"Crank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in forty years; but to look for an exception to the common run of yellow dogs and damfools among them is like opening oysters with the hope of finding pearls. It's the common man we want and the uncommon common man when we can find him—never the crank. This is the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... advertise is the most original and startling thing one can do to attract attention. It was the fact that I do NOT advertise that drew you here. And everyone who comes here thinks he has discovered the place himself. He goes and tells his friends about the book asylum run by a crank and a lunatic, and they come here in turn to ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... inactive was not merely to invite destruction for ourselves, but was sure to bring certain failure upon the purpose of the expedition. All of us began instantly to look about in search of the proper handle, seizing every crank and wheel in sight ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... worked out a larger model which illustrated the band-bucket process. This is shown in Fig. 30, at the right of the mill. Small cups were made of soft tin and fastened to a leather strap. The strap was fastened around two rods, placed one above the other. The lower rod was turned by a crank fastened on the outside of the box. Two or three brads driven into the lower rod caught into holes in the strap and prevented slipping. The machine successfully hoisted grain from the lower box to one fastened higher up, but not shown in the picture. The model was very crude ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... fish, they placed their villages near the sea beaches or the rivers and lakes. In their canoes they would paddle as far as twelve miles from land. Amongst other fish they caught sharks, killing them before they hauled them into the crank canoes; or, joining forces, they would sweep some estuary with drag nets, and, with much yelling and splashing, drive the fish into a shallow corner. There with club and spear dog-fish and smooth-hound would be done to death amid shouts and excitement. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... capable of carrying a load of a thousand pounds at thirty miles an hour over even the softest snow, as its cylindrical supports did not sink into the snow as ordinary wheels would have done. The motor was a forty-horse power automobile machine with a crank-case enclosed in an outer case in which a vacuum had been created—on the principle of the bottles which keep liquids cold or warm. In this instance the vacuum served to keep the oil in the crank-case, which was poured in warm, ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... of a Greenwich boat, but exerting in their revolutions what seemed to be an almost irresistible power. There was no noise, no vibration, nor the slightest sign of heating. The tremendous frame of ironwork sprang at once into life and motion, with as much ease as if every rod and crank had been worked for the last ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... crank-case arms to the crank-case, using pneumatic hammers which were supposed to be the latest development. It took six men to hold the hammers and six men to hold the casings, and the din was terrific. Now an automatic press operated by one man, ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... oar, prepared to attack. Russ called to his rowers to be ready to rescue the girls and the young actor if necessary, and then, with the desire for a good film ever uppermost in his mind, he continued to grind away at the camera crank. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... side of it," Cressler went on, heedless of Jadwin's good-humoured protests. "Yes, I know I am a crank on speculating. I'm going to preach a little if you'll let me. I've been a speculator myself, and a ruined one at that, and I know what I am talking about. Here is what I was going to say. These fellows themselves, the gamblers—well, call them speculators, if you like. Oh, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... connecting rod C R, which causes the crank K to revolve. At the point where the two rods meet there is a "crosshead," H, running to and fro in a guide to prevent the piston rod being broken or bent by the oblique thrusts and pulls which it imparts through C R to the crank K. The latter is keyed to a shaft S carrying the fly-wheel, or, in the case of a locomotive, the driving-wheels. The crank shaft revolves in bearings. The internal diameter of a cylinder is called ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... at all; the answer is, that he has said nothing and that he talks only for the sake of talking, the same as a sectarian preaching to his congregation, neither the preacher nor his audience ever wearying, the one of turning the dogmatic crank, and the other of listening. So much the better if the container is empty; the emptier it is the easier and faster the crank turns. And better still, if the empty term he selects is used in a contrary sense; the sonorous words justice, humanity, mean to him piles of human heads, the same as ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the skipper irascibly, not perhaps for the moment attaching the importance it demanded to this small but essential part of the engines, uniting the connecting rod of the crank shaft with the piston which he thus irreverently anathematised; and then, struck by the comic aspect of the situation, with the waves breaking over us and the elements in mad turmoil around us, ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... of distress, and though I am no dreamer and I think no crank, I could not get away from the idea that she was crying to me to ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... and the engine did not seem to be overheated. The manifest fact was that the motor would not run. A few irregular beats, I say, I got out of it by almost winding my arm out of its socket with the crank, only to have the thing die away before I could regain my seat in the car. In my desperation I advanced the spark to a point which resulted in a "back kick" so tremendous that I was nearly ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... Strauss or Josef Holbrooke, and Beethoven did not loom nearly so large before the eyes of the people as these composers do: the names of Salieri, Marschner, Meyerbeer, Spontini, Spohr and Weber would be much more familiar than his; even in Vienna he was regarded mainly as a deaf, surly old crank who had the support of highly placed personages. So there is the amazing fact: Wagner, who worshipped Weber's operas, had not, when fourteen years old, heard of the existence of a musician a thousand times mightier than Weber. The great ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... prayer-wheel designed for written prayers to be put in and turned with a crank, or it could be hitched to water power or a wind-mill or anything, and the owner could truly pray without ceasing. Oh how I felt as he explained! I felt that indeed the last straw wuz bein' packed onto my back, but Josiah ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... bigger, for men shal neuer shot well, excepte they be broughte up in it." The advantage of this weapon over the steel crossbow (used by the Genoese) lay in the fact that it could be discharged much more rapidly, the latter being a cumbrous affair, which had to be wound up with a crank for each shot. Hence the English long bow was to that age what the revolver is to ours. It sent an arrow with such force that only the best armor could withstand it. The French peasantry at that period had no skill ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Therefore, the engine's over-all length, from head of cylinder to the centerline of the side paddle wheel shaft, could not have been much less than 15 feet 9 inches, and probably as much as 16 feet 2 inches, thus making the length at extreme clearance of crank throw as much as 19 feet. These dimensions indicate that the centerline of the side paddle wheel shaft must have been from 38 to 39 feet from the forward perpendicular. It is not clear how the wheel shaft was mounted in the vessel. Taking into consideration her depth and her reported ...
— The Pioneer Steamship Savannah: A Study for a Scale Model - United States National Museum Bulletin 228, 1961, pages 61-80 • Howard I. Chapelle
... making. Had she been more expansive she would have readily enough found friends. No one knew of the misery of her home life, and she was simply judged as what her schoolfellows thought her—a queer-tempered crank who refused to join in the general fun of the place, and in consequence was left out ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... areas in France; at one place an old crank named Mayette about two hundred years ago found a good walnut and he grafted some and planted out an acre or two, and his neighbors planted some, especially when his acre or two began to grow, with the result that the territory around ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... The great crank that grinds the screw, and is itself ground by the piston—not to mention the cylinder and boiler—works in a dark place deep down in the engine-room, like a giant hand constantly engaged on ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... her to him, he buried his face in her neck, mumbling her name over and over: and neither of them knew that he was rapturously kissing the coonskin collar of his own greatcoat. The launchman, motor crank in hand, paused, staring; he was still open-mouthed when Dan, ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... fortune while society remain unreconstructed? Well, societies were not to be reconstructed by the devoting of fortunes to the work. Moreover, if he followed such an extreme course he would be regarded as a crank, and he could not have borne to be regarded as a crank. He detested cranks more than murderers or even profiteers. As for enjoying his fortune in present circumstances, he thought that he might succeed in doing so, ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... driver, no plowman, nothing but the farmer to crank the tractor and start it on its way," Dick exulted, as the uncanny mechanism turned up the brown soil and continued unguided, ever spiraling toward the field's center. "Plow, harrow, roll, seed, fertilize, cultivate, harvest—all from the front porch. And where the farmer can buy ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... comrades, and that he has but to push a lever to set it in motion or stop it. The machine, in spite of its miraculous power and productiveness, has no mystery for him. The labourer in the electrical works, who has but to turn a crank on a dial to send miles of motive power to tramways, or light the lamps of a city, has but to say, like the God of Genesis, "let there be light," and there is light. Never sorcery more fantastic was imagined, yet for him this sorcery is a simple and natural thing. He would be greatly ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... that steam could be used as a motive power long before it was so applied; and because he employed a good deal of his time in trying to discover the principle, he was ridiculed by his neighbors and friends, and the more thoughtless among them didn't know whether he was a crank, a half-wit, or a "luny." From all accounts, he was a modest, shy, retiring man, though a merry one. He had but little money to devote to the experiments he wished to make, and in this was not different from ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... economy, many other advantages would flow from a judicious regard to similarity in build; as it would permit us to relieve our ships of many of the spare spars with which they are incumbered, and we should probably not again hear of suspending the operations of a frigate thousands of miles away, until a crank or rod could be sent to her; because, when ships of the same class are cruising together, by a careful distribution of spare spars and machinery among them, it is hardly probable that damage would be sustained, or loss of spars or "break down" occur, which might not be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that I soon wearied and came ashore again, and that it gives me more pleasure to recall the man himself and his simple, happy conversation, so full of gusto and sympathy, than anything possibly connected with his crank, insecure embarkation. In order to avoid seeing him, for I was not a little ashamed of myself for having failed to enjoy his treat sufficiently, I determined to continue up the river, and, at all prices, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... winter turnip-fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough. He now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and too probably once in his life, 'hits the keeper into the river,' and reconsiders himself for a while after over a crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults; and I have mine. But he is a thorough good fellow nevertheless; quite as good as I: civil, contented, industrious, and often very handsome; and a far shrewder fellow too—owing to his dash ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... together with a stick placed between them. A pair of cutting nippers was the next addition to his "kit" of tools. His next means for twisting the two wires together was the grindstone—attaching one end of the wire to shaft and crank, the others being fastened to the wall of the barn. And here, as in most things great and small in this world, woman furnished the motor power. The strong arm of the good helpmeet, Mrs. Glidden, turned the ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... it is the grindstone. Turning grindstones to grind scythes is one of those heroic but unobtrusive occupations for which one gets no credit. It is a hopeless kind of task, and, however faithfully the crank is turned, it is one that brings little reputation. There is a great deal of poetry about haying—I mean for those not engaged in it. One likes to hear the whetting of the scythes on a fresh morning and the response of the noisy bobolink, who always sits upon the fence and superintends the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... machine, or man-engine. It consists of two parallel rods, furnished at equal distances with steps, while one is raised to a certain height the other is lowered to the same distance. While the movement of the crank is on its turning point, the miner passes from the step on which he is standing to the opposite step of the other. As they are constantly moving up and down, his next step is back again to the rod he had before left, which rising a few feet, he is able to step back to the other, just ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... at his command, this officer improved upon my suggestion, by substituting for my quill turned in the fingers a wooden cylinder worked by a crank, and by securing, at a proper distance, (between pins, I think,) one or more spiders, whose threads were guided between pins upon the cylinder. He thus produced more of the silk, winding it upon rings of hard rubber ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... was a plan to do away with the crank, and transform the rectilinear motion of the piston into rotary motion. He figured it out that this would save two-fifths of the steam, and so stated in his application for a patent, a copy of which is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Then it would roll over, open its mouth, and run out its tongue. There was another that I cannot describe, for I never saw anything that looked like it. It was some kind of a machine, and the turning of a crank made it draw together in such a way, that if a person were once within its embrace, the pressure would soon arrest the vital current, and stop the breath of life. Around the walls of the room were chains, rings ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... the ease with which the spar was lifted. It was an improved crank windlass, and the purchase it gave was enormous. Of course, what it gave us in power we paid for in distance; as many times as it doubled my strength, that many times was doubled the length of rope I heaved in. The tackle dragged heavily ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... down to arm's-length and dropped to the ground. "Thank God!" he said again. "The two men who were to have come with me didn't show up. I waited as long as I dared, and then came on with only the chauffeur. He's waiting outside by the car ready to crank up when I give the word. The car's just a few yards away, headed out for the road. How are we to get back ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... time of waiting, a small flood of "crank" letters poured in from all over the country. There was an incredibly large number of persons who were simply oozing with inventions and schemes, the adoption of which would absolutely insure the discovery of the Pole. Naturally, in view of the contemporaneous drift of inventive thought, flying ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... we were looking the Great Panjandrum Himself, with his little round button-at-the-top on his head, was turning a crank in the side of the wonderful Pantoscopticon, which had a hopper on the top of it like that of an old-fashioned coffee-mill. As he turned he ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... Helena now, his face was serious. He cranked the engine—no result. He tried it again with equal futility—then, going to the tool-box, he took out his electric flashlight, and, lifting the engine hood, began to peer into the machinery. Everything seemed all right. He tried the crank again—the engine, like some cold, dead thing, ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... wheel; it was turned by a crank; it did the work perfectly; so, in the year 1793, he had invented ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... jobs where it does not pay to install a power mixer a hand power mixer mounted on a frame carried by two large wheels has been found at least as efficient as hand mixing; more convenient and easier on the men. The machine is turned by a crank driving a sprocket chain; it is charged at the stock piles and then hauled to the forms to be discharged. Local conditions determine the capacity of power mixer to be used. Difficulties in supplying material or in taking ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... see." His hands gripped the wheel. His cheeks had been too ruddily tinted by the Dakota sun to show a blush, but his teeth caught his lower lip. He had no starter on his bug; he had in his embarrassment to get out and crank. He did it quietly, not looking at her. She could see that his hand trembled on the crank. When he did glance at her, as he drove off, it was apologetically, miserably. His foot was shaking on ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... to England, and the steamer Peace was built on the Thames, Grenfell watching everything being made from the crank to the funnel. She was built, launched, and tried on the Thames; then taken to pieces and packed in 800 packages, weighing 65 lbs. each, and taken to the mouth of the Congo. On the heads and shoulders of a thousand men the ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... food came from bakeries and delicatessens. They had but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their "wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas" in unpaid social work, and still more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not adequately supported. They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... which Larry told Pat to buy for herself as a birthday present from him, is forty horsepower, I believe; whereas I'm much mistaken if Angele isn't about a hundred demon-power. She's geared terribly high, can "crank" herself I should imagine, and has the smartest new type of body, all glittering paint and varnish. Isn't it nice that her name should be Angele? It wasn't the Mother Superior who engaged this guardian angel for Miss Moore, but the dear ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... years their townsman's literary works would be published in a sumptuous twenty-volume edition, and that critics in his own country and in Europe would rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet that is precisely what has happened. Our literature has no more curious story than the evolution of this local crank into his rightful place of mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers"—which was even more completely neglected by the public than Emerson's "Nature"—and "Walden," now one ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... in one o' the heving peepers, they sez—that the people wot's missin' hev been carted off in aeroplanes by some o' the other religionists wot wanted to git rid o' them, an' that the crank ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... girl. Probably there never will be. But I'm no crank. I like a good dinner and a seat at the play and an artistic domestic hearth as well as the next man. If I were to marry, of course I should retain the tutorship which I accepted temporarily as a means of training my own perceptions, ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... husband needed for a brilliant society woman. He was that absent-minded crank, a grand seigneur husband who was in no one's way, and far from spoiling the high tone and general impression of the drawing room, he served, by the contrast he presented to her, as an advantageous background to his elegant ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... called at the Ehrich's that afternoon, and no one could have been more charming, more neighborly than he. He told of our first meeting, smilingly called me "a Henry George crank," and referred to other differences which existed between us. "Differences which do not in the least interfere with our friendship," he assured Zulime. "Your husband, for example, doesn't believe in hunting, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... cat, cat o'nine tails; rope's end. pillory, stocks, whipping post; cucking stool[obs3], ducking stool; brank[obs3]; trebuchet[obs3], trebuket[obs3]. triangle[instruments of torture: list], wooden horse, iron maiden, thumbscrew, boot, rack, wheel, iron heel; chinese water torture. treadmill, crank, galleys. scaffold; block, ax, guillotine; stake; cross; gallows, gibbet, tree, drop, noose, rope, halter, bowstring; death chair, electric chair; gas chamber; lethal injection; firing squad; mecate[obs3]. house ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... your mother's big churn, that goes with a crank. You whittle out a wheel twice as large as that, and set it a little stronger, and raise your dam a few inches, and you can run ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... gunpowder. Both vessels are employed by the same house, and take out the same freight. You must, however, please yourself, Mr. Lyndsay. The Flora has a great number of passengers of the lowest cast,—is old and crank; with the most vicious, morose captain that sails from this port. I know him only too well. He made two voyages for me; and the letters I received, complaining of his brutal conduct to some of his passengers, I can show you at ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... of these passed under Fritz Braun's watchful scrutiny. The disguised criminal trembled lest some ugly-minded detective or crank journalist might entrap him into the ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... visible. Unfortunately the path led through a thicket of raspberry bushes, and the fruit was so tempting that the boys lost a good deal of time by stopping to gather it. After a tiresome tramp under the mid-day sun they reached the lower end of Schroon Lake, where they hired a crank little row-boat, and rowed up to Schroon. There was a fresh northerly breeze which delayed them; and the spray from the bow of the boat sprinkled them, so that they were uncomfortably wet when they reached the village. By this time ...
— Harper's Young People, August 31, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... veer and turn. At earl beardy. At rogue and ruffian. At the old mode. At bumbatch touch. At draw the spit. At the mysterious trough. At put out. At the short bowls. At gossip lend me your sack. At the dapple-grey. At the ramcod ball. At cock and crank it. At thrust out the harlot. At break-pot. At Marseilles figs. At my desire. At nicknamry. At twirly whirlytrill. At stick and hole. At the rush bundles. At boke or him, or flaying the fox. At the short staff. At the branching it. At the whirling gig. At trill madam, or grapple my ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... twelve-oared cutter under the boom; so that we had nothing upon the skids but the jolly-boat; and the alteration which this made in the vessel is inconceivable: For the weight of the boats upon, the skids made her crank, and in a great sea they were also in danger ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... squeeze. Jack sat in front with Remedios and one of the bags. Mr. Temple and Bob, both big individuals, filled the rear with the balance of the bags. Frank, who had gone to the front of the car to crank it, found no room within for him when he returned. He ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... admitting the steam alternately at both ends of the cylinder, it was too awkward and clumsy to become a practical navigator. Moreover, though it could pump admirably, it had not been taught to turn a crank. The French assert, that experiments in steam-propulsion were made on the Seine, by Count Auxiron and Perrier, in 1774, and on the Saone, by De Jouffroy, in 1782; but we know they led to no practical results, and the knowledge of them probably did not, for some years, travel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... a crank, has been made to speak words, but nothing below a human being has been able to get thought from a written or printed page and convey it to others. To make the machine requires a vast amount of labor expended upon matter; to get the thought requires the awakening of a human spirit. ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... also call attention to the improvements that we have just made in our mill. Last week we put a handle in the upper burr, and we have also engaged one of the best head millers in Pompeii to turn the crank day-times. Our old head miller will oversee the business at night, so that the mill will be in full blast night and day, except when the head miller has gone to his meals or stopped ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... over at Epinal the day after tomorrow,' he said as they left the mill, 'and I'll see if I can get the new crank there.' ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... To crank the motor (for the self-starter had not yet arrived) was a task of magnitude, but he accomplished it and pulled himself into the seat. For a moment he lay upon the steering wheel, panting, fighting back his weakness; then he thrust forward his control lever and the car began to move. The ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... dismissing the question with the national gesture. After a moment he added: "I shall tell you something that is strrange, so strrange that you shall say, like the banker say, 'Thees Enriquez, he ees off his head; he ees a crank, a lunatico;' but it ees a FACT; believe me, I ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... worlds, is obtained by "superimposure," or by taking the picture twice, as it were. On the first "take" the characters go through the business already rehearsed, and the director keeps careful track of just when each important move is made by counting while the cameraman turns the crank. If, at the count of "Eleven!" one character registers surprise and points excitedly at an unoccupied corner of the room, it is the first step in introducing the fairy, or the spectre, who is to appear there in ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... 'barbacues'—smooth platforms on which the ripe coffee-berry is laid and raked out to be blackened and baked by the sun. Near the secaderos is a circle of ground, hedged in like a bull-ring and containing a horizontal fluted roller, turned by a crank. This roller, or pulping-mill, is made to gyrate by a mule, crushing in its perpetual journey the already baked coffee-berry, until the crisp husk peels off and exposes a couple of whity-brown, hard, oval seeds, upon which ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... letter from Scudder. I knew something of the man, and he did several jobs for me. He was half crank, half genius, but he was wholly honest. The trouble about him was his partiality for playing a lone hand. That made him pretty well useless in any Secret Service—a pity, for he had uncommon gifts. I think he was the bravest man in the world, ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... with your prehistoric races, Professor!" he growled. "A whole car-load o' rubbish like this wouldn't be worth a nickel t' anybody but a scientific crank like you. If this is th' sort o' stuff that that old king o' yours thought was worth hidin', I guess he must 'a' been off his head. But that pot may 'a' got in by mistake. Before I get too much down on ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... brick-paved street. The major-general commandant and a group of officers from headquarters took up posts on the turf of the parkway beside the curb. A sergeant of marines, in khaki, came running across the parade-ground, set up a motion-picture camera, and began to crank. Another sergeant was snapping "stills" as the column came to a halt and faced about toward the group ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... crime. Some of them are worthless vagabonds, and nearly all the Italians accused of crime in the city are included in their number. One of these men is to be seen on the Bowery at almost any time. He seats himself on the pavement, with his legs tucked under him, and turns the crank of an instrument which seems to be a doleful compromise between a music box and an accordion. In front of this machine is a tin box for pennies, and by the side of it is a card on which is printed an appeal to the charitable. At night a flickering ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Alcohol is alcohol, I don't care whether it's in a saloon or a church or pickling snakes in a museum. I tell you, Tommy's case has made a prohibition crank of me. Talk about it's being a man's lack of will and moral strength—bah! I never knew a man who had more will power than he, or who was more on the square. ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... had to leave. A prisoner stepped forward to crank my car, and all of them, the dauntless Frenchman in the center, lined up and gave us the military salute. Before reentering the woods I looked back and saw the blue-coated figure offering a light ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... well in their classes; and they were liked by all the instructors—even by Professor Krenner, who some of the girls declared wickedly was the school's "self-starter, Lakeview Hall being altogether too modern to have a crank." ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... some tea in an odd little contrivance over the gas-jet, much as Sara did over the log- fire at home; but neither Morton nor Molly would have been surprised to see food come sliding in, all cooked, or clothes all made, by the simple turn of a crank, so like fairyland was ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... its ministrations. No night was ever so dark and tempestuous, that he would not brave the boisterous seas of Newport Harbor to attend mass, and no occasion, however inappropriate, was ever lost sight of to advocate its cause; in fact, he was what would nowadays be called most emphatically a crank on that subject, and might not inappropriately be considered a one-ideaed man lacking in the breadth and poise, so necessary to success in the commander of an army in the field. While Buel's Army was in Louisville getting reinforcements and preparing to renew operations against ...
— Personal recollections and experiences concerning the Battle of Stone River • Milo S. Hascall
... observations, he finally decided to appear before medical bodies to tell them modestly of some facts which always recurred in his dream and his patients' dreams, he was first laughed at and then avoided as a crank. ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... world. Bellerding's house is a museum of obsolete musical instruments. De Gay collects venomous insects from all over the world; no harmless ones need apply. Terriberry has a mania for old railroad tickets. Some are really very curious. I've often wished I had the time to be a crank. ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... unseeing, in the smoke, and had herself grounded a little farther up near the head of the spit. She was observed to be on fire as the Monongahela again drew near the bend, and at the same moment the latter vessel's engines ceased to move, a crank-pin being heated. Thus unmanageable she drifted down within thirty yards of the batteries, and had to anchor below. Her loss was 6 killed and 21 wounded; the Kineo, though repeatedly struck, had no ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... he for music that's developed by a crank, No chance had he at sculpture, nor a penny in the bank. The pea-nut trade was languid, and for him too full of risk; He thought the work on railways for his blood was rather brisk. The sole profession ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... inventor, Ramsey by name, is working on a motor which is said to possess great possibilities in this line. Its distinctive features include a connecting rod much shorter than usual, and a crank shaft located the length of the crank from the central axis of the cylinder. This has the effect of increasing the piston stroke, and also of increasing the proportion of the crank circle during which effective pressure is applied to ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... the tank. Anna de Jong said something about hot showers, and not having to take any more sponge-baths. Howell was watching the stuff come off the other landing craft. A dozen pairs of four-foot wagon wheels, with axles. Hoes, in bundles. Scythe blades. A hand forge, with a crank-driven fan blower, and a hundred and fifty pound anvil, and sledges and ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... a dry rasp in the Major's throat. "Don't you think that to say she is a crank would ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... say. I never hid it from her brother, so why shouldn't she know? But her father's a bit of a crank, so I rather ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... hands and knees, slipping and slithering along the propeller shaft, brought the leaders to the edge of a wider space. Sievers struck a match, and a well-like, vertical opening was revealed. High overhead towered and threatened an enormous steel crank. Before their feet lay a deep pool of slime. ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... Alice, who had not heard her sister's last burst of eloquence, and whose thoughts were still running on her nephew, and his various talents. "He's found out summut about a crank or tank, I forget rightly which it is, but th' master's made him foreman, and he all the while turning off hands; but he said he could na part wi' Jem, nohow. He's good wage now; I tell him he'll be thinking ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... weighed just upon a hundred pounds. A wagon-wheel had once gone over his tail (when nine dogs out of ten would have lost their lives by receiving the wheel on their hind quarters), and this appendage now had a curious bend in the middle of it, making it rather like a bulldog's "crank" tail, but long and bushy. He was far from being a handsome dog; but he looked every inch a fighter, and there was a certain invincibility about his appearance which, combined with his swiftness ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... we lingered yet a little over that famous breakfast, then rose, and prepared to follow the mechanical old ape. Boy hugged Bessy fondly by way of good-by, and, leaving Beebe on guard, we went forth. The same long, narrow, tall, and very crank boat received us. The sun was hot enough to daunt a sepoy; down the bare backs of the oarsmen flowed miniature Meinams of sweat, as they tugged, grunting, against the strong current. We landed at the familiar ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... I don't like the idea of it. There is apt to be something underlying this, or even if it is only a single individual and he happens to be a crank he could cause a lot of trouble. Suppose, for instance, one of these crack-brained foreigners in the shop got it into his head that Torrance here was grinding him down in order to increase our profits? Why, he might attack him at any time! I tell you, we have got to be ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hardened. Gear.—68 regular; other gears furnished if so desired. Bearings.—Made of the best selected high-grade tool steel, carefully ground to a finish after tempering, and thoroughly dust-proof. All cups are screwed into hubs and crank hangers. Hubs.—Large tubular hubs, made from a solid bar of steel. Furnishing.—Tool-bag, wrench, oiler, pump and repair kit. Tool Bags.—In black or tan leather, as may be preferred. Handle bar, hubs, sprocket wheels, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... the plot turns upon the doings of the Society of Friends, you may extract a jest by saying "that many of the characters trembled with anxiety before its production—in fact, were quakers!" The name of the Manager of the Haymarket has frequently been the subject of a quip, if not a crank; still it may yet serve as a peg for slyly observing that, "At the fall of the Curtain, TREE, naturally enough, appeared with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... nose and was so deaf that it took her several seconds to make him understand where she wanted to go. When finally he grasped the address, he tapped his most conspicuous feature with a horny finger, and, his engine having by this time stopped, descended with creaks and groans to crank it up. He was so long over the operation that she began to be alarmed. However, he was not drunk, only senile. Of the two, his taxi was far worse—rickety, spavined, with every evidence of decrepitude. It started with a jerk which threw its ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... gentleman mumbled these curt phrases in a series of inarticulate jerks, as if his vocal apparatus were wound up and worked with a crank, but had grown so rusty that every now and then a wheel would catch on a cog. He did not stand still for a moment, but kept continually stepping, stepping, without advancing or retreating, striking his heavy cane on the ground at each step, as ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... visited the local doctor, a most extraordinary individual with a crank. He had started a Montenegrin temperance society, called the "Band of Good Hope." At present, I believe, the three hundred odd members were all from Kolasin, and it was meeting with very little encouragement. The cultivation of plums for the manufacture ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... a priest of some strange religion, an enquiry agent, or just—a crank?" was the thought that first occurred to him. And the question suggested itself without amusement. The impression of subterfuge and caution he ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... recently set up in business, was willing to give him work. It was a queer house and a queer printer. There was an old damaged press, on which Franklin exercised his skill in repairing, and a small worn-out font of type. Keimer himself, who seems to have been a grotesque compound of knave and crank, was engaged at once in composing and setting up in type an elegy on the death of a prominent young man. He is the only poet to my knowledge who ever used the composition-stick instead of a pen for the vehicle of inspiration. The elegy may still be read in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia, and on perusing ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... Reading incessantly, now fiction, now history, poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of things that aren't so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, is fired at him first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable treatise on the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And with it all he must retain his simple-hearted ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... said seemingly wrong. I'm for A. S. just one hundred per cent and would prefer to have it as right as possible. I don't like crank letter writing and would never have written this now if it hadn't been for several of the letters in the March issue that gave me a touch of hades under the collar. S'long. Maybe I'll write again sometime when I get some more "ham science" ideas.—William S. Lotsch, ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... over the front railing of the car. Another deluge of missiles struck the car. He noticed that his friends were safely aboard. Andy noticed, too, that the crank handle of the motor box was ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... idea," said Harding. "Clarke's known as a crank, and he takes advantage of it to cover his doings. At first, I thought of the whisky trade; but taking up prohibited liquor would hardly be worth his while; though I dare say he has some with him to be used for gaining his Indian friends' ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... no patience with your long memories; this nursing of grievances, this raking up of last night's squabbles, is unworthy of a king, let alone a king of Gods. Once take away from our feasts the little elegancies of quip and crank and wile, and what is left? Muzziness; repletion; silence;—cheerful accompaniments these to the wine-bowl! For my part, I never supposed that Zeus would give the matter a thought the next morning; much less that he would ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... cried, "that's no crank letter. This Earle woman is wise. You got to take her as a serious proposition. She wouldn't make that play if she couldn't get away ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... A small Levantine vessel. Also, a graceful skiff seen in perfection at Constantinople, where it almost monopolizes the boat traffic. It is fast, but crank, being so narrow that the oars or sculls have their looms enlarged into ball-shaped masses to counter-balance their out-board length. It has borne for ages the wave-line now brought out in England as the highest result ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... reflected. "All those sails, all that weight! Boxes heaped one on the top of the other—cubes to catch the air—a man sitting inert in a basket, with his hand on a lever and a crank: it's as though one tried to make a stuffed bird fly! And what becomes of the man in all that: the back push, the daring stroke? The man has got to be the backbone of the machine, with his quick balancings, his bendings, which are worth more ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... ideas and impressions; he was seldom so busy that he would not push aside his papers for a chat; and he would talk with almost any one, on almost any subject—his secretaries, his stenographers, his office boys, and any crank who succeeded in getting by the doorman—for, in spite of his lively warnings against the breed, Page did really love cranks and took a collector's joy in uncovering new types. Page's voice was normally quiet; though he had spent all his early life in the South, the characteristic Southern ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... "He's a crank," said Lee; "frankly, I don't like him. If you find it unpleasant there, come back ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... father was a lascivious, egotistical crank, married a man absolutely devoid of will power and energy. She was gifted; the marriage a failure. Of the two children, one was an indolent, thoroughly useless, good-for-nothing boy, whose only thought was of wasting money on pretty neckties and the like and of flirting with ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... timber, one end of which rested on the parapet whilst the other—in the trench—was packed in a manner to give the required elevation. A cricket ball or jam tin bomb was placed in the pouch and the rubbers were then strained by means of a crank handle winding up a wire attached to the pouch with a trip hook. When the required tension was obtained one man lit the fuse and retired to cover. The other, the expert, allowing the fuse to burn for a certain time—to suit the range, ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... better reach her through her father. Do you play croquet?" He replied that he was considered something of an expert in that line. That, then, was surely the best way. John Darrow was known in the neighbourhood as a "crank" on the subject of croquet. He had spent many hundreds of dollars on his grounds. His wickets were fastened to hard pine planks, and these were then carefully buried two feet deep. The surface of the ground, he was wont to descant, must be of a particular sort of gravel, sifted just so, and rolled ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... murderers," he informed the composed visage which the mirror held forth to him. "But we haven't got to the point where we're letting lunatics who break up city government meetings, or crank doctors, tell us how to spend a million or two of the money we've worked hard to accumulate. There's getting to be too much of this telling business men in this country how to run their business. If we're peddling typhoid fever in spite of what our analyses tell us, then we'll ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... polishing is done by machinery, which is the custom in Europe, with large lenses, the polisher is slid back and forth over the lens by means of a crank attached to a revolving wheel. The polisher is at the same time slowly revolving around a pivot at its centre, which pivot the crank works into, and the glass below it is slowly turned in an opposite direction. Thus the same effect is produced as in the other system. ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb |
