners. How did Roosevelt manage to keep it so clean? An idea! I must get a vacuum cleaner! But where can I get a vacuum? Took my head in my hands and thought: problem solved. Can get the vacuum ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock

... Society] were suddenly returned to the homes which I suppose will know them no longer, there would be in this city what the quack medicine men call 'a sense of goneness,' and I think we should have to send to the wise men of the East, Dr. Atkinson, for example, to tell us how to supply the vacuum." Taking my cue from that generous compliment, I venture to suggest that if the South should suddenly withdraw from Wall Street, it would occasion such a contraction of the currency in that district as would demand even a more liberal policy ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... Elmo's fire, a "brush discharge" of electricity, on the points of the nephoscope. As the weather became colder this curious phenomenon increased in intensity. At any time in the drift, an electroscope exposed outside became rapidly charged. A spark gap in a vacuum, connected with a free end of wire, gave a continuous discharge. At times, when the effects were strong, the night-watchman would find the edges and wire stays of the screen outlined in a fashion reminiscent of a pyrotechnic display or an electric street-advertisement. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

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

... continued to extract a great deal of enjoyment out of my life. To sum it up with a word, it was life—not mere existence—a life brimming over with duties and responsibilities and untried work, too busy for vacuum. Every corner and interstice of time filled up—heart, and head, and hands always fully employed; and youth and health, those two grand gifts of God, making all such ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey

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

... legal methods and the methods of diplomacy (in which I here include international conversations of every sort) is that the latter take place, as it were, in a vacuum. There is no Sovereign, no common denominator, no unifying system in which both parties are related by their common obligations. They exist and act in two separate moral spheres, and no real intercourse is possible ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... Adonai" of Hasdai Crescas, who ventured to deny some of the propositions upon which Maimonides based his proof of the existence of God—such, for example, as the impossibility of an infinite magnitude, the non-existence of an infinite fulness or vacuum outside of the limits of our world, the finiteness of our world and its unity, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

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

... takes the bad air from the basement or cellar, frequently made still poorer through its passing over red hot iron, which absorbs part of its oxygen, and fills the room with it. The room being filled with poor air, none of the pure air outside will enter it, because there is no vacuum. Thus the bad air introduced into the room, and the bad air created by the persons in it, will be the only supply for the lungs of the patients. But should the furnace take its air from outside the house, as it is the case with some improved kinds, there would still be no ventilation in ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde

... question?" Jerry leaned back comfortably and began an elaborate vacuum-cleaning process of what teeth he retained. "Who starts all our rows, if I don't? No. I'm as easy- going as a greased eel, and 'most anybody can get along with me, but, tread on my tail and I swop ends, pronto. That's me. I go my own even way, but I live up to my bargains and I see to it that ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... sometimes polishing the furniture. Open the windows top and bottom, dust and brush them inside and out; use a soft brush or a dust mop to take the dust from the floor. Use a carpet sweeper for the rugs unless you have electricity and can use a vacuum cleaner; collect the sweepings and ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... hear, by the bye, there is a gang of thieves that has just set up business in Sherwood Forest: a pretty presence, indeed, to get into my castle with force and arms, and make a famine in my buttery, and a drought in my cellar, and a void in my strong box, and a vacuum in my silver scullery." ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock

... space—500 millions of miles in a year—it would take not less than 40,000 years to reach the nearest star among its neighbours, while for the more remote ones millions of years must be reckoned. The huge space separating these masses is practically devoid of matter; it is a vacuum. ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear

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

... thing in the world, as explaining his transparency. He was neatly dressed in a sort of tunic of writing-paper, with a cocked hat of the same material, and he had under his arm a large book, with the words "HOLE-KEEPER'S VACUUM" printed on the cover. This curious-looking creature was standing before an extremely high wall, with his back to Davy, intently watching a large hole in the wall about a foot from the ground. There was nothing extraordinary about the appearance of the hole (except that the lower edge ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl

... believe I should give you a kiss. But I am not going to, so don't be nervous, dear man. I'll be perfectly correct, I promise you—only I had to come. I have been good, absolutely tiptop beastly good, I tell you. I have washed the slate. It is as clean as a vacuum, as the inside of an exhausted receiver. And I feel as dull as empty space before ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

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

... now ready. The engine-driver pulls open the regulator, and we glide back and are attached to the train. We have air-breaks worked on the engine, vacuum-breaks which can pull us up quickly, and when all the connections are made the "Flying Dutchman" is ready; he is harnessed to his eight coaches full of people—the solemn and sorry; the glad and the cheerful; and boys and girls, going on all ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... sentence, "For example, take this lady of fashion." Such an illustration is worthless. The individual chosen does not fairly represent the class. If, on the other hand, a teacher in physics should announce that "all bodies fall at the same rate in a vacuum," and should illustrate by saying, "If I place a bullet and a feather in a tube from which the air has been exhausted, they will be found to fall equally fast," his example would be a fair one, as the two objects differ in no manner essential to the ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... compound ideas represent compound thoughts or realities. Therefore it follows that every thought comes from a corresponding reality. To deny this is equal to the affirmation that we can clearly see objects in a vacuum, that we can see something where there ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various

... of a square figure in another. I do not ask, whether bodies do so EXIST, that the motion of one body cannot really be without the motion of another. To determine this either way, is to beg the question for or against a VACUUM. But my question is,—whether one cannot have the IDEA of one body moved, whilst others are at rest? And I think this no one will deny. If so, then the place it deserted gives us the idea of pure space without solidity; whereinto any other body may enter, without either resistance ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... accumulation of capital allowed certain families to live in great luxury, they returned to the ways of older aristocracies, and, with other wants, felt the necessity of a court about them, ladies and gentlemen in waiting, pages and jesters. Nature abhors a vacuum, so a class of people immediately felt an irresistible impulse to rush in and fill the void. Our aristocrats were not even obliged to send abroad to fill these vacancies, as they were for their footmen and butlers; the native article ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... good notion," said Jim, sitting back on his heels, blacklead brush in hand. "I think I'll go architecting with you, Nor. We'll go in for all sorts of electric dodges; plugs in all the rooms to fix to vacuum cleaners you can work with one hand—most of 'em want two men and a boy; and electric washing-machines, and cookers, and fans and all kinds of things. And everybody will be using them, so electricity will have to ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce

... it cannot be too often reiterated that raw fruits, vegetables and salads, are of more value than cooked forms of these same sources and that drying processes are extremely destructive where heat enters into the drying process. Vacuum drying seems to be much less destructive and it may be possible to develop the drying of vegetables to a point where retention of this vitamine factor is practical. At present all dried vegetables should be regarded with suspicion as a source of vitamine "C." Expressed juices ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy

... by the smoke, could only cling to her protector. For an instant they felt as if they were about to be drawn into the awful power of the rushing monster. Then it had passed, and a roar of silence followed, as if they were suddenly plunged into a vacuum. Gradually the noises of the world began again: the rumble of a trolley-car on the bridge; the "honk-honk" of an automobile; the cry of a newsboy. Slowly their breath and their senses ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill

... sounded logical enough, was based on the irrefutable truth that as air has some weight—to be exact 14.70 pounds for a column one inch square and the height of the earth's atmosphere—a vacuum must be lighter, as it contains nothing, not even air. Accordingly in the seventeenth century, one Francisco Lana, another priest, proposed to build an airship supported by four globes of copper, very thin and light, from which all the air had been pumped. The globes ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... under the soothing influence of her surroundings, just as she had mistaken the effects of physical weakness when she was ill for a desire to die. Such feelings were the result of a void which the whole universe, as she thought, never could fill, but it was really a temporary vacuum, like that caused by the loss of a first tooth. These teeth come out with the first jar, and nature intends them to be speedily replaced by others, much more permanent; but children cry when they are pulled out, and fancy they are ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)

... olive trees must not fill in the vacuum with earth; but he may cover it over with stones or stubble. He who cuts down trunks of sycamore must not fill in the vacuum with earth, but he may cover it over with stones or stubble. Men must not cut down a young sycamore ...
— Hebrew Literature

... You can't help them by abstract thought or by graceful art, but only by that moral sense which will hold the scales of Justice even, and keep itself free from every taint of corruption. That is how we rule India. We came there by a kind of natural law, like air rushing into a vacuum. All over the world, against our direct interests and our deliberate intentions, we are drawn into the same thing. And it will happen to you also. The pressure of destiny will force you to administer the whole of America from Mexico to ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... the entire ship because I thought there might be a hidden source of buoyancy somewhere. It would take a lot of air bubbles to turn this ship into a balloon, but there are large vacuum chambers under the multiple series condensers in the engine room which conceivably could have sucked in a helium leakage from the carbon pile valves. And there are bulkhead porosities ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long

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

... that explosive is in double vacuum containers, and it will be safe for some time yet. Besides, it's in the cellar. It's the carbide I'm most worried about. We daren't ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton

... equal of a marquis, but does he? And even if he does, do A, and B, and C? No profoundness of belief in our own superiority or the superiority of a humble friend to the aristocrat can make us ignore the circumambient feeling on the subject in the same way that the man brought up in the American vacuum does. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

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

... clearly or correctly expressed in that or in the Opus Minus. In Chapter LII. he apologizes for diverging from the strict line he had originally marked out, by inserting in the ten preceding chapters his opinions on three abstruse subjects, Vacuum, Motion, and Space, mainly in regard to their spiritual significance. 'As these questions,' he says,' are very perplexing and difficult, I thought I would record what I had to say about them in some one of my works. In the Opus Majus and Opus Minus I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... a substitute for you, Miss Walton. I am coming to believe that your absence would make that vacuum which nature so dreads. You shall see how good I will be this evening, and you shall read me everything you please, even to that 'Ancient Ecclesiastical History.' If you will only stay I will be your slave; and you shall rule me with a rod of iron or draw me with the silken cords ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... he had had a surfeit of blood and torture, that the end of his life was approaching, that everything was vanishing, Caesar, the court, the multitude, and around him was only a kind of bottomless, dreadful black vacuum with no visible thing in it, save those eyes of a martyr which were summoning him to judgment. But Glaucus, bending his head lower down, looked at him fixedly. Those present divined that something was taking place between those two men. Laughter died on ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... Secret Sea had kept her soul awake with movement. But her Friend was dead, and there was no more sea. The very fine rain blew across her Secret World, and blotted it out. The very distant sound of guns—which was not so much a sound as an indescribable vacuum of sound—shattered the ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson

... camera, when an explosion occurred just behind me, which sounded as if the earth itself had cracked. The concussion threw me with terrific force head over heels into the sand. The explosion seemed to cause a vacuum in the air for some distance around, for try as I would I could not get my breath. I lay gasping and struggling like a drowning man for what seemed an interminable length of time, although it could have ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins

... manner of bizarre and even grotesque figures. Critics naturally marvelled at this; and as in the days of old, men explained the effects of morphine by saying that it contained the soporific principle, and the action of the pump by nature's abhorring a vacuum, so critics explained this fact, so strange in the healthy, clear-eyed, measure-loving Turgenef, by saying that he had a natural fondness for the fantastic and the strange. In truth, however, the choice of his subjects was part of his very art ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... with sarcastic refinements, 'science tells us that a perfect vacuum ain't possible, but after watching you I know better, and for you, Mr. Workingman's Friend,—us to the floor,' and ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach

... the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence. The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as air inclines to a vacuum.... Whenever the though; is not occupied with one's daily duty or profession, it should he sent aloft into the spiritual atmosphere. There are quiet leisure moments by day, and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful exercise may be engaged in ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

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

... reciprocation of a fly's wing being equivalent to a screw rotation of 9,000 per minute, proves that a screw may be run at this speed without losing efficiency by centrifugal vacuum. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... many square feet. These were nearly all hardy perennials,[347:1] with the addition of a few hardy annuals, and the great object seems to have been to have had something of interest or beauty in these gardens at all times of the year. The principle of the old gardeners was that "Nature abhors a vacuum," and, as far as their gardens went, they did their best to prevent a vacuum occurring at any time. In this way I think they surpassed us in their practical gardening, for, even if they did not always succeed, it was surely something for them to aim (in Lord Bacon's happy words), "to have ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... uncontrollable emotion, I ventured to embrace her, assuring her that she was the cynosure of my neighbouring eyes, and supplied the vacuum and long-felt want of my soul, and while occupied in imprinting a chaste salute upon her rosebud lips—who'd have thought it! her severe matronly parent popped in through the curtains and, surveying me with a cold and basilican eye, ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... an important passage of Montfaucon: Turris ingens rotunda.... Caeciliae Metellae.... sepulchrum erat, cujus muri tam solidi, ut spatium perquam minimum intus vacuum supersit; et Torre di Bove dicitur, a boum capitibus muro inscriptis. Huic sequiori aevo, tempore intestinorum bellorum, ceu urbecula adjuncta fuit, cujus mnia et turres etiamnum visuntur; ita ut sepulchrum Metellae quasi arx oppiduli fuerit. Ferventibus in urbe partibus, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... you say; but the only trouble I can see is they wasn't near big enough to fit in with my capacity. There's a vacuum still under my belt; even if I don't ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter

... stimulating the movement of the fluids is exercising the lungs, and that can be accomplished with a fair measure of success even by the bed-ridden. Every time the chest cavity is emptied by the expiration of the breath a partial vacuum is created which exerts a tremendous suction power. It is one of the principal forces concerned in the return of the venous blood to the heart, but it also exerts a like effect upon the lymphatic current, hence deep ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... put away my bondage. I had ceased my unprofitable labor. The rest I had so long craved was at hand. I might take a jubilee, a siesta, if I pleased, of half a year, and nobody be the wiser. I was responsible to nobody. Nobody had any demands upon my time or exertion. Free! I stood in a vacuum; no rush of air, no tempest or whirlpool stirred its infinite profundity. At length I was at peace,—a peace which seemed likely to last as long as my slim purse held out; for employment was not easy to obtain. Did I enjoy it? Did I lap myself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

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

... all events, one advantage possessed by the more recent writer over his predecessor. Mr. Darwin abhors mere speculation as nature abhors a vacuum. He is as greedy of cases and precedents as any constitutional lawyer, and all the principles he lays down are capable of being brought to the test of observation and experiment. The path he bids us follow professes to be, not a mere ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... all packed. I think you'll find the house in good order, Lady Sybil. I have had the vacuum cleaners in. I'll give you the keys of the linen and the silver plate; I have them in that bag. The carpet on the upper landing is a good deal ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie

... occasions, however, there was nothing to tell of the extraordinary speed—nothing unless one stood on the rear platform of the last car and saw the swirling cloud of dust and leaves and bits of paper, even of sticks and stones, that were sucked up into the vacuum behind, and almost shut out the view of the rapidly receding track. It may be (it certainly will be) that the average of 65.07 miles an hour for a distance of 510 miles will be beaten before long. It is almost certain that the same engines on the same road could beat it in another trial—taking ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various

... a sound stole in through the open window, and abhorring Nature began to fill the vacuum called Penrod Schofield; for the sound was the spring song of a mouth-organ, coming down the sidewalk. The windows were intentionally above the level of the eyes of the seated pupils; but the picture of the musician was plain to Penrod, ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... even as he was climbing into the inflatable vacuum garment. It was Larry—and it wasn't Larry. He felt a certain confidence, a certain sense of doing the right thing—a feeling which Larry Grange had never experienced before in his life. It was as if the boy had become a man in the final moments of his life—or, he thought all ...
— A Place in the Sun • C.H. Thames

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

... at his watch, but he snatched his water-bottle, for one effect of loss of blood is to cause intense thirst. A quantity of liquid being taken out of the body. Nature seems to point out in this way that the loss should be supplied; you know she is said to abhor a vacuum. If he had had all his senses about him, he would merely have taken a sup and held it in his mouth some time before swallowing it; but he was half dazed, and did not know where he was, and he yielded to the instinct ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough

... talk of the distance to Cambridge; the college life; and of how glad he would be to get there himself; starting topics till, to use his own expression, when describing the scene to his uncle, he felt "in a state of mental vacuum." ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn

... very high vacuum—this was the idea Rose seemed to be getting at—might be expected, faute de mieux, to tolerate Bertie. So if you found him tolerated seriously in a woman's life, you couldn't resist the presumption that there was ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster



Words linked to "Vacuum" :   make clean, household appliance, region, clean, space, home appliance, part, dust bag



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