"Piston" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... engine. In the "Century of Scantlings and Inventions", published in London in 1663, he describes devices showing that he had in mind the raising of water not only by forcing it from two receivers by direct steam pressure but also for some sort of reciprocating piston actuating one end of a lever, the other operating a pump. His descriptions are rather obscure and no drawings are extant so that it is difficult to say whether there were any distinctly novel features ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... as to gunpowder presses applies still more to those for gun-cotton, although the latter are always hydraulic presses. Generally the pistons fit the mould perfectly, that is to say, they make aspiration like the piston of a pump. But there is no metal as yet known which for any length of time will stand the constant friction of compression, and after some time the mould will be wider in that part where the greatest compression takes ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... the bottom of an upright cylinder, which is immediately shut perfectly close. A flint and steel are at the same time made to strike directly over it, and to ignite the powder. The air that is thus generated, forces up a piston through a cylinder, which piston, striking the arm of a wheel, puts it in motion, and with it the machinery of the mills. A complete revolution of the wheel again prepares the cylinder for a fresh ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... project, and described the difficulty he had experienced in getting his paddle-wheels turned round. On which Symington immediately asked, "Why don't you use the steam-engine?" The model which Symington exhibited, produced rotary motion by the employment of ratchet-wheels. The rectilinear motion of the piston-rod was thus converted into rotary motion. Mr. Miller was pleased with the action of the ratchet-wheel contrivance, and gave Symington an order to make a pair of engines of that construction. They were to be used on a small pleasure-boat on ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... valve is fastened to the shaft to give the proper amount of lead, and the desired release and compression, and the expansion valve is operated by a separate eccentric fastened in line with or 180 deg. ahead of the crank. When the piston, therefore, commences to move from the crank end to open the port, D, the expansion valve is forced by its eccentric in the opposite direction, and is closing the steam port and would have closed it ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... withstanding any internal pressure of steam. The necessary consequence was, that the manufacturing engines of those days were compelled to work with steam of from only 31/2 lb. to 5 lb. per square inch of pressure above atmosphere. The piston speed rarely exceeded 250 feet per minute, and as a result of the feeble pressure, and of the low rate of speed, very large cylinders indeed were needed relatively to the power obtained. The consumption of fuel was heavy, being commonly from 7 lb. to 10 lb. per ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... father and mother, and the smell carried him back to days before those in which he had begun to bruise himself against the great outside world. "I always think one of the best parts of going abroad is the first thud of the piston, and the first gurgling of the water when the paddle begins ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... piston-rods slid in and out. Jukes put his ear to the tube. The voice was ready for him. It said: "Pick up all the money. Bear a hand now. I'll want you up here." ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... hot enough to scald you, almost boiling; thirdly, it may be just one degree hotter and at the boiling point, giving forth its vapor in clouds of steam, pressing through the valves and driving the mighty piston which turns the wheels and propels the train ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... cylinders, valve-chests, circulating pumps, steam and exhaust units in main engines; dry-firing boilers, and thus melting the tubes and distorting furnaces, together with easily detectable instances of a minor character, such as cutting piston and connecting rods and stays with hack saws, smashing engine-room telegraph systems, and removing and destroying parts which the Germans believed could not be duplicated. Then there was sabotage well concealed: rod stays in boilers were broken off, but nuts were fastened on exposed surfaces ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... a certain weight of coal can convert into vapor; the quantity and weight of steam expended at each oscillation by one of Newcomen's engines of known dimensions; the quantity of cold water that must be injected into the cylinder to give a certain force to the piston's descending oscillation; and finally the elasticity of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... three or four more, and his ball is, if anything, more hopelessly bunkered than ever. All sense of what is due to the game and to his own dignity is then suddenly lost, and a strange sight is often seen. Five, six, and seven more follow in quick succession, the man's arms working like the piston of a locomotive, and his eyes by this time being quite blinded to the ball, the sand, the bunker, and everything else. As an interesting feature of what we might call golfing physiology, I seriously suggest that players of these habits and temperament, when they begin to work ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... earliest period of his mechanical labors, he had been in the habit of regarding heat as an agent, which, whilst it exerts mechanical force, undergoes no change. The steam in the cylinder of a steam-engine, after having lifted the weight of the piston, contains just as much heat as it did before leaving the boiler,—minus only the loss by radiation. Yet in the low-pressure engine we turn the steam, after having performed its office, into a condensing-apparatus, where the heat ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... means of straps fastened to a large roller underneath the bed, a tympan frame and frisket arranged to open and close automatically with the movement of the bed, and an inking apparatus, consisting of an ink-box with a narrow slit in the bottom through which the ink was forced by a piston upon a roller below, from which it was transmitted by two intermediate rollers to another and lower roller which inked the form as it passed underneath. The two intermediate rollers had an alternating, lateral motion which spread or distributed the ink sideways ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... is called a clack. The child should now be permitted to plunge the piston (by which name it should now be called) into a tub of water; in drawing it backwards and forwards, he will perceive that the clack, which should now be called the valve, opens and shuts as the piston is drawn backwards and forwards. It will be better not to inform the child how this mechanism is employed in the pump. If the names sucker and piston, clack and valve, are fixed in his memory, it will be sufficient for his first lesson. At another opportunity, he should be present when ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... syringe, as in the case related in a former chapter, it must be admitted that the corona is not without some functional office in the act of procreation. Its shape indicates a valve action like that of the valve in a syringe-piston, and if we examine the two extremes of these conditions of glans—one devoid of corona, as many are, and the other with the corona in its most pronounced form, when in a state of erection—the difference, either in the appearance of the two organs or in the different philosophical ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... principal difficulty to be apprehended in these operations is that of packing a working piston so as to bear the pressure of 200 or 300 atmospheres: but this does not seem insurmountable. It is possible also that the chemical combination of the two gases which constitute common air may be effected by such pressures: if this should be the case, it might offer a new mode of manufacturing ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... trembling under the power of the reversed pressure against her piston, seemed to buck upon the tracks. She stopped as though she had come to the end of an ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... put in perfect working order, and shone like silver, one bearing the name of Worden, the other that of Ericsson. Her engineer, Mr. Campbell, was in the act of giving some final touches to the machinery, when his leg was caught between the piston-rod and frame of one of the oscillating engines, with such force as to bend the rod, which was an inch and a quarter in diameter and about eight inches long, and break its cast-iron frame, five-eighths of an inch in thickness. The most remarkable fact in this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... fees which he had arranged for me! He put down: 'La Favorita, complete arrangement for pianoforte, arrangement without words, for solo; ditto, for duet; complete arrangement for quartette; the same for two violins; ditto for a Cornet a piston. Total fee, frcs. 1100. Immediate advance in cash, frcs. 500.' I could see at a glance what an enormous amount of trouble this work would involve, but I did not hesitate a ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... that the slightest touch may bring it to the earth again in the same time as it took to travel upwards; so on the house-top it is said to have potential energy. When a boiler works an engine, every time the piston is thrust forward (mechanical energy), an equivalent in heat (molecular energy) is lost. But for the elucidation of these principles, readers must refer to treatises ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the first commercial steam-engine, or rather steam fountain, which applied cold water to the outside of the cylinder to condense the steam inside and produce a vacuum; while Papin, one of the Huguenot refugees to whom industrial England owed so much, planned the first cylinder and piston engine. Then in 1705 Newcomen and Cawley, working with Savery, took up Papin's idea, separated boiler from cylinder, and thus produced a vacuum into which atmospheric pressure forced the piston and worked the pump. Next Humphrey Potter, a youngster hired to open and shut the ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... unalterable quantity, like gravitation. But he can accomplish the same thing indirectly by weakening the power of the rival force. Thus, if he encloses a portion of gas in a cylinder and drives a piston down against it, he is virtually aiding cohesion by forcing the molecules closer together, so that the hold of cohesion, acting through a less distance, is stronger. What he accomplishes here is not all gain, however, for the bounding molecules, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... Fleming named Kremer, i.e. dealer.] the two languages being represented by those important tradesmen Baker and Butcher. The former is reinforced by Bollinger, Fr. boulanger, Pester, Old Fr. pestour (Lat. piston), ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... (3) Raise the piston of the cylinder first to be cleaned to the top of the compression stroke and continue this from cylinder to cylinder ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... seemed to understand, for she turned away a few steps and then looked at him pleadingly, standing with her jaws open, and her long dripping tongue working like a piston ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... inserted a smaller one, joining and fixing them together with gum that the air might not escape from the wrong part. Then at the extremity of a thick stick they fastened a bunch of leaves and grasses large enough to pass with difficulty into the bamboo tube. By working this as a piston the air was expelled from the lower bamboo cane and ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... supported on three wheels, and carried a small copper boiler, heated by a spirit lamp, with a flue passing obliquely through it. The cylinder, of 3/4 inch diameter and 2-inch stroke, was fixed in the top of the boiler, the piston-rod being connected with the vibratory beam attached to the connecting-rod which worked the crank of the driving-wheel. This little engine worked by the expansive force of steam only, which was discharged into the atmosphere after it had done its ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... an engine is a measure of the rate at which work is done by the pressure upon the piston or pistons, as distinct from the rate at which the engine does work. The latter is usually termed "brake horse-power," since it may be ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... that holds the stable pyramid upon its base through centuries of time, condescending to turn the restless wheels of man's machinery! When the expansive burst of the vapour confined within the cylinder of the condensing steam-engine thrusts upwards the piston-rod with its mighty beams, it is simple weight—the weight of the superincumbent transparent atmosphere—that crushes the metal back with antagonistic force. When particles of water have been sublimated ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... the band of men, some twenty of them, cleaving their way through the crowd like a wedge. At their head, and taller than the others, fought two men, whose arms worked with the systematic precision of piston-rods, and before whom men fell on either hand as ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... interrupted in his appeal by his master himself, who called out from the further side of the courtyard, with an air of business: "M. Piston! quick, M. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... use of twin screws at a later time. He also devised and adapted many new types of engines for marine purposes, having respect to the geometrical character of the connections by means of which a reciprocating motion of the piston may be transformed into a rotary motion of the shaft. In particular, he was the first to introduce and show the advantages of engines directly connected to the propeller-shaft, instead of through the more indirect and clumsy modes which others ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... made some unimportant changes at the Forge itself—the pigs were subjected to the working of two hearths now, the chafery, where the greater part of the sulphur was burned out, and the finery. The old system of bellows had been replaced by a wood cylinder, compressing air by piston into a chamber from which the blast was regulated. A blacksmith's shed had been added in the course of time, and a brick coke oven. He stopped at the Forge shed, filled with ruddy light and shadow, the ringing of ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... which it was placed before— when we bear in mind all this, is it possible not to connect the facts together, and to refer cycles of living generations to the same unalterableness in the action of like matter under like circumstances which makes Jupiter and Saturn revolve round the sun, or the piston of a steam-engine move up and down as long as the steam ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... double-bitted axe into a dry hemlock, the keen blade sinking deeper and deeper into the tree with each successive stroke, made with the precision and rapidity of a piston, until the tree fell with a sweeping crash (it had been as smoothly severed as if by a saw) and the two soon had its full length cut up and piled near the ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... himself Mr. Fulton, during the experiments; and further evidence is found in the fact that the engines he ordered of Messrs. Boulton and Watt for the "Clermont" were precisely of the same dimensions as those in the "Charlotte Dundas," with the exception of two inches more diameter in the piston; and the patent of Fulton dates from 1809—twenty years after Symington had propelled a boat by steam on Lake Dalswinton, and eight years after he had himself taken sketches of Symington's engines in the ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... cylinder, the bottom closed while the top remains open, and pour in water to the height of a few inches. Next cover the water with a flat plate or piston, which fits the interior of the cylinder perfectly; then apply heat to the water, and we shall witness the following phenomena. After the lapse of some minutes the water will begin to boil, and the steam accumulating at the upper surface will make room for itself ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... confronted by a pop-gun, some ten feet in diameter, charged with mephitic vapours and plugged with microbes of typhoid fever. Conceive your sensations when you were aware that the piston ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... honored by the universities of England and Germany. Nevertheless, what gave him his value to humanity, and hence his greatness, was the fact that his attention had been arrested by the sight of the lid of a saucepan of boiling water raised by the steam. "Steam is a force which could lift a piston as it lifts the cover of a saucepan, and become the motor power of a machine." Papin's famous saucepan is a kind of magic wand in the history of mankind, which thenceforth began to work and travel without fatigue. How ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... was their very strength, he saw, that made them tender; the appalling power of the machine, which even now he felt that he but half understood, was the very thing that made it run so smoothly. It had the horror of a perfectly controlled steel piston that moves as delicately ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... at its back. In such circumstances it would go through an ordinary house, train and all, as a rifle-bullet would go through a cheese. It was an eight-wheeled engine, and the driving-wheels were eight feet in diameter. The cylinder was eighteen inches, with a piston of two feet stroke, and the total weight of engine and tender was fifty-three tons. The cost of this iron horse with its tender was about ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... seat and centre of its power. The steam is generated in the boilers, but while it remains there it remains quiescent and inert. The action in which its mighty power is expended, and by means of which all subsequent effects are produced, is the lifting and bringing down of the enormous piston which plays within the cylinder. This piston is a massive metallic disc or plate, fitting the interior of the cylinder by its edges, and rising or falling by the expansive force of the steam, as it is admitted alternatively above and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... nozzles, pointing to, and meeting at, the fire. To produce a stream of air bunches of feathers or other soft substance, being fastened to long handles, are worked up and down in the upright tubes, like the piston of a pump. These, when pushed downwards, force the air through the small horizontal tubes, and, by raising and sinking each alternately, a continual current or blast is kept up; for which purpose a boy is usually placed ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... had mercy. The quirt went back and forth like a piston-rod, and the outlaw, in screaming fury, leaped and tossed like a small boat in a ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... open; but a fall of 25 feet did not seem to trouble them in the least. One even found his way into the engine-room, difficult as it might seem to gain access to it, and curled himself up between the piston-rods. Fortunately for the visitor, the engine was not started while he ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... cast-brass, with a piston made of two circular pieces of the same metal, each put into a strong leather cup, and bolted to the other. The bottoms of the cups being together, when the piston becomes loose in the barrels, ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... unbroken regularity. In that yellow streak of horse, that low-bending, bony rider, he saw a possibility of defeat and disgrace. His head disappeared out of the window, his derisive hand vanished. He was turning valves and pulling levers, trying to coax a little more power into his piston strokes. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... professor came dashing toward the camp, his arms were outstretched as if in entreaty, and his long legs going up and down like piston rods, at such speed ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... human being aimed such an unceasing, unending, rain of blows in the space of two minutes as had Trooper Matthewson. His arms had worked like the piston rods of an express engine—as fast and as untiringly. He had taken the Gorilla by surprise, had rushed him, and had never given him a fraction of time in which to attack. Beneath the rain of sledge-hammer blows the Gorilla had shrunk, guarding for dear life. Driven into a corner, he cowered down, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... side. One of these magnets closes an exhaust-valve, and the other opens an inlet-valve, in the compressed air tank. At once air is forced into this double cylinder, which you see at the bottom of the stabilizer, filling the half which is to operate its own set of rudders; and a piston begins to work inside. The piston is connected to a toothed rack, as you will note, causing this to turn a sector engaging it. The control wires connect ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... his companion; "an amatyure like yourself. That's one style of play, yours is the other, and I like it best. But I began when I was a boy, you see, before my taste was formed. When you're my age you'll play that thing like a cornet-a-piston. Give us that air again; how does it go?" and he affected to endeavour ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I started back from the wagon lines, carrying a piston rod of the buffer, with Downey assisting me. We were on horseback and getting into Labazell Valley, when a shell passed over our head so close that we felt the wind of it; it was accompanied by a great flare ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... business at the window. He took a neck in each hand and cracked their skulls together until the whack-whack-whack of it was like the exhaust of a Ford with loose piston rings; and when they fell from his grip, unconscious, he came to my rescue. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... lift the lid of the teapot. He didn't create the idea, he merely discovered the fact; the cat had noticed it a hundred times. From the teapot he evolved the cylinder—from the displaced lid he evolved the piston-rod. To attach something to the piston-rod to be moved by it, was a simple matter—crank and wheel. And so there was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Understand, this was the first time we went into Loando. I have learned that wretched hole well enough since. And it was as we were running out of Loando, that, in reversing the engine too suddenly, lest we should smash up an old Portuguese woman's bum-boat, that the slides or supports of the piston-rod just shot out of the grooves they run in on the top, came cleverly down on the outside of the carriage, gave that odious g-r-r-r, which I can hear now, and then, dump,—down came the whole weight of the walking-beam, bent rod and carriages all into three ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... daresay. But not unequal work. The work must be unequal if the conditions are unequal. It's not the same machine. To turn a woman on to a man's work is like trying to run an express train by clock-work, with a pendulum for a piston, and ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... their simplicity thought and averred it, Had yet a meaning quite as respectable: For, among other doctrines delectable, Was he not surely the first to insist on The natural sovereignty of our race?— Here the lecturer came to a pausing-place. And while his cough, like a drouthy piston, Tried to dislodge the husk that grew to him, I seized the occasion of bidding adieu to him, The vesture still within ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... in history at all, or in the outer world at all: a greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else. How dare we pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a crucible, that we know the limits of natural ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... prayer before they were eaten, and now went on praying and praying forever and ever. When they came to the end of the three hymns, they began again by themselves. The mill kept getting louder, they kept the time with their feet, and it was like the stroke of a mighty piston, a boom! Fris nodded with them, and a long tuft of hair flapped in his face; he fell into an ecstasy, and could not sit still ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... easy and safe, some of it was easy but not safe. Oil cups had to be filled as they flew back and forth, bearings must be oiled after great steel rods had flashed by and before they returned. The swift, silent play of the great piston and the steady motion of the resistless, revolving shaft, half hypnotized the boy and he stood, dazed and in danger, until called down by the sharp rebuff of ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... of one boiler operating the different kinds of machinery referred to. In Fig. 48 is shown a small pump, made by The Goulds Manufacturing Co., capable of lifting forty-eight gallons of water per minute against a head of a hundred feet. The diameter of piston is four inches and the length of stroke is six inches. It is operated by a belt from a steam engine used for other purposes ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... you will join them, but on condition that you forthwith drink up to two bottles full of Hungarian wine, Champagne, or Cape, just to bring you up to their mark.—My dear fellow, we are all so much on here, that it was necessary to close the Opera. The manager is as drunk as a cornet-a-piston; he ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... pressure engine the steam, after having pushed the piston to the end of the stroke, escapes into the atmosphere, and the impelling force is therefore that due to the difference between the pressure of the steam and the pressure of the atmosphere. In the condensing engine the steam, after having pressed ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... of that description in the house. I applied it to his mouth, drew up the piston, and then ejected the air, and re-applied it. In two minutes he pronounced himself better, and I left the old nurse hard at work, and my father very considerably pacified. I returned to my sister, to whom I recounted what had passed; but ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... be removed with a syringe and water as hot as can be comfortably borne. A hard-rubber syringe having a piston, and holding from two teaspoonfuls to two tablespoonfuls, is to be employed—the larger ones are better. The clothing should be protected from water by towels placed over the shoulder, and a basin is held under the ear to catch the water ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... drink brandipanee, and some drink cocktails—vara bad for the coats o' the stomach is a cocktail— and some drink sangaree, so I have been credibly informed; but one and all they sweat like the packing of piston-head on a fourrteen-days' voyage with the screw racing half her time. But, as I was saying, the population o' Larut was five all told of English—that is to say, Scotch—an' I'm Scotch, ye know,' ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect. Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... their weight; while, to keep the frames thin, the necessary power is obtained by terrific speed of the moving parts, as though a steam engine, to avoid great pressure in its cylinders, had a long stroke and ran at great piston speed, which, however, is no disadvantage to the rotary motion of the electric motor, there being no reciprocating cranks, etc., that must be started and stopped ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... fluid can pass freely from one cylinder to the other, through the connecting pipe. Suppose a horizontal section of the smaller cylinder to measure one square inch, that of the larger to be one hundred square inches. A weight of one pound on the smaller piston will balance a weight of one hundred pounds on the larger. If a downward pressure of one pound be exerted on the smaller piston, the larger piston will exert an upward pressure of one hundred pounds. Conversely, a downward pressure of one hundred pounds, ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... than a short, thick "S"-wrench, of the kind used by locomotive engineers in tightening the nuts of the piston-rod packing glands. ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... of using a cam instead of an eccentric is to enable the opening of the valves abruptly at the beginning of the piston stroke, maintaining a uniform steam-port opening during nearly the entire length of stroke, and as abruptly closing the valves at the termination ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... the single drivers in the center, 9 ft. in diameter, and a four-wheeled bogie at each end. The driving wheels have no flanges. The bogie wheels are 4 ft. in diameter. The cylinders have a diameter of 161/2 in. and a piston stroke of 24 in. The boiler contains 180 tubes, and the total weight of the engine is 42 tons. These locomotives, constructed for 7 ft. gauge, have attained a speed of seventy-seven ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... miles to Detroit. Then it was run into the shops and taken down for examination. Being found to be in perfect condition except for the valves, which required some trifling adjustment to take up the wear on the valve stems, and for the piston rings, which needed setting out, it was reassembled and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... appeared in his hand with the magical suddenness of a conjuring trick. As the man worked away Bryce peeped out from his hiding-place and saw then that it was indeed Cumshaw. He watched fascinated. His heart was thumping away like the piston of a steam-engine, and some queer unnamed instinct told him that the chase was drawing to a close. Cumshaw was digging up something of vital importance; it might be the treasure itself or perhaps the key to it. But why should Cumshaw ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... installed two Porter-Allen engines to drive electric alternating-current generators for supplying current to primitive lighthouse apparatus. While the engines were not directly coupled to the dynamos, it was a curious fact that the piston speeds and number of revolutions were what is common to-day in isolated direct-coupled plants. In the dozen years following Mr. Porter built many engines with certain common characteristics—i.e., high piston speed and revolutions, solid engine bed, and babbitt-metal bearings; but there was no electric ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... sprung up in her heart that he might not see Tom at all; but she could not utter a word, and stood returning Godfrey's gaze like one fascinated with terror. Presently her heart began again to bear witness in violent piston-strokes. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... of its boiler by turning the exhaust from the cylinders into the smoke-stack, thus creating a forced draught. Second he built another engine, in which the tooth-wheel driving gear gave way to a simple and direct connection between the piston and the driving wheels which rolled upon the rails. This type of locomotive, developing some six miles an hour, did its work so well in the colliery that it was retained, with very slight alterations, for more than half a century. The report of its success ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... in the soups containing them. Maccaroni, being tubular, is the favorite habitat of a very dangerous insect, which is rendered peculiarly ferocious by being boiled. The government of the island, therefore, never allows a stick of it to be exported without being accompanied by a piston with which its cavity may at any time be thoroughly swept out. These are commonly lost or stolen before the maccaroni arrives among us. It, therefore, always contains many of these insects, which, however, generally die of old age in the shops, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... the action of this screw, A, B," meditatively. "It interferes with the force of the piston, in my judgment." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... sat, an hour later, disgustedly reflecting on this incident, that I remembered that there was always some 'hand-working' of the engine during the cage-descents, an engineman reversing the action by a handle at every stroke of the piston, to prevent bumping. However, the only permanent injury was to the lamp: and I found many ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... he went, opening the great doors, feting the musicians, soaking them with champagne, drunk himself without drinking a drop, solely with the music which brought him back to life. He mimicked the piston, he mimicked the harp, he snapped his fingers over his head, and rolled his eyes and danced his steps, to the utter stupefaction of the tourists running in from all sides at the racket. Then suddenly, as the exhilarated musicos struck up a Strauss waltz with the fury of true tziganes, ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... asked the ticket-clerk, in the suavest voice, whether he could tell him how far it was to London. The official put forward his face to reply when Cullingworth drove his fist through the little hole with the force of a piston. The clerk flew backwards off his stool, and his yell of pain and indignation brought some police and railway men to his assistance. They pursued Cullingworth; but he, as active and as fit as a greyhound, outraced them all, and vanished into the darkness, down the long, straight ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... was everything! Instead of a single column of smoke he counted thirteen, forced through the soil as if violently propelled by some piston. It was evident that the crust of the earth was subjected in this part of the globe to a frightful pressure. The atmosphere was saturated with gases and carbonic acid, mingled with aqueous vapors. Cyrus Harding felt the volcanic ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... of our pilot's bell, a gasping throb, as if our boat took a deep, long breath; and just as the "Senator" makes our wheel we dash ahead again, with every stroke of the piston threatening to rack our frail ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... more slowly on the cloth And sweaty fingers slacken And hair falls in damp wisps over the eyes— Sped by some power within, Sadie quivers like a rod... A thin black piston flying, One ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... our drive to Krugersdorp we left for Cape Town and England. We made the voyage on the old Roslin Castle. Always a slow boat, she had on this occasion, in sporting parlance, a "wing down," having broken a piston-rod on her way out from England, when we had vainly awaited her at Cape Town, and I think it was nearly three weeks before we landed at Plymouth. Again Randolph's African journey was brought back to my recollection. The ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... afterwards, I was seized with a fit of giddiness, and felt more completely intoxicated than ever. The room whirled round and round furiously; the old soldier seemed to be regularly bobbing up and down before me like the piston of a steam-engine. I was half deafened by a violent singing in my ears; a feeling of utter bewilderment, helplessness, idiocy, overcame me. I rose from my chair, holding on by the table to keep my balance; and stammered out that I felt dreadfully unwell—so unwell that I did not know how ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... off" before me, but he enjoyed explaining the motor in broken English to Starr. The American artist heard with a vague smile the difference between the ordinary four-cycle engine of an automobile, and the two-cycle engine of this marine motor, with its piston receiving an impulse at each down stroke; tried to understand how the charge of vaporized petrol was drawn into the crank-chamber, and there slightly compressed; how the gas afterwards traveled along a by-pass into the firing chamber ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... appeared to be as tireless as the piston-rods of an engine, and at last our friends grow weary of watching him. The boys became drowsy, and they finally lay down in the bottom of the boat, with their blanket over ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... substance but the upper portion was transparent as crystal. Through the walls could be seen a quantity of apparatus resting on the opaque bottom portion. Two mechanics from the Bureau of Standards were making final adjustments of one of the pieces of apparatus, which resembled a tank fitted with a piston geared to an electric motor. From the tank, tubes ran to four hollow pipes, an inch and a half in diameter, which ran through the skin and extended thirty inches from the outer skin of the twenty-foot sphere. Dr. Bird stood near talking with the executive officer of the ship and from ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... in introducing the drug by means of a hypodermic syringe into the substance of the gluteal muscles. The syringe is made of glass, and has a solid glass piston; the needle of platino-iridium should be 5 cm. long and of a larger calibre than the ordinary hypodermic needle. The preparation usually employed consists of: metallic mercury or calomel 1 dram, lanolin and olive oil each 2 drams; it must be warmed to allow of its passage through the needle. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... Co., and now I'm senior partner with the firm of Stephenson & Mackenzie. If ever you're up in Greenock direction, and want to see how we do it, just ask for Donal Mackenzie, and they'll show you the place. (Proudly.) We're the sole makers of the Mackenzie piston, if ever you ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... while an arc of black cloud had been growing on the horizon. There was not a breath of wind. From the engine-rooms the thud of the piston-rods came throbbing up with a singular distinctness. The arc of cloud had risen halfway to the meridian. There were streaks in it—streaks of yellow on black. Far away to the north, at the point of ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... shaped like a tumbler, only as large at the bottom as it is at the top, would be a cylinder. Now, if there was a cylinder of iron, with the inside turned perfectly true, and a brass piston fitted ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... like the piston of a pump. It vanished and reappeared and a plane came off. Men in vividly-colored suits swarmed about it, and the elevator was descending again. The plane roared, shot down the deck, and was gone to form one of the string of climbing objects which grew smaller with incredible ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... found a group of worried trainmen gathered about the engine, and it needed but a glance to show what the trouble was. The piston rod had broken while the ponderous engine was going at full speed, and the driving rods, which had broken off from where they were fastened to the wheels, had been driven deep into the ground. This ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... pressures have been increased twice in the last ten years, and nearly three times in the last nineteen. The coal consumptions have been reduced 16.7 per cent. in the last ten years and 27.9 per cent. in the last nineteen. The revolutions per minute have increased in the ratios of 100, 105, 114; and the piston speeds as 100, 124, 140. Although it is quite possible that the further investigations of the Research Committee on Marine Engine Trials may show that the present actual consumption of coal per indicated horse-power is understated, yet it is hardly probable that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... it—a very important improvement over the old idea; then he worked out a plan by which the steam could be admitted at each end of the cylinder instead of at one end, as was the case with former engines. The latter innovation resulted in the push and pull of the piston rod. ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... shock must follow shock, Until the sole remaining Rock That all one's hopes exist on, Crumbles beneath the crushing force Of Conscience, kicking like a horse, And pounding like a piston. ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... wires over land and ocean; were set up in startling type in hundreds of newspaper offices while he who did not know heroism by name was breathing his last on a mattress laid on the yellow-painted floor of the room he had seen so "clear" when the engine-throb and piston-beat played Home, Sweet Home. The sunshine that had followed the rain touched the white cheek of the opened lily before falling on his sightless ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... cauldrons play'd, And call'd delighted SAVERY to your aid; 255 Bade round the youth explosive STEAM aspire In gathering clouds, and wing'd the wave with fire; Bade with cold streams the quick expansion stop, And sunk the immense of vapour to a drop.— Press'd by the ponderous air the Piston falls 260 Resistless, sliding through it's iron walls; Quick moves the balanced beam, of giant-birth, Wields his large limbs, and nodding ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... except in these lengthened terms, give you the complete force of the passage; especially of the [Greek: apiston emesato piston]—"made it trustworthy by passionate desire that it should be so"—which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the present day, who are kindly and sincere, in clinging to the forms of faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... every day. It is this rotation which is the source of the energy. Let us compare the rotation of the earth with the rotation of the fly-wheel belonging to a steam-engine. The rotation of the fly-wheel is really a reservoir, into which the engine pours energy at each stroke of the piston. The various machines in the mill worked by the engine merely draw upon the store of energy accumulated in the fly-wheel. The earth may be likened to a gigantic fly-wheel detached from the engine, though still connected with the machines in the mill. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... diameter, and the ram 1 foot 8 inches in diameter, making the sides and bottom of the cylinder 11 inches thick; it was calculated that it would resist a pressure of 8000 or 9000 pounds to the square inch. The ram or piston was attached to an exceedingly thick and heavy beam of cast iron, called the cross-head, strengthened with bars of wrought iron. To the cross-head were attached the huge chains that descended to the tubes far below, to which they were secured, so that, as ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... E, and the piston, F, in combination with the lever, D, or their equivalent, operated by the means and in the manner and for the ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... ate his breakfast when the six o'clock bell rang, and the bolts of five hundred cells shot back by one mighty stroke of a steam piston-rod, he paraded with his companions, and the four were marched off to their ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... ye ragamuffins, laugh all ye want to! It's no laughin' matter with me, I can tell ye. [Blustering:] I'll let the machine squeeze off one of my arms! Or ye can run the piston through me if ye want to! Kill me, for ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... where he glared at Mark, his grey whiskers standing out stiff with rage. After satisfying himself as to the extent of his injuries, the big pitcher again went for the monk, but the latter jumped from the grating to the piston-rod of the engine, and at every revolution of the screw he would go down into the hold and then come up again, shaking his fist at Mark at every ascent, and chattering like a magpie. This sight was so ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... piercing the cold silent crevices of the earth. Ay, indeed! The coal in the furnace, burning passively and hotly, is as much a force, though it but lies and suffers, as the energy that throbs in the leaping piston-rod or the rushing wheel. Not in success and noise and triumph does the soul grow; when the body rejoices, when the mind is prodigal of seed, the spirit sits within in a darkened chamber, like a folded chrysalis, stiff as a corpse, in a faint dream. But when ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... stood balanced on one leg, with the other stretched out behind, in a manner that riveted attention. But no doubt his horn was badly chosen. Mr. Robinson insisted on a long single-tubed instrument, saying that it was classical; but a cornet a piston would have given ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... passing under triumphal arches, to the clang of church bells and the blare of bands. On the leading engine rode the young Marquis of Blandford playing "See the Conquering Here Comes" on the cornet-a-piston, Mr. George Owen, Mr. Davies and Mr. Webb. Earl Vane was in the train and received a public welcome at the station. Then the inevitable speeches. The return train was still longer and took two hours to reach Machynlleth, where the jubilations were renewed, and Countess Vane, ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... despised Stanhope so utterly that he would take no protection from him, or give him any share in his own troubles. But at that blow, a demon sprang to life in him which knew no law but an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. His left arm shot out like a piston at the dim flushed face before him, and the face bobbed downward out ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... provided with a steam cylinder, similar to the cylinder of a steam engine, containing a piston, the rod of which is attached to a crosshead, A, that slides on ways, B, secured to the bed supporting ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... (Plate LXII). At one end is a raised bamboo bench in front of which stands the forge. This consists of two upright wooden cylinders, usually logs hollowed out, known as po-opan. In each of these is a piston or plunger (doeydoyog) at the lower end of which is a wooden ring packed with corn husks and chicken feathers. When this is pushed downward in the cylinder, it compresses the air and forces it out of the small opening in the base, but when it is drawn up, the packing collapses and allows ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... cylinder receives a very small charge of air at each stroke; when the pressure in the reservoir diminishes the cut-off is delayed so that a larger quantity of air is admitted to the small cylinder; and when the pressure in the reservoir is so far reduced that the pressure on the smaller piston gives very little power, the supply passages are kept open so that the air acts directly on the piston of the larger cylinder. This arrangement is also available when the air pressure is high and great power is required ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... sky, a tranquil sea. The piston- rods of the engines so regularly coming up from below, to look (as well they may) at the bright weather, and so regularly almost knocking their iron heads against the cross beam of the skylight, and never doing it! Another Parisian actress is on board, attended ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... every second syllable throughout the whole line. A little variety must, he admits, be allowed to avoid satiety; but all lines which do not go in the steady jog-trot of alternate beats as regularly as the piston of a steam engine, are more or less defective. This simple-minded system naturally makes wild work with the poetry of the 'mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies.' Milton's harsh cadences are indeed excused on the odd ground ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... actuating a Cance dynamo-electric machine, consists of a cast iron bed frame, A, upon which are mounted all the parts. The two jacketed, cylinders, B and C, of different diameters, each contains a simple-acting piston. The two pistons are connected by one rod in common, which is fixed at its extremity to a cross-head, D, running in slides, E and F, and is connected with the connecting rod, G. The head of the latter is provided ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... and Hawthorn) engine had a vertical boiler and machinery. The cylinders were on the opposite side of the boiler from the door of the fire box, and mounted independently; the motion of the piston was communicated by means of a crank shaft and toothed wheels to the driving axle. The wheels were coupled. A regulator, injector, and a hand-brake were placed at each end, so that the engine driver could always stand in the front, whichever was the direction ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... observed. But the moment Faith turns his back on Fact, and looks at Feeling, the procession wabbles. Steam is of main importance, not for sounding the whistle, but for moving the wheels; and if there is a lack of steam we shall not remedy it by attempting by our own effort to move the piston or blow the whistle, but by more water in the boiler, and more fire under it. Feed Faith with Facts, not ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... greater part of the room was occupied by broken machinery of all descriptions. The larger specimens had a case to themselves, and tickets with writing on them in a character which I could not understand. There were fragments of steam engines, all broken and rusted; among them I saw a cylinder and piston, a broken fly-wheel, and part of a crank, which was laid on the ground by their side. Again, there was a very old carriage whose wheels in spite of rust and decay, I could see, had been designed originally for iron rails. Indeed, there were fragments of a great ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... A condensing machine, in which the downward stroke of the piston is performed by the pressure of the atmosphere acting ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... made on water pipes at high pressure, and of various diameters. Of machines worked by water pressure the author proposes to refer only to two which appear to him in every respect the most practical and advantageous. One is the piston machine of M. Albert Schmid, engineer at Zurich. The cylinder is oscillating, and the distribution is effected, without an eccentric, by the relative motion of two spherical surfaces fitted one against the other, and having the axis of oscillation for a common axis. The convex surface, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... devices which carry coal to the fire room. To put boilers out of order use explosives or silicates or a plain glass bottle which thrown on the glowing coals hinders the combustion and clogs up the smoke exhausts. You can also use acids to corrode boiler tubes; acid fumes will ruin cylinders and piston rods. A small quantity of some corrosive substance, a handful of emery will be the end of oil cups. When it comes to dynamos or transformers, short circuits and inversion of poles can be easily managed. Underground cables can be destroyed by fire, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... genius may yet accomplish in this respect, remains yet undetermined. There is, it is true, a mile or more of pneumatic railway used between Dublin and Kingstown. An air pump, driven by steam, exhausts the air from a cylinder in which a piston moves; this cylinder is laid the whole length of the road, and the piston is connected to a car above, so that, as the piston moves forward on the exhaustion of the air in front of it, the car is also carried forward. The original idea of this pneumatic railway was derived from the contrivance ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of this in steam engine construction. If a cylinder has a piston in it with an area of 100 square inches, and a pipe one inch square supplies steam at 50 pounds pressure, the piston will have 50 pounds pressure on every square inch of its surface, equal to ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... a ship carries thousands of tons of freight across the ocean. The engines of the locomotive and the ship are worked by the push of steam. A fire is built under a boiler. The water is boiled; the steam is shut in; the only way the steam can get out is by pushing the piston ahead of it; the piston is attached to machinery that makes the ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... consists usually of a strong iron chest, with a hinged cover, into which the clay is placed, having a piston moving in it, connected by a rod or bar, having cog-teeth, with a cog-wheel, which is moved by horse or hand power, and drives the piston forward with steadiness, forcing the clay through the openings ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... temperature (1,200 or 1,500 degrees), while the rubbing surfaces remain at a moderate temperature (60 or 80 degrees). The fire grate is placed in the interior of the cylinder, and is traversed by the cold air forced by a pump. The expanded hot gases fill the cylinder and act against the piston ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... bills when shot, but others do not frequent them. The principal food of all is small insects. I have examined scores of them, and never without finding insects in their crops. Their generally long bills have been spoken of by some naturalists as tubes into which they suck the honey by a piston-like movement of the tongue; but suction in the usual way would be just as effective; and I am satisfied that this is not the primary use of the tongue, nor of the mechanism which enables it to be exserted to a great length beyond the end of the bill. ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... bodily and mental male organism specially adapted for the superincumbent posture of energetic human copulation and energetic piston and cylinder movement necessary for the complete satisfaction of a constant but not acute concupiscence resident in a bodily and mental female organism, passive ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... deliberately across the tracks and into the roundhouse, followed by his fireman. Murphy, the hostler, was hovering about the big throbbing locomotive, putting a final polish on the oil-cups and piston-rods. Jawn, without a word, climbed into the cab, and out over the tender, where he lifted the tank lid and peered ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... what is the difference between it and fa fine drawing. But perhaps this difference can be brought home a little more clearly if you will pardon a rather fanciful simile. I am told that if you construct a perfectly fitted engine—the piston fitting the cylinder with absolute accuracy and the axles their sockets with no space between, &c.—it will not work, but be a lifeless mass of iron. There must be enough play between the vital parts to allow of some movement; "dither" is, I believe, the ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... products of combustion. The Atkinson engine, patented in 1887, was one of the attempts to solve this as well as several other problems, thus creating a more efficient cycle. This engine was designed so that the exhaust stroke carried the piston all the way to the head of the engine, while the compression stroke only moved the piston far enough to sufficiently compress the mixture. The unusual linkage necessary to create these unequal strokes in the Atkinson engine ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile
... the periscope gave a couple of low-voiced orders, and in the ensuing silence Sir William felt the artery in his throat quicken and beat like a piston. Then— ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... the electrophorus comes the "fire syringe" (Fig. 7). The necessary heat in this case is produced by the compression of air. You see in this syringe stopped at one end, I have a certain quantity of air. My piston-rod (C) fits very closely into the syringe (B), so that the air cannot escape. If I push the piston down I compress the air particles, for they can't get out;—I make them in fact occupy less bulk. In the act of compressing ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... it could all mean when the emissaries leaped upon him. Although weakened by his previous battle, Locke proved no easy customer for them. Time after time he struggled free from them and with arms working like piston-rods for a while he kept them at a distance. But, like a pack of wolves, they were not to be denied, and they finally succeeded in holding ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... consists of three cylinder compound surface condensing engines, one cylinder being 72 inches, and two 100 inches in diameter, with a stroke of piston of 6 feet 6 inches. There are seven boilers and thirty-nine furnaces. Practically the Servia is a five decker, as she is built with four decks—of steel, covered with yellow pine—and a promenade reserved for passengers. There is a music room on the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... that waved to and fro, slowly rising, until a breeze caught and carried them away. The sight alone would suffice to inspire terror, without the oppressive smoke and the uncanny noise far down in the depths. Dull and regular, it sounded like the piston of an engine or a great drum, heard through the noises of a factory. Presently there was silence, and then, without any warning, came a tearing crack, the thunder as of 100 heavy guns, a metallic ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... cella contained one central and ten side niches, in which eleven masterpieces of Greek chisels were placed, namely, the Apollo and Hera, by Baton; Leto nursing Apollo and Artemis, by Euphranor; Asklepios and Hygieia, by Nikeratos; Ares and Hermes, by Piston; and Zeus, Athena, and Demeter, by Sthennis. The name of the sculptor of the Concordia in the apse is not known. Pliny speaks also of a picture by Theodoros, representing Cassandra; of four elephants, cut in obsidian, a miracle of skill and labor, and of a collection of precious ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... a long brass spoon. A portable iron stand is generally to be seen somewhere in the tent, upon which the hot vessels are placed, as they are removed from the fire. Close to these is the toxzum or dongbo, a cylindrical wooden churn, with a lid through which a piston passes. This is used for mixing the tea with butter and salt, in the way I have described as also adopted ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... there has been almost constant progress in the science of this great force, until at the present time it is handled, controlled and understood in its phenomena almost as easily as water is poured into a vessel, air compressed under a piston, or hydrogen made to ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... shed over me, were working sad mischief to my peace of mind. I came upon an old shepherd, who, with his music-book thrown into a bush in front of him, was leaning back against a tree and drawing sweet sounds out of a cornet-a-piston. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... hour of emptiness and loss, to recognise whose hand it was that pulled up the props round which our poor tendrils clung. But the opposite actions have the same purpose, and like the up-and-down stroke of a piston, or the contrary motion of two cogged wheels that play into each other, are meant to impel us in one direction, even to the heart of God who is our home. A landowner stops up a private road one day in a year, in order to assert ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... water is heated, the water which is turned into steam, the piston on which the steam acts, the driving wheel, &c., &c., are all one as much as another a means whereby a train is made to go from one place to another; it is impossible to say that any one of them is the main means. ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... Farcot decided to study out one for himself. Almost from the very beginning of his researches in this direction, he adopted the Woolf system, which is one that permits of great variation in the expansion, and one in which the steam under full pressure acts only upon the small piston. There are many types of this engine in use, all of which present marked defects. In one of them, the large cylinder is arranged directly over the small one so as to have but a single rod for the two pistons; and the two cylinders have then one bottom in common, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... and forget our aching limbs, for the most laborious portion of the night's toil is before us. The almost perpendicular ladder is just beside the powerful pump, which, worked by a steam-engine, exhausts the water from the mine, and its busy piston, in monotonous measure, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... the young men to London; his lordship driving, and the servants sitting inside. Jack sat behind with the two grooms, and tooted on a cornet-a-piston in the most melancholy manner. He partook of no refreshment on the road. His silence at his clubs was remarked: smoking, billiards, military duties, and this and that, roused him a little, and presently Jack was alive again. But then came the season, Lady Clara Pulleyn's first season in London, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the beat of a horse's hoofs, and the sound of human voices. Dick's first thought was of his pursuers, the troopers; his second of his escape; his third sent the blood surging through his veins and his heart beating like a piston. A grand thought, a magnificent thought! He could have cried out with exultation as it swept into his mind. Creeping around the tree he silently unearthed the gold-stealers' bag and dragged it after him, retreating to the quarry. At the edge of the incline he let the bag slide, and it went ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... Fortunately, the last line of the History was written, so Miss Anthony, with vol. III. and bushels of manuscripts, fled to the peaceful home of her sister Mary at Rochester. The expected party sailed from Liverpool the 26th of May, on the America After being out three days the piston rod broke and they were obliged to return. My son-in-law, W.H. Blatch, was so seasick and disgusted that he remained in England, and took a fresh start two months later, and had a swift passage without ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Earth into an elastic body, which we can put into compression by resting the weight upon it. In this way work is done against elastic force and stored as elastic potential energy. We may deal with a metal spring, or with a mass of gas contained in a cylinder fitted with a piston upon which the weight may be placed. In either case we find the effect of compression is to raise the temperature of the substance, thus ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... away hastily. He began battering at King's face, battering like a steam-piston. The blows sounded loudly; blood broke out under the terrific pounding. King's grip did not alter, did not shift. His eyes were shut but he clung on, grim, looking a dead man, but a man whose will lasted on after death. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... do nothing else; though A- was ready to swear after each fit was past, that that was the first time he had felt anything, and at this moment would declare in broad Scotch that he'd never been sick at all, qualifying the oath with "except for a minute now and then." He brought a cornet-a-piston to practice on, having had three weeks' instructions on that melodious instrument; and if you could hear the horrid sounds that come! especially at heavy rolls. When I hint he is not improving, there comes a confession: "I don't feel quite right yet, you ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... consequences! Remember, John Grier's firm has a reputation, and deal justly, but firmly, with opposition. The way it's organized, the business almost runs itself. But that's only when the man at the head keeps his finger on the piston-rod. You savvy, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... he extinguished the fire and let the furnace cool, and when Dorothy entered the workshop for the last time to take her mournful leave of the place, there lay the bones of the mighty creature scattered over the floor—here a pipe, there a valve, here a piston and there a cock. Nothing stood but the furnace and the great pipes that ran up the grooves in the wall outside, between which there was scarce a hint of connection ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... Actual Horse-power of an engine, multiply the area of the cylinder in square inches by the average effective pressure in pounds per square inch, less 3 lb. per square inch as the frictional allowance, and also by the speed of the piston in feet per minute, dividing the product by 33,000, and the quotient will be ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... he thought—the up and down stroke of the piston in and out of the cylinder, which oscillated from side to side guided by the eccentric; with the steady systematic revolution of the shaft, borne round by the crank attached to the piston-head, all working so smoothly, and yet with ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sir," he said; "to my mind something has happened to the machinery. Either the shaft or the piston rod is broken, and they cannot get the screw to work. The commander, of course, did not like to remain in the bay, with the chance of a hurricane blowing right into it; and so he got up the steam, and was probably ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston |
