Flame, Electricity and the Camera: Man's Progress from the First Kindling of Fire to the Wireless Telegraph and the Photography of Color

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Doubleday & McClure Company, 1900 - 398 pages
This work examines the chief uses of fire, electricity, and photography and other discoveries and inventions at the end of 1899.
 

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Page 342 - And both, with moons and tides. Nothing hath got so far, But Man hath caught and kept it, as his prey. His eyes dismount the highest star ; He is, in little, all the sphere. Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they Find their acquaintance there.
Page 201 - T is not the grapes of Canaan that repay, But the high faith that failed not by the way; Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave; No ban of endless night exiles the brave; And to the saner mind We rather seem the dead that stayed behind.
Page 340 - ... order quite different from that of the stars. Further observations soon convinced me that, though the short span of human life is far too minute relatively to cosmical events for us to expect to see in succession any distinct steps in so august a process, the probability is indeed overwhelming in favour of an evolution in the past, and still going on, of the heavenly hosts. A time surely existed when the matter now condensed into the sun and planets filled the whole space occupied by the solar...
Page 198 - ... and paid into the ocean with the most improved machinery, possesses every prospect of not only being successfully laid in the first instance, but may reasonably be relied upon to continue for many years in an efficient state for the transmission of signals.
Page 349 - I was working with a Crookes tube covered hy a shield of black cardboard. A. piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper.
Page 330 - ... medium, possibly a stream of meteors, such as we know exist in space. The long series of photographs obtained of this comet frequently showed great masses of cometary matter drifting away into space, probably to become meteor swarms. One of the pictures showed the tail of the comet streaming irregularly, as if beating against a resisting medium, and sharply bent at right angles near the end, as if at that point it encountered a stronger current of resistance. All of these wonderful phenomena...
Page 370 - Under whatever aspect we view this cranium, whether we regard its vertical depression, the enormous thickness of its supraciliary ridges, its sloping occiput, or its long and straight squamosal suture, we meet with ape-like characters, stamping it as the most pithecoid of human crania yet discovered.
Page 43 - ... slip" along the cleavage planes of crystals. Osmond also by its aid shows that the entire structure of certain alloys may be changed by heating to so low a temperature as 225° C. Passing to questions bearing upon molecular activity, we are still confronted with the marvel that a few tenths per cent of carbon is the main factor in determining the properties of" steel. We are, therefore, still repeating the question, "How does the carbon act?
Page 349 - The effect was one which could only be produced, in ordinary parlance, by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube, because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known, even that of the electric arc." "And what did you think?" "I did not think; I investigated. I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube, since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else. I tested it. In a few minutes there was no doubt about it. Rays were coming from the...

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