"Gradient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... metallic conductors has anything like its velocity through free space. It was soon found, as Professor Mendenhall says, "that it is no more correct to assign a definite velocity to electricity than to a river. As the rate of flow of a river is determined by the character of its bed, its gradient, and other circumstances, so the velocity of an electric current is found to depend on the conditions under which the flow takes place."[2] Mile for mile the original Atlantic cable had twenty times the retarding effect of a good aerial ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... the heights of a tree, telegraph pole and church steeple, describing method adopted. Measure width of a river, and distance apart of two objects a known distance away and unapproachable. Be able to measure a gradient, contours, conventional signs of ordnance ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... 25 some experiments were made before the Society of Civil Engineers with the tricycle above described, and on that occasion it traversed the Rue Girardon and the Rue de Norvino to Montmartre (streets in which the gradient rises to 15 centimeters per meter) with a velocity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... the police':—a tacit confession of failure which this high-hearted, if contrarious couple were by no means minded to arrive at, now or ever. But there is no warning sign-post at the turn of the road; and already their feet were nearing it, without knowledge that its easy gradient slips into the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... weighs 28 tons in full working order. These engines take 40 loaded coal trucks or sixty empty ones, and burn 52 lb. of coal per train mile, the worst gradient being 1 in 176. A notice of goods engines would not be complete without alluding to a steep gradient locomotive, and a good example is the engine which works the Redheugh Bank on the North-Eastern Railway. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... from the crest of the encircling hills to the circular belt of plain below was of course quite an easy matter, compared with the ascent of the outer slope on the previous day, the gradient of the road being practically uniform all the way, and just steep enough to necessitate a slight application of the brakebar to the rear wheels of the wagon from the crest to the plain; and Dick noted with some surprise that their taciturn ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... through the combustion chamber into the main flue, and thence go forward to the boilers, where their heat is absorbed and utilized. Forced draught, or in many cases, hot blast, is supplied from fans through a conduit commanding the whole of the cells. An inclined roadway, of as easy gradient as circumstances will admit, is provided for the conveyance of the refuse to the tipping platform, from which it is fed through feed-holes into the furnaces. In the installation of a destructor, the choice of suitable plant and the general design ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... down through the village of Harley brought the car within sight of a very steep hill, up which the road wound like a silver thread against the black slope. This was Harley Bank, one of the steepest of many stiff Shropshire hills, its gradient averaging one in seven. ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... whose gentle gradient of ascent was merely sufficient to keep us level with the river bank, opened up an alluring prospect of ease and comfort. We lay back on our comfortable cushions and watched the clouds as they swept over the mountains, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... snow to the Otome Pass, on an immemorial and nearly perpendicular bridle path, and once by the modern road to the tunnel which, with characteristic address, the Japanese have bored through the rock, thus reducing a very steep gradient. ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... reach any place, excepting those on the railway to Bourg. The Bourg or Satonay railway station is at the top of the Rue Terme, astreet commencing near the N.E. corner of the Place des Terreaux. From the Rue Terme the train is pulled up the hill by a rope in the same way as at Fourvire. The gradient is 16 per 100, and the distance 547 yards. At the top station, in the Boulevard de la Croix Rousse, passengers for Bourg enter the ordinary railway carriages. The rope railway runs every 5 minutes, fare 1d., and forms a convenient way of escaping from the damp foggy ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... halloo," three Komaticks were racing and tearing down the gradient of the land to our camp, and all of us were out to see the finish. Kudlooktoo and Arkeo an even distance apart; and, heads up, tails up, a full five sledge-lengths ahead, with snowdust spinning free, the dog-team of the ever victorious Peary in the lead. The caravan ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... illustrates the risk often attending a digression into byroads not listed in the road-book, for England is a country of many hilly sections. I had read only a few days before of the wreck of a large car in Derbyshire where the driver lost control of his machine on a gradient of one in three. The car dashed over the embankment, demolishing many yards of stone wall and coming to rest in a valley hundreds of feet beneath. And this was only one of several similar cases. Fortunately, ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... more difficult obstacle than the Sauerbach, the brook which meanders through the open meadows of the Alsatian valley. A deep channel of more than sixty feet in width is overshadowed by forest trees; and the ground on either bank ascends at a sharp gradient to the crests above. Along the ridge to the west, which parts the Antietam from the Potomac, and about a mile distant from the former stream, runs the Hagerstown turnpike, and in front of this road there was a strong position. Sharpsburg, a village of a few hundred inhabitants, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... point till the glacier was reached the climb was laboriously simple. There was no difficulty and not the slightest risk, even for a child; but the heavy gradient and the rarefied air made it almost impossible to sustain a conversation unless the speakers dawdled. Helen often found herself many yards in advance of the others. She simply could not help breasting the steeper portions of the track. She was drawn forward by an intense eagerness to begin the ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... walking in its new-born state, unattended or unassisted even by its tender, is it not appalling to reflect what must be its momentum when, in the full vigour of its life, it is flying down a steep gradient at the rate of 50 miles an hour, backed up by, say, 30 passenger carriages, each weighing on an average 5.5 tons? If ordinary houses could suddenly be placed in its path, it would, passengers and all, run through ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... driven into cab, train, or omnibus, the only reason why they should get out to a residence here rather than there is the necessity of saving time, and such a violent upward gradient of fares as will quite outbalance the downward gradient of ground values. We have, however, already forecast a swift, varied, and inevitably competitive suburban traffic. And so, though the centre will probably ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... some of the pieces. The only effect was that the larger ones became detached and threatened to roll down the gradient and crush us. It was evident that the obstacle was far beyond any efforts which we could make to remove it. The road by which Maple White had ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... what it was, he could not determine with any certainty, but he judged it to be a vehicle of some sort, a slow moving vehicle; and if so, it was of necessity travelling over a road, and that road, although it was indistinguishable from where Dick stood, was one of very easy gradient, judging from the movements of the object upon it. Satisfied now that he had made an important discovery, the lad carefully noted his surroundings, noted with equal care a number of objects which would enable him to fix the position of the road, and closing his glasses, ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... of two tunnels. The first one is a mile long, and somewhere near the centre has a passage out to the cliffs, so that even if both ends of the tunnel collapsed there would be a way of escape. But this is small comfort when travelling from Kettleness, for the down gradient towards Sandsend is very steep, and in the darkness of the tunnel the train gets up a tremendous speed, bursting into the open just where a precipitous drop into the sea could ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... on his road to Cape Town. During the night as they drew near De Aar, his guards fell asleep, and our brave Commandant prepared to leave the train. He seized a favourable opportunity when the engine was climbing a steep gradient and jumped off. But the pace was fast enough to throw him to the ground, though fortunately he only sustained slight injury. When daylight came he hid himself. Having made out his bearings he began to ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... Persian apple, is the earliest in gradient for pies, which the spring offers. The skin should be carefully stripped, and the stalks cut into small bits, and stewed very tender. These are dear pies, for they take an enormous quantity of sugar. ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... valleys and the difficult nature of the country, which was a succession of hill-ranges covered with jungle forests, made almost impenetrable from the huge creepers, and intersected by rivers and watercourses, a good road, from six to eight feet wide, was constructed, with a sufficiently easy gradient for laden elephants to travel over. Cutting one's way day after day through these dense, gloomy forests, through which hardly a ray of light penetrates, was most stifling and depressing. One could hardly breathe, and was ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... horses appeared grazing free amongst the bushes. A little further off lay the Aylonda valley studded with graves, and dark with verdure. Beyond it stretched the Wady Harawwah, a long gloomy hollow in the general level. The background was a bold sweep of blue hill, the second gradient of the Harar line, and on its summit closing the western horizon lay a golden streak—the Marar Prairie. Already I felt at the end of my journey. About noon, reaching a kraal, whence but that morning our Gudabirsi Abbans had driven off their kine, we sat under a tree and with a pistol ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... the silence was startled by the falling tinkle of a stream. Far away a cow lowed, a long, deep monotone, or a goat's call trembled from nowhere to nowhere. But mostly there was a silence which buzzed with a multitude of small winged life. Going up the hills the Philosopher bent forward to the gradient, stamping vigorously as he trod, almost snorting like a bull in the pride of successful energy. Coming down the slope he braced back and let his legs loose to do as they pleased. Didn't they know their business—Good ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... ear from behind the undergrowth. The track had originally been a well-kept winding drive, but a deep carpet of moss and leaves overlaid it now, though the general outline still remained to show that its curves had been set out with as much care as those of a lawn walk, and the gradient made easy for carriages where the natural slopes were great. Felled trunks occasionally lay across it, and alongside were the hollow and fungous boles of trees sawn down in long ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... from forty miles away they preferred to bring it in channels lined with impermeable cement and carried upon arches, which wound across the country according to the levels in order to avoid the excessive pressure of too steep a gradient. The reasons for their choice are simple enough. Their chief difficulty was in making pipes of iron of sufficient capacity. On the other hand, it was easy to construct a cemented channel in masonry of any size ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... hand, the path that Christ makes runs clear on, without a break, across the gulf, like some daring railway bridge thrown across a mountain gorge, and goes straight on on the other side without a curve, only with an upward gradient. The manner of work may change; the spirit of the work and the principles of it will remain. Self-surrender will be the law of Heaven, and 'they shall follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.' Better to begin here as we mean to end yonder! Better to begin here what we can carry with us, in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... from Arthur next Easter was clouded by a sense of more positive want. It was the season of lovers, days of bright sunshine, evenings of a surpassing tenderness. She went to the station with him in the pony-cart alone. She sat like a statue in the trap while the train puffed its way slowly up the gradient and its noise died away in a rhythmical rumble. When she awoke to the fact that he had gone she felt a sudden impulse to do something desperate, if only she could think of anything desperate to do. She felt ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... the time she reached this spot, a marked change had come over her. Her pretty, even brows were slightly drawn together in an odd, thoughtful pucker. Her usually merry eyes were watchful and sober. It may have been the gradient of the hills, but somehow her gait had lost something of its buoyancy. Her steps were lagging, even hesitating, and, when she finally halted, it was almost ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... time of this conversation, running through a most beautiful valley, glorious with tropical vegetation. The train was gradually rising on an easy gradient to the higher lands, where we hoped to get fresher air, for the heat in the valley was most oppressive after three weeks passed practically in the open on the deck ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... light-realm is narrowed down from one side or the other - in other words, when an abrupt change of the field-conditions, that is, a sudden leap from light to dark or from dark to light, is introduced within this realm. In this case, clearly, the effect of the transverse field-gradient on such a leap will be different, depending on the relation between the directions of the two (see small arrows in Fig. i). Our eyes witness to this difference by seeing the colours of the blue pole of the colour-scale appear when the field-gradient is directed towards the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... apparently, and the back he was sitting on flew up into a dome. Ugh-lomi became a thing of instinct again—strictly prehensile; he held by knees and feet, and his head seemed sliding towards the turf. His fingers were twisted into the shock of mane, and the rough hair of the horse saved him. The gradient he was on lowered again, and then—"Whup!" said Ugh-lomi astonished, and the slant was the other way up. But Ugh-lomi was a thousand generations nearer the primordial than man: no monkey could have held on better. And the lion had been training the horse for countless ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... skill. About midway up the mountains the builders came to a solid mass of rock, which presented a barrier that to a surface road was impassable. They determined to tunnel it, and, after an enormous expenditure of labor, finished an inclined tunnel 225 feet in length, of the same gradient as the road. A gorge in the side of the mountain where a small stream, the Schnurtobel, had cut itself a passage also hindered their way, and was crossed by a bridge of lattice girder work in three spans, each 85 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... deafening. She had ceased to care for him, and ceased, surfeited with abundance, with the same vehement abruptness as she had once begun. The swiftness with which things had swept to a conclusion, had, confessedly, been accelerated by her unhappy temperament; but, however gentle the gradient, the point for which they made would have remained the same. What she was now forced to recognise was, that the whole affair had been no more than an episode; and the fact of its having begun less brutally than others, had not made it a whit better able than these ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... behind him, Jack's mind had turned to the contemplation of the bright prospects which lay before him, when his reverie was broken by the sound of voices and the noise of horses' hoofs; and round a bend of the track, slowly ascending the uncertain gradient, appeared the gold-escort. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... be very heavy, Telford took much greater pains. Here he paid especial attention to two points: first, to lay it out as nearly as possible upon a level, so as to reduce the draught to horses dragging heavy vehicles,—one in thirty being about the severest gradient at any part of the road. The next point was to make the working, or middle portion of the road, as firm and substantial as possible, so as to bear, without shrinking, the heaviest weight likely to be brought over it. With this object he specified that the metal ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... some stream. They were winding their way up the valley of a stream, into a higher country? Yes. As they climbed now, she could catch the scent of the forest as the wind changed from time to time. The profanity of her captor grew as the difficulty of the trail increased. They were climbing at a gradient as steep as the laboring car ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... suburbs of Berlin; then, in the spring of 1894, he built a conical hill at Gross-Lichterfelde to serve him as a starting-ground. Later on, he moved to the Rhinow hills. His best glides were made against a light breeze at a gradient of about 1 in 10; and he could easily travel a hundred yards through the air. 'Regulating the centre of gravity', he says, 'becomes a second nature, like balancing on a bicycle; it is entirely a matter of practice and experience.' ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... what may still be called, comparatively, the narrow seas. The hundred-fathom line lies far beyond them; these waters, though thoroughly oceanic in character, are not oceanic in depth. We may regard the islands as the last upward thrust of the granitic backbone that runs, at a diminishing gradient, from Dartmoor to Land's End, while the submarine plateau follows a similar gradient. Structurally, therefore, these isles are a continuation of Land's End, but the granite has become less consistent and more friable; it is largely broken ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... hamlet that, owing to situation at cross-roads figures conspicuously upon the milestones of the neighbourhood, the road to Gisors goes towards the east, and after crossing the valley of the Epte, you run down an easy gradient, passing a fine fortified farm-house with circular towers at each corner of its four sides and in a few minutes have turned into the historic old town of Gisors. It is as picturesque as any place in Normandy with the exception of Mont St Michel. The river Epte gliding slowly through its little canals ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... diluvial character of the winter rains. Doubtless the outsides of the walls were faced with well burnt bricks, carefully set, and often coated with an impenetrable enamel; but an inclined plane of a more or less gentle gradient wound from base to summit to give access to the latter. When a storm burst upon one of these towers, this plane became in a moment the bed of a torrent, for its outer edge would, of course, be protected by a low wall. The water would pour like a river over the sloping pavement ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... motion. So hilly is the little island that if the engine is approaching the chances are it looks as if it were about to plunge wildly down on its head and turn a somersault into the station, or else it seems to be gradually climbing up a steep gradient after the fashion of a fly on the wall. But everything appears well managed, and the dulness of the daily press is never enlivened by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Frank gazed at the foremost carriage in alarm, so nearly was it upset in one of the ruts of the ill-kept road; but the rate at which they were going saved it, and they thundered along without accident to where the gradient ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... order the company's engineer to comply with standing orders at all costs rather than introduce any special clause. The consequence is that we see much money spent and a most inconvenient level-crossing placed at the entrance to some large town, where a steep gradient for two hundred yards on a straight piece of road (to which there is no objection) would have avoided all difficulty. The responsibility in all such cases should be thrown on the company, and ...
— Speculations from Political Economy • C. B. Clarke
... may be described as the natural gradient which the machine automatically makes when engine power is cut off. It will be evident why it is safer for a pilot to fly, say, at four or five thousand feet high than just over the tree-tops or the chimney-pots of towns. Suppose, for example, the machine has a gliding angle of one in twelve, ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... you call it a basin, the vast plain through which it runs, the savannah which on all sides stretches out of sight, without a hill to give a gradient, without a mountain to bound ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... changing connections in the opposite order of succession, and, therefore, slowing the car. There is, however, no definite speed corresponding to each notch, for this will vary with the load on each car, and with the gradient upon which it ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord |
