"Electric current" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chain, one end of which passes over a sprocket wheel in the hoisting mechanism. On the lower end of the chain is hung an electro-magnet of sufficient magnetic strength to support the heaviest striking weights. When it is desired to drop the striking weight the electric current is broken and reversed by means of an automatic switch and current breaker. The height of drop may be regulated by setting at the desired height on one of the columns a tripping pin which throws the switch on the magnet and so breaks and ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... by surrounding them with bodies which did not conduct it; and in 1745 the Leyden jar was invented, which led to the knowledge that the force of electricity could be extended through an indefinite circuit. The French savants conveyed the electric current through a circuit of twelve ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... he had been distinguished for this faculty, variable with the state of the atmosphere. As a rule, the act of shaking hands was generally attended by a quivering sensation like that produced by an electric current, and contact with his tongue ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... when a single shot startled the echoes of the rocks, and instant alertness passed like an electric current through the squadron. The advance guard, which had already entered the defile, consisted of three promising young Pathans from Denvil's troop; and anxiety for the fate of his favourites pricked the Boy to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... was rapidly fitted up as an impromptu radiographic department, the windows painted over and covered with thick paper, a stove introduced, and a dark-room contrived with the aid of a cupboard and two curtains. Electric current was obtained from a dynamo bolted on to the step of a twenty-horse-power car, and driven by a belt from the flywheel of the engine. The car stood out in the courtyard and snorted away, whilst we worked in the storeroom alongside. The coil and mercury break ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... the clouds, they, too, dropped off. The rescuers and rescued mounted higher and higher, and, when they were far enough up so that there was no danger from the spears or arrows, Tom switched on the lights, and turned the electric current into the search-lantern, the rays of which beamed down on the mass of ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... yet the fire with which Mr. Moffat uttered these simple words, lifted all hearts and surcharged the atmosphere with an emotion rarely awakened in a court of law. Not in my pulses alone was started the electric current of renewed life. The jury, to a man, glowed with enthusiasm, and from the audience rose one long and suppressed sigh of answering feeling, which was all the tribute he needed for his eloquence—or Carmel for her uncalculating, ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... like an electric current, and a blessing came at once to his own soul and to the souls ...
— Men of the Bible • Dwight Moody
... magnificent new frigate of the United States Navy; but, when five miles of cable had been paid out, it caught in the machinery and parted. On the second trial, when two hundred miles at sea, the electric current was suddenly lost, and men paced the decks nervously and sadly, as if in the presence of death. Just as Mr. Field was about to give the order to cut the cable, the current returned as quickly and mysteriously ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... kilowatt of current used between Trenton and Albany, the New York metropolitan area included. Except for a few little storage-battery or Diesel generator systems, that couldn't handle one tenth of one per cent of the barest minimum load, it's been the only source of electric current here since 1962, when the last coal-burning power plant was dismantled. Knock this plant out and you darken every house and office and factory and street in the area. You immobilize the elevators—think what that would mean in lower and midtown Manhattan ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... upward movement of his hands, as if they had been jerked by an electric current, then ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was active and rapid, rather than powerful, and in all his writings we feel the want of a stronger electric current to give that vigor of conception and felicity of expression, by which we distinguish the undefinable something called genius; while his moral nature, though refined and elevated, seems to have been subordinate to his intellectual tendencies ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... has only one interest in him: that he stick to his instruments; while the engine-room crew strictly is the source from which his blessings flow, his blessings taking the invisible, vital form of electric current. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... is now twenty minutes past ten. At 10 46' 40'', precisely, Murphy will send the electric current into the gun-cotton. We have, therefore, twenty-six minutes more to remain ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... of the Nanshan Heights defences. These pitfalls were arranged in regular lines, interrupted at intervals by patches of mined ground, while outside these again there ran a practically continuous girdle of barbed wire entanglements, the wire being charged with an electric current powerful enough to instantly destroy any one who should be unfortunate enough to come into contact with it. Liao-yang defences were, in fact, a repetition of the defences of the Nanshan Heights—where the Japanese suffered such appalling ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... See note to the teacher, Footnote 9.]—It was mentioned previously that electricity is not a fuel. Hence electric stoves are not provided with burners. They have heaters which contain coils of wires through which an electric current passes. Electricity is the cleanest source of heat for cooking. But in order to operate an electric stove economically, it is necessary to utilize the current required for a heating element to its greatest extent. For example, if the current is turned ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... Do we ever know what electric current precipitates the avalanche or decides a revolution? It may result from anything or nothing. But finally, Adolphe, after a period to be determined in each case by the circumstances of the couple, utters this fatal phrase, in the midst of a discussion: "Ah! when I ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... Naudin employs 12 voltameters that discharge 12 hectoliters per hour, for a distillery that handles 300 hectoliters of impure spirits every 24 hours. The electric current is furnished to the voltameters by a Siemens machine (Fig. 3) having inductors in derivation, the intensity being regulated by the aid of resistance wires interposed in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... a sputter and a flicker and a last expiring tremor, we had begun to realize that the going season was, indeed, nearly gone, something happened. There was a rally, and a brief return to animation. The corpselike season sat up and waved its hands. An electric current, applied to its extremities by one admirable actress and one enterprising manager, was the cause of this surprising change, and the writing of ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... compartments, tier on tier, about the size of ordinary post office boxes. Closer examination showed that each was equipped with a delicate needle arranged to oscillate backward and forward upon the very minutest interference with the electric current. Under the boxes, each of which bore a number, was a series of drops and buzzers numbered to correspond with ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... employed were light blows from the cork tip of a hammer actuated by an electric current. These instruments, of which there were two, exactly alike in construction, were similar in principle to the acoustical hammers employed by Estel and Mehner. Each consisted essentially of a lever about ten inches in length, pivoted near one ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... that one table will serve both for mixing and setting hot utensils on. If possible, install a gas range, or an electric range if current is cheap enough to warrant. The range should, if possible, have an oven heat regulator. Where gas is unavailable and cost of electric current high, install a good oil stove with an oven. Refrigerator should be on porch or vestibule just outside kitchen door or should be in the kitchen near the back door away from the stove. If space permits, table next to refrigerator ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney
... but a discovery. We knew what we wanted; a carbonised tissue, which would withstand the electric current in a vacuum for, say, a thousand hours. If no such tissue existed, then the incandescent light, as we know it, was not possible. My assistants started out to find this tissue, and we simply carbonised everything we could lay our hands on, and ran the current through it in a vacuum. At last ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... wonder of wonders, that the Almighty God will use frail humanity as the vehicles of His power, and will make Moses and Aaron shine with reflected glory. Man can send an electric current into a fragile carbon film and make it incandescent. He can send his voice across a continent, and make it speak on a distant shore. And the Lord God can do wonders compared with which these are only as the dimmest dreams. He can send His holy power into ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... beautiful instruments are employed. When all are on board again and ready for the supermarine voyage, the engineer loads up with a much more powerful charge than before. He prepares at the start for a speed of a mile in three seconds, then, when fairly out over the sea, a stronger electric current is applied to the huge charge, and a speed of a mile, or even more, a second is obtained. This fearful velocity is not permitted overland, for fear of collisions, as car routes cross each other. But no routes cross over the sea between St. John's ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... 4th, John Winslow brought from Virginia the rumor of the English Revolution and the landing of the Prince of Orange, it went through their blood like the electric current, and thrilled from the city along the byways into every home. Men got on their horses and rode onward to the next house to carry the tidings that the popish King was down and William was up, and that there was hope; through town and country the questions were eagerly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... a full year's experience with the false Hansanella and in that time they blighted our supremest joys. There was always a gap in the circle where they stood and they stopped the electric current whenever it reached them. I am more anxious that the Eugenic Societies should eliminate this kind of child from the future than almost any other type. It has chalk and water instead of blood in its veins. ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a summer in this section of the country before, and he knew no more than did Ralph the destruction often caused by the electric current where so much ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... difficult to get him to talk of the relative importance of his inventions, but he has expressed the opinion that the one of most far-reaching importance is the electric light system which includes the generation, regulation, distribution and measurement of electric current for light, heat and power. The invention he loves most is the phonograph as he is a lover of music. He has patented about ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... An electric current seemed to pass from her arm into mine. Besides I noticed that she too seemed pleased with me, and that naturally raises one's spirits. My scrutiny from an artistic point of view proved highly satisfactory. There are faces ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... purpose. Once arrived at the summit of Stony Hill, the wire supported on poles for a distance of two miles met a powerful pile of Bunsen passing through a non-conducting apparatus. It would, therefore, be enough to press with the finger the knob of the apparatus for the electric current to be at once established, and to set fire to the 400,000 lbs. of gun-cotton. It is hardly necessary to say that this was only to be done at ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... the engineer in charge of the hydro-electric plant of the Woodbridge Quarry Company, became interested in the "Scout Engineers," and through him the officials of the quarry company were persuaded to allow the lads to use as much electric current as they required without cost. The youngsters quickly built a transmission line to the electric station, which was located a few miles north of the town on a ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... electric current as it passes through a solution is distributed among three factors, first, its potential, which is measured in volts, and corresponds to what is called "head" in a stream of water; second, current strength, which is measured in amperes, and corresponds to the ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... on a patient may with safety be flipped off with a dry board or stick. A live wire may be safely cut by an axe or hatchet with a dry wooden handle and the electric current may be short circuited by dropping a crowbar or a poker on the wire. They should be dropped on the side from which the current is coming and not on the further side as the latter will not short circuit the current ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... work, signor," he said, with a shrug of his shoulders, "now that the electric current ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... caused exclusively by captured insects crawling over and repeatedly irritating the sensitive filaments; and this view seemed the more probable when I learnt from Dr. Burdon Sanderson that whenever the filaments of a closed leaf are irritated, the normal electric current is disturbed. Nevertheless, such irritation is by no means necessary, for a dead insect, or a bit of meat, or of albumen, all act equally well; proving that in these cases it is the absorption of animal matter which excites the lobes slowly to press close together. We have seen ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... result Where genius fails completely. Touch his hand, It thrilled through all your being—meet his eye, And you were moved, yet knew not how, or why. Let him but rise, you felt the air was stirred By an electric current. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... There was something sinister about it, something vaguely terrible. Yet, as she stood there waiting, she was not afraid. Something deeper than fear was in her heart. Pulsing through and through her like an electric current was a deep and passionate revolt against the fate ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... hitching strap. The knot was covered with a thin coating of ice, and it was several minutes before he could loosen it. But his teeth finally pulled it apart, and with the reins in his hands he sprang upon the wheel. And as he stood so, a shock of fear ran down his back like an electric current, his breath left him, and he stood immovable, gazing with wide eyes into ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... in a nitric acid solution are readily decomposed by the electric current, but the deposited bismuth is not coherent. It comes down in shaggy tufts which are difficult to wash ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... delivered from the abnormal appetite instantly through sanctification of the Spirit. I knew an old man, who had been a drunkard for over fifty years, similarly delivered. I knew a young man, the slave of a vicious habit of the flesh, who was set free at once by the fiery baptism. The electric current cannot transform the dead wire into a live one quicker than the Holy Spirit can flood a soul with light and love, destroy the carnal mind, and fill a man with ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... nature as those of light, and are felt by us as heat. To do this, Langley invented a sort of artificial eye, which he called a bolometer, in which the optic nerve is made of an extremely thin strip of metal, so slight that one can hardly see it, which is traversed by an electric current. This eye would be so dazzled by the heat radiated from one's body that, when in use, it must be protected from all such heat by being enclosed in a case kept at a constant temperature by being immersed in water. With this eye the ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... upon vegetation has been the subject of numerous investigations. Some have been made to ascertain the effects of the electric current through the soil; others to ascertain the effect of the electric light upon growth through the air. Among the latter are those of Prof. L.H. Bailey of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station. In Bulletin No. 30 of the Horticultural Department is given an account ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... to the alphabet of his knowledge: he knew that under ordinary circumstances the presence of an electrified body was sufficient to excite, by induction, an unelectrified body. He knew that the wire which carried an electric current was an electrified body, and still that all attempts had failed to make it excite in other wires a state similar ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... being in the first instance avoided. Uniting the two ends of the battery by a thick wire, the attraction is satisfied, the oxygen unites with the metal, zinc is consumed, and heat, as usual, is the result of the combustion. A power which, for want of a better name, we call an electric current, passes at the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... went on, "proved that under the electric current and other exciting mediums metals exhibited practically every reaction of the human nerve and muscle. It grew weary, rested, and after resting was perceptibly stronger than before; it got what was practically indigestion, and it exhibited ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Marie Bashkirtseff as warring with vast genius against unknown powers, but who now is in her coffin among worms, her skull grinning and showing its teeth. She would be possessed by her and thrilled as by an electric current. A dwarf beggar wrings her heart with pity, but she will not be overwhelmed. Though a daring peasant, she will be free and sing out her paean to the sun, though amid the infernal glow of furnaces, forges, and the ringing noise ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... was discovered, but it looked as though human intelligence would never be able to set it free from its prison. Nevertheless I have not only set it free, but I am able to control it as perfectly as if it were steam from a boiler, or an electric current ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... the lance—bore his crest, or an emblematic allusion to some event in his career, embroidered, it was supposed, by the hand of his lady-love. A yet more sacred gift was the scarf worn across the shoulder, an indispensable appendage to a knight fully equipped. The emotions of the human soul send an electric current through the ages, and women who during four years of war toiled to aid our soldiers in the great struggle of the nineteenth century felt their hearts beat in unison with hers who gave, with tears and prayers, pennon and scarf to the knightly and beloved ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... frog) lying immediately below the optic centres and closely connected with them. Nerve-fibres of the sympathetic can easily be traced and can be seen to penetrate this centre. When this centre is artificially stimulated either with the point of a needle or with a mild electric current, tinctumutation ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... that India was lost, was guessed by intuition rather than known as a certainty. Australia was as isolated from Britain as though it had been on another planet, and now every one of the Atlantic cables had suddenly ceased to respond to the stimulus of the electric current. No ships came from the East, or West, or South. The British ports were choked with fleets of useless merchantmen, to which the markets of the world were no ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... a proof that I am not speaking without foundation, this young lady will allow you to feel her hands, when you will at once become aware of the electric current. [The Sibyl leans across the barrier, and tenders a decidedly pretty palm for public pressure, but there is the usual reluctance at first to embrace the opportunity. At length a seeker after truth grasps the hand, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... explorers tell us of the dipping of the needle as the vessel sails in regions of the farthest north known. In reality, they are at the curve; on the edge of the shell, where gravity is geometrically increased, and while the electric current seemingly dashes off into space toward the phantom idea of the North Pole, yet this same electric current drops again and continues its course southward along the inside surface ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... delight in these things, I reached the railway station at Lauterbruennen, from whence the little train is driven far up the mountain, even into the very heart of the Jungfrau, by an electric current generated by a turbine, itself driven by the torrent at our feet, the waters of which have descended from the glaciers far above, to which it will carry us. In a few minutes I was gently gliding in the train up the to the "Wengern Alp" and the "Little Scheidegg"—a slope up which ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... breathed. "One kind of copper ore. They reduced it, extracted some of the pure metal. See all the little reddish specks shining? It is pretty well established that the process is something like electroplating. There's a dissolving acid—then a weak electric current—from a kind of battery... Oh, nobody should laugh, Frank—Dr. Pacetti keeps pointing out that there are electric eels on Earth, with specialized muscle-tissue that acts as an electric cell... But this is ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... and were changed frequently. The windows of the old barracks where he slept were fortified with steel bars, and the open camp where the prisoners were employed in outside work was surrounded with wires through which a strong electric current ran. To touch them would mean instant death, and they were so close together that it would be impossible to squeeze ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... When there is no electric current available, matches or candles may be used and inserted through the holes H, as shown in the ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... possessed no magnetic properties whatever, nor did it encroach on the magnetic domain: only vague similarities in the phenomena of attraction and repulsion aroused attention. But directly electricity was set in motion, constituting what is called an electric current, magnetic lines of force instantly sprang into being, without the presence of any steel or iron; and in twenty years they were recognised. These electrically generated lines of force are similar to those previously known, but they need no matter to sustain them. They need matter ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... the air and gas takes merely a short time to effect by diffusion, the difference in density causing the gas to rise on issuing from the jet, which is on the floor of the chamber. The detonating cap is then ignited by the passage of the electric current and the shot fired. The operator, placed in his shelter, can observe, by means of the small lateral windows, whether any flame is produced, and indeed, a little experience will enable him to determine by the sound alone, whether an explosion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... shock produced by contact with an electric current is not of rare occurrence. Lightning stroke is very uncommon; statistics show that in the United States each year there is one death from this cause to each million of inhabitants. There are several conditions which must be borne in mind when considering the accidental effect ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... undergo some change. For example, the physicist determines the density, elasticity, hardness, electrical and thermal conductivity, thermal expansion, &c.; the chemist, on the other hand, investigates changes in composition, such as may be effected by an electric current, by heat, or when two or more substances are mixed. A further differentiation of the provinces of chemistry and physics is shown by the classifications of matter. To the physicist matter is presented in three leading ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... of the invaded country from escaping German control and joining the Belgian forces under King Albert. Yes, they could see the light shot from a small moon, which had now risen, shining on the wires, shining on that lower one which was charged with an electric current. ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... resembling lightning, and we naturally seized on whatever was before us to await the opening of "Hell." After more sheet lightning the veil was drawn aside and there were before us representations of human beings in every attitude of agony. At the same moment the electric current was passed through certain bars before us, on one of which the boatman held a firm grip, but no sooner was he charged with electricity than his hair flew on end, he looked the picture of terror, shouted in a loud voice, "O, hell!" and broke for the door. Soon ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the Germans, consisted of a number of shacks, in barrack fashion, with a central parade, or exercise ground. About it all was a barbed wire stockade and, though the character of these wires did not show, there were also some carrying a deadly electric current. ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... spared from the fire-fighting operations engaged instantly in an active search, but there was no clue to Mrs. Fenley's disappearance beyond an open door and a missing night light. The electric current was shut off at the main at midnight, except on a special circuit communicating with the hall, the courtyard, and MacBain's den, where he ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... merely a point of style and not an attitude of the heart with the old Greek tragedians—a calm which, unlike theirs, insulates, so to speak, and is intended to insulate, the writer, to the end that his individuality, of which only the electric current of sympathy ever makes a reader conscious, may disappear, and the characters of the drama stand forth the more life-like from the complete concealment of ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... plaster cast, and into these moulds liquid metal—an alloy mainly composed of lead—is run, and left to cool. All these five toys have wheels that move. They are electro-gilt—that is, the gilding is fixed on them by means of a bath through which an electric current passes. ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various |
