"Perpetual motion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hour some visits a score; Though, since first on the wheels, I've been every day At the 'Change, at a raffling, at church, or a play; And the fops of the town are pleased with the notion Of calling your slave the perpetual motion;— Though oft at your door I have whined [out] my love As my Knight does grin his at your Lady above; Yet, ne'er before this, though I used all my care, I e'er was so happy to meet my dear Chair; And since we're so near, like birds of a feather, Let's e'en, as they ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... suit the stoking. The first method is carried out in any of the many forms of mechanical stoker, of which this of Sinclair's is an admirable specimen. Fresh fuel is perpetually being pushed on in front, and by alternate movement of the fire bars the fire is kept in perpetual motion till the ashes drop out at the back. To such an arrangement as this a steady air supply can be adjusted, and if the boiler demand is constant there is no need for smoke, and an inferior fuel may be used. The other plan is to vary the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... third law, which is extremely simple, though it has extraordinarily far-reaching consequences, and when combined with a denial of "action at a distance," is precisely the principle of the Conservation of Energy. Attempts at perpetual motion may all be regarded as attempts to get round ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... had going the usual number of students' stories about rewards offered by the Board of Longitude for discoveries in that matter,— stories, all of which, so far as I know, are lies. Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough. But as to this business of the longitude, it was reserved for Q.[1] to make the happy hit and to explain it ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... descend upon the chronometer that timed his race. The dust atoms that a hundred years ago had been exalted to make a man now clamored for their humble rehabilitation. Man shall never, in this mortal body we use, exemplify perpetual motion. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... chief attribute is her tongue, which has solved the secret of perpetual motion. Had it kept silent even for a few seconds at lunch time today, that sharp-eyed and rabbit-eared detective would never have known of the second picture—your picture—because I can eke out my exhibits by a half finished sketch of the lake and a pencil note of the gates. But ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... whom personally he seems to have an affectionate friendship and for whose work a rueful and decidedly humorous appreciation. He analyzed with great sapience the psychological effect on the audience of Mr. Dundee's ring-system of perpetual motion. He described with great delight a punch that Mr. Dundee had landed on the very top of his head. In fact Mr. Dundee's publicity manager could do no better than to use parts of this interview for ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... trace the cause, the moving power, thro all the curiously arranged means, to the agent who acted as prime mover to the whole affair. Others, less cautious in their conclusions, might think it a perpetual motion. Such would find a first cause short of the Creator, the great original of all things and actions; and thus violate the soundest principles of philosophy. Heaven has never left a vacuum where a new and ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile. Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil, That turns and turns to give the world a notion Of endless torments and perpetual motion. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... shape of an entertainment for every night. Every moment of the day, too, of every day was filled up. It seemed to Mrs. Ketchum that "those English people," as she called them, were never idle, and had discovered the secret of perpetual motion. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... begin sweeping for a planet, he would have detected it within 1-3/4 of the place assigned to it by Adams. But anyone in the situation of the astronomer-royal knows that almost every post brings absurd letters from ambitious correspondents, some of them having just discovered perpetual motion, or squared the circle, or proved the earth flat, or discovered the constitution of the moon or of ether or of electricity; and in this mass of rubbish it requires great skill and patience to detect such gems ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... no longer waste our time over the impossible task of manufacturing energy for ourselves. Our science will bring to an abrupt end the long series of severe experiments in which we have indulged in the hope of finding a perpetual motion. And having decided upon this once for all, our first step in seeking a more satisfactory state of things must be to find a new source of energy. Following Nature, only one course is open to us. We must ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... cases the machines would have been of absolutely no use if perfected. In other cases the inventions were of the utterly hopeless class, incapable of perfection, like some perpetual motion apparatus. In these cases Tom turned a deaf ear, though if the inventor were in want our ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... accord, than that such numerous and extraordinary facts had really just come to light. They would feel a right to exercise the same obduracy towards them as the French Institute is in the habit of displaying when memoirs or models are offered to it relating to the squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; which it is the rule to pass over without notice. They would feel as astronomers and natural philosophers must have felt when, some half a dozen years ago, an unknown man came forward, and asked for an opportunity to demonstrate to Arago and his colleagues that ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... place, we note that the Russian Socialist tyrants give the workmen, in exchange for their labor, pieces of paper run off from printing presses which seem almost to have solved the problem of perpetual motion. The workmen are wise if they spend this fiat money daily for whatever it will bring in food, for its value will collapse utterly when the dictatorship bursts, leaving the country financially prostrate, without credit or means of exchange. This is one of the greatest bunco games ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... his stool of office in the doctor's consulting room, swinging his legs. Would-be discoverers of perpetual motion might have received many hints from Bubble, though he himself would have scorned to consider the swinging of legs as motion. He was under the delusion that he was sitting perfectly still. For the ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... apparently unexplained change of mood in going into some room. One can learn a deal by analyzing one's own sensations. Figured wall-papers should also be chosen with the greatest care for this same reason. Papers which have perpetual motion in their design, or eyes which seem to peer, or an unstable pattern of gold running over it, must all be ignored. People who choose this kind of paper are blest, or cursed, whichever way one looks at it, by an ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... whole island was employed in preparing for the great fleet and in huzzaing Popanilla. When at borne, every ten minutes he was obliged to appear in the balcony, and then, with hand on heart and hat in hand, ah! that bow! that perpetual motion of popularity! If a man love ease, let him be most unpopular. The Managers did the impossible to assist and advance the intercourse between the two nations. They behaved in a liberal and enlightened manner, and a deputation of liberal and enlightened merchants consequently waited upon them with ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... it in the eccentric section of a library, with books on perpetual motion and the fourth dimension. But if you'd let us ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... capable of disordering the intellects as an intense application to any one of these six things: the Quadrature of the Circle; the Multiplication of the Cube; the Perpetual Motion; the Philosophical Stone; Magic; and Judicial Astrology. "It is proper, however," Fontenelle remarks, "to apply one's self to these inquiries; because we find, as we proceed, many valuable discoveries of which we were before ignorant." The same thought Cowley has ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Astronomical Society a Paper about deducing the mass of the Moon from observations of Venus: on Nov. 16th a Paper to the Cambridge Philosophical Society on a correction to the length of a ball-pendulum: and on Dec. 14th a Paper on certain conditions under which perpetual motion is possible.—The engravings for my Figure of the Earth in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana were dispatched at the end of the year. Some of the Paper (perhaps much) was written after my return from the Continent.—I began, but never finished, a Paper on the form of ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... and his plea for drinking to "wa-ash down your honour's health:" or his anti-polarity as Nipperkin, when his very legs seemed drunk beneath him; his attempt to set down the keg would stagger the disbelievers of perpetual motion. Again, who did not relish the richness of his voice, and the arch crispness which he gave to some words, while others came not trippingly off his tongue, but lingered and jarred with an effect which accounts for so many imitators. His mouth had a peculiar twist, somewhat resembling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... wages, can then be reduced to comparing the simple unit called labour. Both Mill and M'Culloch regard capital as a kind of labour, so that things may be produced by capital alone, 'without the co-operation of any immediate labour'[372]—a result which can hardly be realised with the discovery of a perpetual motion. So, again, the value of a joint product is the 'sum' of these two values.[373] All value, therefore, can be regarded as proportioned to labour in one of its two states. M'Culloch advanced to an unfortunate conclusion, which excited some ridicule. Though ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... aerial navigation seems at present to be agitating as many pseudo-scientific minds as did that of perpetual motion not many years ago, or the philosopher's stone at a more remote period. It possesses perhaps a still stronger attraction in the danger connected with the experiments—the source, we suppose, of the eagerness shown by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... glass, you cannot at once (say at three feet distance) see the outlines of the eye and cheek. They disappear every where, except in the focus common to both eyes. Then nothing is seen absolutely at rest. The act of breathing imparts perpetual motion to the artist and the model. The aspen leaf is trembling in the stillest air. Whatever difference of opinion may exist as to Turner's use or abuse of his great faculties, no one will doubt that he has never been excelled in the art of giving space and relative ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 20, March 16, 1850 • Various
... have here," the colonel said dryly, "except that Keely at least had an explanation for where he was getting his power. Back around 1874, a man named John Keely claimed he had invented a wonderful new power source. He called it a breakthrough in the field of perpetual motion. An undiscovered source of power, he said, controlled by harmony. He had a machine in his lab which would begin to turn a flywheel when he blew a chord on a harmonica. He could stop it by blowing a sour ...
— With No Strings Attached • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)
... or at least others, that he had discovered perpetual motion, vowed that he had made a machine which, "by a simple mechanism," could replace steam power and had been declared practicable by the first engineers in Paris; but of course he declined to speak freely about it. Columbus and Fulton ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... latter is that the gas structures, which before were constantly changing, now assume lasting form. This, too, happens because the Lords of Form cause their forces to flow in and out of the human etheric body. When the Lords of Motion alone were acting on the gaseous organisms, these were in perpetual motion, not keeping their form for an instant. Now, however, they temporarily assume distinguishable shapes. Again, after a certain period, there occurs a time of rest; and then once more the Lords of Form continue their activity. ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... granted, and we went into a sort of saloon, over-looking the Neckar; very small, very bright, and very close. The floor was slippery with polish; long narrow pieces of looking-glass against the walls reflected the perpetual motion of the river opposite; a white porcelain stove, with some old-fashioned ornaments of brass about it; a sofa, covered with Utrecht velvet, a table before it, and a piece of worsted-worked carpet under it; a vase of artificial flowers; and, lastly, an alcove with a bed in it, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... will concede is, that the Republicans and gold standard Democrats are certainly on their past statements entitled to the $1,000,000 offered by the United States patent office for the invention of a perpetual motion, would not they have a complete and perpetual motion in their bank issuing money with the Government completely separate from the banking business, for we see the bank issue would be made of paper, ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... behold Nature's great display from the half submerged conning-tower of a U-boat, and to dive through the mountainous breakers until they close gurgling over our heads and hide us from all curious glances. Our little nutshell, in perpetual motion, is drawn down into the deep valleys of the ocean waves, or tossed upwards on the comb of the following breaker. We are soaked to the skin, and the spray covers us like a silvery veil; our boat as well as ourselves is daubed with a salt crust, our eyes smart ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... almost asleep when he felt a presentiment that something was about to happen. He opened his eyes just in time to see Forestier close his. He coughed slightly, and two streams of blood issued from the corners of his mouth and flowed upon his night robe; his hands ceased their perpetual motion; he had breathed his last. His wife, perceiving it, uttered a cry and fell upon her knees by the bedside. Georges, in surprise and affright, mechanically made the ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... ignobly failed. He had contrived and patented a machine for milking cows, which might have done all that was claimed for it if anybody—cows included—could have been induced to give it a trial, and he had fiddled around with perpetual motion until the place was a litter of ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... I was somewhat the more induced by the relations I have met with in Geographical Writers, of drawing fresh Water from the bottom of the Sea, which is salt above. I cannot now stand to examine, whether this natural perpetual motion may not artificially be imitated: Nor can I stand to answer the Objections which may be made against this my Supposition: As, First, How it comes to pass, that there are sometimes salt Springs much higher then the Superficies of ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... in a moment. The stillness of the vessel, after its perpetual motion, gave her an odd sensation, not unlike what she had felt when it first began to move; but she was quickly dressed and on deck. There were a good many people there, and the water all round was alive with boats and shipping of every description, but Lucia's ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... them, and the waists of their short woolen gowns inserted modestly in the region of their shoulder-blades. Round the outer edge of the assemblage thus formed, flying detachments of plump white-headed children careered in perpetual motion; while, mysteriously apart from the rest of the inhabitants, the musicians of the Baths stood collected in one lost corner, waiting the appearance of the first visitors to play the first tune of the season in the form ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... his theories was that the air around the earth was immovable and pregnant with disease, and that everything in it was mortal; but that the upper air was in perpetual motion, and pure and salubrious, and that everything in that was immortal, and on that account divine. And that the sun and the moon and the stars were all gods; for in them the warm principle predominates which is the cause of life. And that the moon derives its light from the sun. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... you take steps to make known that yesterday I completed my invention which will give motion to every country on the Earth;—to move Machinery!—the long sought in vain 'Perpetual Motion'!!—I was supported at the time by the Queen and H.R.H. Prince Albert. If, Gentlemen, you can advise me how to proceed to claim the reward, if any is offered by the Government, or how to secure the PATENT for the machine, or in any way assist me by advice in this great ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... child, and acquitted herself in her new office with an amount of importance which was very comical. Hiding her old limbs under rich Persian robes, she moved about exulting in the new and delightful right to command, and kept her inferiors in perpetual motion. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... spent half an hour in listening to the astonishing oratory that was going on there. Although I had not done this for many, many years, there was so little change in the proceedings that I gained a new impression of perpetual motion. The same—or to all intents and purposes the same—leather lungs were still at it, either arraigning the Deity or commending His blessed benefactions. As invariably of old, a Hindu was present; but whether he was the Hindu of the Middle Ages or a new Hindu, I cannot say. One proselytizing ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... that he had not eaten, discovered that he was hungry, and ordered some sandwiches and beer. Still staring, the figures began to differentiate themselves, although they all appeared, somehow, in perpetual motion; hurrying, though seated. It was like gazing at a quivering cinematograph. Here and there ribbons of smoke curled upward, adding volume to the blue cloud that hung over the tables, which in turn was dissipated in spots by the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... receded, and turned from the mother to the daughter, little Lady Anne Mowbray, a light fantastic figure, bedecked with "daisies pied," covered with a profusion of tiny French flowers, whose invisible wire stalks kept in perpetual motion as she turned her pretty head from side to side. Smiling, sighing, tittering, flirting with the officers round her, Lady Anne appeared, and seemed as if she delighted in appearing, as perfect a contrast as possible to her august and formidable ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... antics on the shore. He frisked and danced around along the sand playing all sorts of antics. He walked on his hind feet, turned somersaults in quick succession, and acted as though possessed with perpetual motion, but not one yelp or bark or ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... money and worked hard, and traveled hard, and had heaps of negroes all contracted for, and everything going along just right, he couldn't get the laws passed and down the whole thing tumbled. And there in Kentucky, when he raked up that old numskull that had been inventing away at a perpetual motion machine for twenty-two years, and Beriah Sellers saw at a glance where just one more little cog-wheel would settle the business, why I could see it as plain as day when he came in wild at midnight and hammered us out of bed and told the whole thing ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... winds up with the solemn and emphatic declaration, "On the evidence hereafter to be presented, we have with much deliberation concluded to denounce Bernal Diaz as a myth." For the evidence here promised we have searched with a patience of investigation which, if applied to the problem of perpetual motion or squaring the circle, could not, we humbly think, have been wholly unproductive; and these are the results. "The author of 'Bernal Diaz' says the march to Jalapa was accomplished in one day;—a proof that he never saw the country.... Cortez makes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common. If ye will needs say I am an old man, you should give me rest. I would to God my name were not so terrible to the enemy as it is: I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion. ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... necessity for the greater portion of the labour performed by the old lady: but she seemed to work from some irresistible impulse; her limbs continually swaying to and fro, as if there were some indefatigable engine concealed within her body which kept her in perpetual motion. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... addressed most of her discourse to her sister, that she might have the pleasure every minute of uttering 'Your ladyship,' in order to show what she herself expected. And as she spoke, her fingers were in perpetual motion, either adjusting her tucker, placing her plaits of her robe, or fiddling with a diamond cross, that hung down on her bosom, her eyes accompanying her fingers as they moved, and then suddenly being snatched off, that she might not be observed to think of her own dress; yet was it plain, ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... an hour's time more agreeably. In the curio hall, as one of the lecturers on the curios called it—they had several lecturers in white wigs and scholars' caps and gowns—there was not a great deal to see, I confess; but everything was very high-class. There was the inventor of a perpetual motion, who lectured upon it and explained it from a diagram. There was a fortune-teller in a three-foot tent whom I did not interview; there were five macaws in one cage, and two gloomy apes in another. On a platform ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... four days in brigade reserve. After thirty-two days of this the brigade went out for sixteen days in divisional reserve. It was all so beautiful and soothing that it seemed as though the problem of perpetual motion had been solved and the war had come for an eternity. The enemy did the same thing, and we knew when he did it. He left us alone on relief days and we returned the compliment. Thus on December 9th we effected a peaceful passage into brigade reserve ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... still—Tudor, perhaps—Jacobean, anyway—by a smart young society architect who wore soft collars and an uptwisted mustache, and who, by a perfectly reciprocal arrangement which almost deserves to be called a form of perpetual motion, owed the fact that he was an architect to his social position, and maintained his social ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... at me with the same tolerant air that father uses on the offspring who comes up with one of the standard juvenile plans for perpetual motion. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... feeling. But this leads us to the doctrine of the universal flux, about which a battle-royal is always going on in the cities of Ionia. 'Yes; the Ephesians are downright mad about the flux; they cannot stop to argue with you, but are in perpetual motion, obedient to their text-books. Their restlessness is beyond expression, and if you ask any of them a question, they will not answer, but dart at you some unintelligible saying, and another and another, making no way either with themselves or with others; for nothing is fixed ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... necessarily be finite; and consequently, that Power which is in Body is finite too. If therefore we can find any Power, which produces an Infinite Effect, 'tis plain that it is not in Body. Now we find, that the Heav'n is mov'd about with a Perpetual Motion, without any Cessation. Therefore if we affirm the Eternity of the World, it necessarily follows that the Power which moves it, is not in its own Body, nor in the other Exterior Body; but proceeds from something altogether abstracted from ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... years of this brilliant and beloved woman were devoted to futile attempts to solve the problem of Perpetual Motion. I wish she had given ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... Arlington Street meant a return to the ceaseless whirl of gaiety. Even at Rood Hall life had been as near an approach to perpetual motion as one could hope for in this world; but the excitement and the hurrying and scampering in Berkshire had a rustic flavour; there were moments that were almost repose, a breathing space between the blue river and the blue sky, in a world that seemed made of green fields and hanging woods, the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... arbitrary quantities which they are to involve; a primitive cause which shall dispose the elements in due relation to each other, in order that regular recurrence may accompany constant change, and that perpetual motion may be ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... private letter gives, perhaps, the best possible explanation of his own heart in this perpetual motion towards the Cross. Who that saw him in some grand demonstration could imagine that he had been feeling just before ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... not want it three times a day and all the time. So he kept up a fidget, and a struggle, and a turning over, and he gave the whale no time to assimilate him. The man knew that if he was ever to get out he must be in perpetual motion. We know men that are so lethargic they would have given the matter up, and lain down so quietly that in a few hours they would have gone into flukes and ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... you cannot but acknowledge, you are at present sadly deficient. I will place Abscissa's hand in yours whenever you shall come before me and square the circle to my satisfaction. No! That is too easy a condition. I should cheat myself. Say perpetual motion. How do you like that? Do you think it lies within the range of your mental capabilities? You don't smile. Perhaps your talents don't run in the way of perpetual motion. Several people have found that theirs ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... where we were at the time, but I know that we had only to walk through the perpetual motion of Paris, across a bridge, and down a few steps on the other side, to find the little steamer that took us by the river to the Tower. We might have gone by omnibus or by fiacre, but if we had we should never have known what a street the Seine is, sliding ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the greyish abdomen by a broad black band, which ornithologists term a collaret. Sometimes the collaret is interrupted in the middle. The hill-bulbul is a most vivacious bird. From dawn to sunset it is an example of perpetual motion. Its vocal cords are as active as its wings. The tinkling sounds of this bulbul form the dominant notes of the bird chorus. Husband and wife almost always move about in company. They flit from tree to tree, from bush to bush, plucking raspberries and other hill fruit as they ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... Red Doctor told you that my mind was a tottering ruin, which may be quite true; but if it's a matter of investing in the Peruvian Gold, Rubber Tree, and Perpetual Motion Concession, ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... glass or crystal globe, wherein he blew or made a perpetual motion by the power of the four elements. For every thing which (by the force of the elements) passes, in a year, on the surface of the earth (sic!) could be seen to pass in this cylindrical wonder in the shorter lapse of ...
— Notes & Queries,No. 31., Saturday, June 1, 1850 • Various
... to be pleased or displeased—these, and others like them, exist, he thinks, in none of those first four kinds: on such account he adds a fifth kind, which has no name, and so by a new name he calls the soul [Greek: endelecheia], as if it were a certain continued and perpetual motion. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... interior of the building resounded heavy thuds and the din of grinding as of machinery in perpetual motion which made the very foundations of the rocks quiver. On the bridge stood another armed man with whom the new arrivals exchanged watchwords and the same thing was done at the door of the stone building where the old ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... although sometimes, if old tradition is to be credited, their malady of the brain took rather the form of violent delirium, which attacked them at new and full moons. Then the workmen laid down their tools, and rushed off from their labour to play mad pranks up and down the country. Perpetual motion was required to alleviate the agony of fury that seized upon the Cagots at such times. In this desire for rapid movement, the attack resembled the Neapolitan tarantella; while in the mad deeds they performed during such attacks, they were not unlike the northern ...
— An Accursed Race • Elizabeth Gaskell
... for the conceit that learning should dispose men to leisure and privateness, and make men slothful: it were a strange thing if that which accustometh the mind to a perpetual motion and agitation should induce slothfulness, whereas, contrariwise, it may be truly affirmed that no kind of men love business for itself but those that are learned; for other persons love it for profit, as a hireling that loves the work for ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... for use as stop-motions in and about the various machines in the cotton mill has been to a certain extent something like the search after perpetual motion. Very available and quite satisfactory stop-motions have for a number of years been employed wherever the thread or sliver has been twisted so that strength was given it to resist a slight amount of friction, but the main trouble ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... jewelry and novelties on the street corners may net a living income in large cities to those who are experienced in such work, usually called "faking." It is not at all probable that it could be made a profitable calling in Texas.—X.Y.Z. Perpetual motion stands at the head of the absolute impossibilities of life; therefore, the government has never offered a prize for the solution of this mythical problem.—RANGER. Nitro-glycerine is one of the most dangerous ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... tedious and useless, but take our word for it, they are all helps in fitting the mind to grasp the idea of the Oneness of All. Each step is important, and renders the next higher one more easily attained. In this mental drill, it will be well to mentally picture the Universe in perpetual motion—everything is in motion—all matter is moving and changing its forms, and manifesting the Energy within it. Suns and worlds rush through space, their particles constantly changing and moving. Chemical composition and decomposition is constant and unceasing, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... there is a scientific humbug just as large as any other. We have all heard of the Moon Hoax. Do none of you remember the Hydrarchos Sillimannii, that awful Alabama snake? It was only a little while ago that a grave account appeared in a newspaper of a whole new business of compressing ice. Perpetual motion has been the dream of scientific visionaries, and a pretended but cheating realization of it has been exhibited by scamp after scamp. I understand that one is at this moment being invented over in Jersey City. I have purchased more than one "perpetual motion" myself. Many persons will remember ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... fly with them, sitting up, with his mouth open, and his tail flapping against the bottom of the vehicle in perpetual motion. He kept giving his paw first to Vixen and then to Rorie, and exacted a great deal of attention, insomuch that Mr. ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... TALKERS who are not even savants in the science of speech. Thus a philosopher is no longer a savant: he is a talker. Legislators and poets were once profound and sublime characters: now they are talkers. A talker is a sonorous bell, whom the least shock suffices to set in perpetual motion. With the talker, the flow of speech is always directly proportional to the poverty of thought. Talkers govern the world; they stun us, they bore us, they worry us, they suck our blood, and laugh at us. As for the savants, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... years since. Had he lived down to our own times, the old man would probably have made all the gyrations in politics that have distinguished the school to which he would have belonged, and, without his own knowledge, most probably, would have been as near an example of perpetual motion as the world will ever see, through his devotion to what are now called "Whig Principles." We are no great politician, but time has given us the means of comparing; and we often smile when we hear the disciples of Hamilton, and of Adams, and of all that high-toned ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... it is. There can't a drowned-out mine peep its head out but I'm thrust upon it. Well, well, it always was the trick of my countrymen to make a good thing too common. Better rust to death than be scoured to nothing by this perpetual motion." ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... formerly believed that a force might under certain circumstances be originated—created, as it were—and hence the attempts to contrive machines for perpetual motion—that is, machines for the production of force. This idea is now wholly renounced by all well-informed men as utterly impossible in the nature of things. All that human mechanism can do is to provide modes for using advantageously a force previously existing, without ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... intoxicated. Around about this scheme, as might have been expected, others just as wild arose. A company was formed with ten million dollars of capital for importing walnut trees from Virginia. A company for developing a wheel to go by perpetual motion, with a capital of four million dollars. A company for developing a new kind of soap. A company for insuring against losses by servants, with fifteen million dollars capital. One scheme was entitled: "A company for carrying on an undertaking of ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... mountains of Georgia, the neighborhood of Constantinople, the holy city of Jerusalem, and the spicy groves of Arabia Felix. Instead of resigning himself to the luxury of his harem, the shepherd king, both in peace and war, was in action and in the field. By the perpetual motion of the royal camp, each province was successively blessed with his presence; and he is said to have perambulated twelve times the wide extent of his dominions, which surpassed the Asiatic reign of Cyrus and the caliphs. Of these expeditions, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... is, that when the limbs of one side are disabled, those of the other are in perpetual motion. This can only be explained from conceiving that the power of motion, whatever it is, or wherever it resides, and which is capable of being exhausted by fatigue, and accumulated in rest, is now less expended, whilst one half of the body is capable of receiving its usual proportion of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... smallest interruption; but the air, the heat, and the wood of the machine, having undoubtedly diminished the water, it no longer ascended into the basin. Till the thirty-second day, many persons imagined that the perpetual motion had been discovered. However, this machine was extremely light, well combined, and very simple in its construction. I ought to observe that it neither acted by springs nor counterpoise; all its powers proceeding from the fall ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... he showed me quickly dispelled the angry feeling my doubts of "Massa Davy" had excited, and opened her heart and her mouth at the same moment. She was terribly garrulous; her tongue, as soon as it got under way, ran on as if propelled by machinery and acquainted with the secret of perpetual motion; but she was an interesting study. The single-hearted attachment she showed for her master and his family gave me a new insight into the practical working of "the peculiar institution," and convinced me that even slavery, in some of its aspects, ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... the head, whilst warmer currents, rising from our bodies and coming into contact with the cold glass, impart to it their excess of heat. Being thus contracted in bulk, and rendered specifically heavier, they in their turn descend, and thus a perpetual motion is kept up in the mass of air. This effect is attended with much inconvenience to those who inhabit the room, and is in great measure prevented by the use of double windows, which prevent the rapid cooling and production of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... are never the same. Yet the ray has a seeming identity, though even the very ripples of light that cause it are themselves ever changing, ever renewed. Could not the soul be such a ray, illuminating the atoms that pass through it, and itself a perpetual motion, a constant renewal?" ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... jerking their tiny bodies from twig to twig in the shrubbery, hanging head downward, like a nuthatch, and most industriously feeding every second upon the tiny insects and larvae hidden beneath the bark and leaves. They seem to be the feathered expression of perpetual motion. And how dainty and charming these tiny sprites are! They are not at all shy; you may approach them quite close if you will, for the birds are simply too intent on their business to be ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... assimilates his life to the standard of ideal rectitude, and thus proves himself the one independent citizen of our free country. In point of ability, many people declare him to be the only mathematician capable of squaring the circle; the only mechanic acquainted with the principle of perpetual motion; the only scientific philosopher who can compel water to run up hill; the only writer of the age whose genius is equal to the production of an epic poem; and, finally, so various are his accomplishments, the only professor of gymnastics who has succeeded in jumping ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... have nothing to do with him. He thereupon determined to shame them by printing his book, which he did at Leyden the same year. It was entitled "The Book of the most Hidden Secrets of Nature," and was divided into three parts; the first treating of "perpetual motion," the second of the "transmutation of metals," and the third of the "universal medicine." He also published some German works upon the Rosicrucian ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... consequence of its reception. The husbanding of mental power, through a bodily regime, is a no less important application. Instead of supposing that mind is something indefinite, elastic, inexhaustible,—a sort of perpetual motion, or magician's bottle, all expenditure, and no supply,—we now find that every single throb of pleasure, every smart of pain, every purpose, thought, argument, imagination, must have its fixed quota of oxygen, carbon, and other materials, combined ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... it may become, if the individual rills of it run together, and, with united forces, take for a time a single direction. So she taps it at its sources, and leads it away to various ends, useful because they are harmless. Bibliomania, tulipomania, potichomania, squaring the circle, perpetual motion, a religious epic, the northwest passage,—anything will serve the purpose. Divide et impera is her motto. The hobby is the safeguard of society. Once mounted, every enthusiast ambles quietly off on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... utilisation of waterfalls situated far from the busy mart and factory. Hardly any natural source of power presents so near an approach to constancy as the ocean billows. Shakespeare takes as his emblem of perpetual motion the dancing ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... features regular, a pleasant smile upon his lips, and a deep dimple in his chin. But his most remarkable feature was his eye; it was small, but piercing, and seemed to possess that long-sought desideratum of the perpetual motion, since it was utterly impossible to fix it for one moment on any object: and there was in it a lurking expression, which, though something of a physiognomist, I could ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... feet are laved by the sea of the divine judgments, unfathomable and shoreless. The mountains and the sea are the two grandest things in nature, and in their combination sublime; the one the home of calm and silence, the other in perpetual motion. But the mountain's roots are deeper than the depths of the sea, and though the judgments are a mighty deep, the righteousness is deeper, and is the bed of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... rare skill, by Jove's command, That every word which, whisper'd here, Scarce vibrates to the neighbour ear, On the still bosom of the air Is borne and heard distinctly there— 190 The palace of an ancient dame Whom men as well as gods call Fame. A prattling gossip, on whose tongue Proof of perpetual motion hung, Whose lungs in strength all lungs surpass, Like her own trumpet made of brass; Who with an hundred pair of eyes The vain attacks of sleep defies; Who with an hundred pair of wings News from the furthest quarters brings, 200 Sees, hears, and tells, untold before, All that she knows and ten ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... famous for nothing but the last council which was held there; and if it was not that it was half Italian, (being glad of coming out of little Barbary, and a universal tippling-house,) I would take no notice of it; being well satisfied, that the mathematicians of our times can no where find out the perpetual motion so well as here, where the goblets of Germans are an evident demonstration of its possibility—they think they cannot make good cheer, nor permit friendship or fraternity, as they call it, with any, without giving the seal brimful of wine, ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... the tapestries and count the rafters, but gained the door before anyone else, and relaxing his sphincter in advance, he hummed a tune on his way to the retreat; arrived there he was compelled, like La Balue, to murmur words of excuse to this student of perpetual motion, shutting the door with as promptitude as he opened it; and he came back burdened with an accumulation which seriously impeded his private channels. And in the same way went to guests one after the other, without being able to unburden themselves of their sauces, as soon ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... puzzled by this behavior; for everything used to be so plain among them. She would even have tried for some comfort from Willie, whose mind was very large upon all social questions. But Willie had solved at last the problem of perpetual motion, according to his own conviction, and locked himself up with his model all day; and the world might stand still, so long as that went on. "Oh, what would I give for dear ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... then will not bring the fruit to maturity. Stand beneath the branches of a forest tree on a day that is at once bright and breezy: you may observe on the ground at your feet a curious network of flickering light trembling and dancing about in perpetual motion. The sunbeams that penetrate at intervals through openings among the agitated branches are barren though beautiful. The grass that gets no other light grows slim and pithless, bearing no seed-knot on its slender top. Sunlight admitted now and then through ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... incorruptible; they are not liable to any diminution, they are indestructible, nor is it possible for them to receive any transformation of parts, or admit of any alterations; of these reason is only the discoverer; they are in a perpetual motion in vacuity, and by means of the empty space; for the vacuum itself is infinite, and the bodies that move in it are infinite. Those bodies acknowledge these three accidents, figure, magnitude, and gravity. Democritus acknowledged but two, magnitude and figure. Epicurus added the third, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Principle is above what it reflects, all is one grand concord. Change this 240:12 statement, suppose Mind to be governed by matter or Soul in body, and you lose the key- note of being, and there is continual discord. Mind is 240:15 perpetual motion. Its symbol is the sphere. The rota- tions and revolutions of the universe ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... way whatever—a certain equivalent quantity of energy must have been expended. When, therefore, we see any work being performed, we may always look for the source of energy to which the machine owes its efficiency. In fact, it is the old story illustrated, that perpetual motion is impossible. A mechanical device, however ingenious may be the construction, or however accurate the workmanship, can never possess what is called perpetual motion. It is needless to enter into details of any proposed contrivance ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... recovery of Seamen's Wages—For extracting of Silver from Lead—For the transmuting of Quicksilver into a malleable and fine Metal—For making of Iron with Pit-coal—For importing a Number of large Jack Asses from Spain—For trading in Human Hair—For fatting of Hogs—For a Wheel of Perpetual Motion." But the most strange of all, perhaps, was "For an Undertaking which shall in due time be revealed." Each subscriber was to pay down two gnineas, and hereafter to receive a share of one hundred, with a disclosure of the object; and so tempting was the offer, that 1,000 of these subscriptions ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... her, or to hear her speak. Nothing could have been easier, and nothing further from his desire, than to know her personally. A Van Twiller personally acquainted with a strolling female acrobat! Good heavens! That was something possible only with the discovery of perpetual motion. Taken from her theatrical setting, from her lofty perch, so to say, on the trapeze-bar, Olympe Zabriski would have shocked every aristocratic fibre in Van Twiller's body. He was simply fascinated by her marvelous grace and elan, and the magnetic recklessness of the girl. It was very ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... to perceive their distinct bulk, figure, or motion; and the particles of water are also so perfectly loose one from another, that the least force sensibly separates them. Nay, if we consider their perpetual motion, we must allow them to have no cohesion one with another; and yet let but a sharp cold come, and they unite, they consolidate; these little atoms cohere, and are not, without great force, separable. He that could find the bonds ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... more easy to imagine than the Improvements which may be made from thence; there's a great deal of Reason to believe, that if a future Age produces a Successor to Sir Isaac, (at present I take it, there's none in the World) that not only the Longitude at Sea will be discover'd, but the perpetual Motion, so many ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... vacuum to exist, and hence there is not beyond and surrounding the world a void which contains the world; that there could be no such thing as Time unless there is a soul, for time being the number of motion, number is impossible except there be one who numbers; that, perpetual motion in a finite right line being impossible, but in a curvilinear path possible, the world, which is limited and ever in motion, must be of a spherical form; that the earth is its central part, the heavens the circumferential: hence the heaven ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... gaze in another direction and we find in the tiniest grain of sand countless millions of molecules whose atoms (or electrons), it is said, are in perpetual motion, revolving like the stars. Are then (we ask) the stars themselves nothing but molecules? Is the whole material universe nothing but some grain of sand on the shore of the ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... I may live for a long time in great poverty, as always happens, and to all eternity will happen, to alchemists, the would-be creators of gold and silver, and to engineers who would have dead water stir itself into life and perpetual motion, and to those supreme fools, the necromancer and ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... Lisle apace to-night; scenes in the last few years shifted with surprising rapidity; everywhere Ellice was the centre-piece, her fair, pleasant face beaming from its framework of brown curls, that were almost ever in perpetual motion from the frequent toss of the ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... Flor gradually rose by no means led her to the exhibition of any greater decorum; on the contrary, it seemed to impart to her the secret of perpetual motion; and, aware of her impunity, she danced with fresher vigor in the very teeth of her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... dubbed Wriggly Beer by the older boys in his street, because of a slight nervous affection that kept him in a state of perpetual motion. He was not uncomely; indeed, when I was telling a story it was a pleasure to watch his face all twitching with interest; first nose, then eyes, then mouth, till the delight spread to his fat hands, which clasped and unclasped as the tale proceeded. He had ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... intended as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to show that dozens of schemes, hardly a whit more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital one million; another was "for encouraging the breed of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the clergy, who were so mainly interested in the latter clause, should have taken so much interest in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... whole life was disgraced by unbridled sensuality coupled with sordid avarice. This explains in a measure Paganini's inferior rank as a composer. Famous are his variations on the tune "God Save the King," his "Studies," his twenty variations on "Il Carnevale di Venezia," and the concert allegro "Perpetual Motion." The celebrated twenty-four violin capricci, written early in Paganini's career, have been rendered familiar by their transcriptions to the pianoforte by Schumann and Liszt. Paganini died from the results of dissipation. He left his famous Guarnero ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... outer temple the noise, confusion, and perpetual motion, are bewildering. Crowds on clattering clogs pass in and out; pigeons, of which hundreds live in the porch, fly over your head, and the whirring of their wings mingles with the tinkling of bells, the beating of drums and gongs, the high-pitched drone of the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... through the tall grasses, his lithe, silken side gliding in and out snakewise, and only his fierce eyes burning bright with gleaming flashes between the gloom of the jungle. Once I had seen him, I could follow with ease his sinuous path among the tangled bamboos, a waving line of beauty in perpetual motion. The Maharajah followed him too, with his keen eyes, and pointed his rifle hastily. But, quick as he was, Lord Southminster was before him. I had half expected to find the pea-green young man turn coward at the last ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... context. Faith in His works: "Believe the works." Faith in His words: "Believe Me." Faith in Himself, as here. In the Greek the preposition translated in, would be better rendered into, as though the believer was ever approaching the heart of Christ in deeper, warmer, closer fellowship; perpetual motion toward, combined with unbroken rest in. Each of these three forms of faith plays an important part in ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... contrary: I consider myself as having made my report, and being discharged from further attendance on the subject. I will not, from henceforward, talk to any squarer of the circle, trisector of the angle, duplicator of the cube, constructor of perpetual motion, subverter of gravitation, stagnator of the earth, builder of the universe, etc. I will receive any writings or books which require no answer, and read them when I please: I will certainly preserve them—this list may be enlarged at some ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... I do not expect disease to be forever banished from life in the Socialist regime. Still less do I expect that mechanical genius will have been so perfected that human labor will be no longer necessary; that perpetual motion will have been harnessed to great indestructible machines and work become a thing of the past. That dream of the German dreamer, Etzler, will never ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... molecularly perishable. It possesses its entity much as a top keeps erect, by the continual inflow of energy. Metabolism is always taking place within it. Any other condition would, probably, involve the difficulties of perpetual motion. ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... must operate as an executory devise or as a springing use." A philosopher "able to give the true reason of all things, from the composition of watches, to the raising of minced pies ... and who, if he is closely questioned about the planner of squaring the circle, or by what means the perpetual motion, or longitude, may be discovered, we believe has honesty, and we are sure that he has skill enough to say that he knows—nothing of the matter." A moral philosopher who has "discovered a perpetuum mobile of government." ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... accepted as true that the sum of energy in the universe is fixed and invariable. This precludes the possibility of perpetual motion. Energy may be unavailable to man, and in the universe the available energy is continually decreasing, but the total energy is ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... into Turkish; the almehs danced and sang to their small lutes; the black slaves succeeded each other in bringing every kind of refreshment which the ingenuity of the Dalmatian cook could devise; the whole establishment was in perpetual motion, and had rarely in the last few days snatched a few minutes of uneasy rest when the Khanum slept her short and broken sleep. It chanced that Laleli had all her life detested opium, and was so quick to detect its presence ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... what a "Theoretical Discoverer" is. If anyone got up and declared in a public meeting that he was the theoretical discoverer of the philosopher's stone, or of perpetual motion for watches, should we not mark him as a little wrong in the head? So of the Nile sources. The Portuguese crossed the Chambeze some seventy years before I did, but to them it was a branch of the Zambezi and nothing more. Cooley put it down ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... USE OF LEVER.—This lack of knowledge of first principles, has bred and is now breeding, so-called perpetual motion inventors (?) all over the civilized world. It is surprising how many men, to say nothing of boys, actually believe that power can be made without the expenditure ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... and hardihood to set at naught the confirmed opinions of the world, voiced by those generally acknowledged to be the best exponents of the art—experiments carried on amid a storm of jeers and derision, almost as contemptuous as if the search were for the discovery of perpetual motion. In this we see the man foreshadowed by the boy who, when he obtained his books on chemistry or physics, did not accept any statement of fact or experiment therein, but worked out every one of them himself to ascertain whether ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... since that a certain ancestor—or was he only a great-uncle?—I forget—had a taste for mechanics, even to the craze of the perpetual motion, and could work well in brass and iron. The creature was probably some invention of his. It was a real marvel how, after so many years of idleness, it could now go as it did. I confess, as I contemplate the thing, I am in a puzzle, and almost fancy the whole a dream. But ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... filled his mind in early boyhood, still haunted his thoughts. In one of his letters from the "Rattlesnake," he gives an account of how he was possessed in his student days by that problem which has beset so many a strong imagination, the problem of perpetual motion, and even sought an interview with Faraday, whom he left with the resolution to meet the great man some day on a more ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... sea was the pathway of the world. But on the mountains nothing moves at night. There even stones do not fall; there are no thunders of avalanches; no sudden and awful crash of an ice-fall. Even when the sun is hot and the mountains waken a little these motions seem accidents. And the perpetual motion of a glacier has something about it which is cruelly inevitable, bestial, diabolic. No, upon the mountains one is swung clear of one's fellow-creatures; one is adrift; it is another world; it gives fresh views of ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... unastonished. For see, if the compass lied and the sun did not keep its engagements, why should not objects lose their mutual attraction and why should not a few bushel baskets of force be annihilated? Even perpetual motion became possible, and I was in a frame of mind prone to purchase Keeley- Motor stock from the first enterprising agent that landed on the Snark's deck. And when I discovered that the earth really rotated on its axis 366 times a year, while there were only 365 sunrises and sunsets, I was ready ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... there is on the whole a general tendency for the denser matter to settle towards the centre. The conditions are much like those which obtain in a bucket of water which contains in suspension a number of kinds of matter of different degrees of density. Since the water is kept in perpetual motion, the different kinds of matter are diffused through it; but in spite of that, the densest matter is found in greatest quantity nearest to the bottom. So that though we must not at all think of the various subdivisions of the astral world as lying ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... of civilization must turn from this analysis of function with the conviction that whatever the advantages of civilization as opposed to earlier phases of human association, the pattern of civilization in action is workable only to a very limited extent. Civilization is not an example of perpetual motion. Rather it is a social life cycle, with a beginning and an end, and a peck of troublesome contradictions and conflicts ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... open, the lady's face was framed against the dark background of the room, producing the effect of a picture. 'Twas a strange face, sallow and curiously wrinkled, with a nose like the beak of a hawk, and large black eyes, which seemed to be endowed with the power of perpetual motion. These roved from one to another of the busy builders, till suddenly one of them seemed to be aware that some one was looking at her, and turned ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... became known that Professor Langley was still secretly at work on a machine for the United States Government. The public, discouraged by the failures and tragedies just witnessed, considered flight beyond the reach of man, and classed its adherents with the inventors of perpetual motion. ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... race, these ants are in perpetual motion, forming lines on the ground along which they pass, in continual procession to and from the trees on which they reside. They are the most irritable of the whole order in Ceylon, biting with such intense ferocity as to render it difficult for the unclad natives to collect the fruit from, the mango ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... which the cropped heads of Lilias and Jane afforded unusual facility. There was, however, but a limited supply of heads willing to be fingered, and Maurice returned to the most abiding of his tastes, and in an empty room at the Old Court laboured assiduously to find the secret of perpetual motion. ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... never stops workin': when 'tan't one thing it's another—cookin', washin', ironin', making butter and cheese, and 'tween spells cuttin' and sewin', and if she ain't doin' that, why, she's braidin' straw to sell to the store or knitting—she's the perpetual motion ready found, ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... She gives to the poor, but her own household she worries to death. (Silence.) All I want, sir, is to find out the secret of perpetual motion! ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... pragmatic situation—anything, no matter how abstract, that arouses their curiosity or appeals to their love of mastery offers enough of a problem. Sometimes children are vitally interested in working geometrical problems, translating difficult passages in Latin, striving to invent the perpetual motion machine, even though there is no evident and useful result. It is not the particular type of situation that is the thing to be considered, but the attitude that it arouses in the individual concerned. Educators in discussion of the situations ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... what I'll do. You go out there and look over his setup. If you can't find his gimmick in half a day, I'll come out and show it to you. But I warn you, some of these things are very tricky—like the old perpetual motion machines. You've got to have your wits about you. ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... journey back again to the heart by a different road: it does not return through these tubes, but through softer ones, called veins. Thus far he could go, and the story of the "circulation" of the blood is very interesting; but the cause of the heart's perpetual motion, and the blood's continuous flow, this he could ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... which have appeared spontaneously in the tanks from unsuspected spores floating in the sea-water. On the other hand, Mr. Lloyd lays much stress on the necessity of arating the water, by keeping it in perpetual motion; a process not easy to be carried out in small aquaria; at least to that perfection which has been attained at the Crystal Palace, where the water is kept in continual circulation by steam-power. For a jar-aquarium, it will be ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... this manner he is perpetually occupied; he has a part to act which renders serious thought unnecessary, and silence impossible. If he has been unfortunate, he recounts his distresses, and in doing so, forgets them. His mind never reposes for a moment upon itself; his secret is to keep it in perpetual motion, and, like a shuttlecock, to whip it back and forward with such rapidity, that although its feathers may have been ruffled, and its gilding effaced by many hard blows, yet neither you nor he have time to ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... did you get this teetotum? We might sell her for a mechanical top—warranted perpetual motion. When the legs give ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... coon dance which, in its way, was as wild and erratic as the minuet had been stately and methodical. Wilder and wilder grew her gyrations—head, feet, legs, shoulders, hair, hands, arms, were in seemingly perpetual motion. The audience grew wildly excited. They jumped up, shouting "On-ko—on-ko!" and accompanied their shouts with the stamping of feet. A dexterous somersault on the dancer's part ended the performance; her cheeks were flushed with exercise and excitement, her black mane was ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... system depend upon a continued state of change. The waste of the body produced in muscular action, perspiration, and various secretions, is made up for by the constant supply of nutritive matter to the blood by the absorbents, and by the action of the heart the blood is preserved in perpetual motion through every part of the body. In the lungs, or bronchia, the venous blood is exposed to the influence of air and undergoes a remarkable change, being converted into arterial blood. The obvious chemical alteration of the air is sufficiently simple in this process: a certain ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... some time at an attempt after a perpetual motion, but, I must confess, more from a metaphysical or logical point of ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... inquiring mind subjects of deep and abiding interest. My wonder was also excited by the singularly glassy smoothness of the surface of the water in a dead calm, while at the same time the long, rolling waves, or "seas," kept the brig in perpetual motion, and swept past as if despatched by some mysterious power on a mission to the ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Weber was no less epoch-marking than in that of opera. In 1812 his sonata in C, Opus 24, was produced, a work which is distinctly in advance of those of Clementi or any other writer before that time. The finale of this work is the well known rondo "Perpetual Motion," which, indeed, contains no new principle of piano playing, but is an elegant example of melodiousness and real musicianly qualities displayed at the highest possible speed. His next sonata, Opus 39, in A flat (1816), is still more remarkable. The piano playing here is of an extremely brilliant ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... speculative crowd. Stock in the South Sea Company rose from 128-1/2 points in January to 550 in May, and scored 1,000 in July. Five million shares were sold at this premium. Speculation ran riot. Hundreds of companies were organized. One was formed "for a wheel of perpetual motion." Another never troubled to give any reason at all for taking the cash of its subscribers—it merely announced that it was organized "for a design which will hereafter be promulgated." Owners began to sell, the mob caught the suggestion, a panic ensued, the South Sea Company stock ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... hack, one of Screwman's, Perpetual Motion they call him, because he never gets any rest. That's him, I believe, with the lofty-actioned hind-legs,' added he, pointing to a weedy string-halty bay passing below, high in ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... for hog and hominy, chills and fever; but I was once a schoolmaster with $1,200 a year, down in Connecticut; wine and women did it. But,' said he, 'I'll be rich yet—I've got it—I've discovered perpetual motion, and the world ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... other Army Corps in a grand march; our Division, with its two ambulances; our General with his five,—and our proportionate number of pack horses and mules. The obstinacy of the latter animal was sorely punished by the apparent effort during that march to teach it perpetual motion. Halt the Division did statedly, but there was no rest for the poor mule. Experience had taught its driver that the beast would take advantage of the halt to lie down, and when once down no amount of tugging and swearing and clubbing could ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... kept her temper, under such provocation as this, may be found when the mathematician is found who can square the circle, or the inventor who can discover perpetual motion. With a furious look, Mrs. Westerfield expressed her opinion of the philosopher in two words: "You brute!" She failed to produce ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... We are still marching bravely on, conquering Nature, but how weary and sad we are getting! The old joy in life and gaiety of heart have vanished, though we do sometimes pause for a few moments in our long forced march to watch the labours of some pale mechanician, seeking after perpetual motion, and indulge in a little, dry, cackling laugh at his expense." And again: "For here the religion that languishes in crowded cities or steals shamefaced to hide itself in dim churches flourishes greatly, filling the soul with a solemn joy. Face to face with Nature on the vast hills at eventide, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... you have ever been at the seashore you know that the ocean is never still for a second; sometimes the waves surge back and forth in angry fury, at other times the waves glide gently in to the shore and the surface is as smooth as glass; but we know that there is perpetual motion of the water even when the ocean is in its gentlest moods. Generally our atmosphere is quiet, and we are utterly unconscious of it; at other times we are painfully aware of it, because of its furious winds. Then again we are oppressed by ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... me of this my torture, quickly, there; My madam, with the everlasting voice: The bells, in time of pestilence, ne'er made Like noise, or were in that perpetual motion! The Cock-pit comes not near it. All my house, But now, steam'd like a bath with her thick breath. A lawyer could not have been heard; nor scarce Another woman, such a hail of words She has let fall. For hell's sake, ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... processes of earth-life, must be kept in perpetual motion to cultivate and be kept in healthy condition, or the world would wither and die, and go to the tombs of space, to join the funeral procession of other dead worlds. Thus you see all nature comes and goes by the fiat of ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... touch the superficial evils, unless it had also some tendency to call out the higher and repress the lower impulses. Unless we can to some extent change "human nature," we shall be weaving ropes of sand, or devising schemes for perpetual motion, for driving our machinery more effectively without applying fresh energy. We shall be falling into the old blunders; approving Jack Cade's proposal—as recorded by Shakespeare—that the three-hooped pot should have seven hoops; or attempting to get rid of poverty by converting the whole ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... embellished with colored glass, and such things of lustre; encompassed also with fine rails of low statuas. But the main point is the same which we mentioned in the former kind of fountain; which is, that the water be in perpetual motion, fed by a water higher than the pool, and delivered into it by fair spouts, and then discharged away under ground, by some equality of bores, that it stay little. And for fine devices, of arching water without ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon |
