Invention and Discovery: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches

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Lippincott, 1868 - 160 pages
 

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Page 9 - Soon shall thy arm, unconquer'd Steam, afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car ; Or, on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying chariot through the fields of air...
Page 128 - In electricity he has made a remarkable discovery; you write two or three words on a paper; he takes it with him into a room, and turns a machine enclosed in a cylindrical case, at the top of which is an electrometer, a small fine...
Page 137 - Strada, in one of his Prolusions*, gives an account of a chimerical correspondence between two friends by the help of a certain load-stone, which had such virtue in it, that if it touched two several needles, when one of the needles so touched began to move, the other, though at never so great a distance, moved at the same time, and in the same manner.
Page 133 - My lord, I have undertaken this long journey, purposely to see your person, and to know by what engine of wit or ingenuity you came first to think of this most excellent help into astronomy, viz.
Page 76 - Accordingly, she makes cherries with the stone on the outside ; and a monstrous animal, as tall as a grenadier, with the head of a rabbit, a tail as big as a bed-post, hopping along at the rate of five hops to a mile, with three or four young kangaroos looking out of its false uterus, to see what is passing.
Page 137 - The friend, in the mean while, saw his own sympathetic needle moving of itself to every letter which that of his correspondent pointed at. By this means they talked together across a whole continent, and conveyed their thoughts to one another in an instant, over cities or mountains, seas or deserts.
Page 137 - ... at never so great a distance, moved at the same time and in the same manner, He tells us, that the two friends, being each of them possessed of one of these needles, made a kind of dial-plate, inscribing it with the four-and-twenty letters, in the same manner as the hours of the day are marked upon the ordinary dialplate.
Page 90 - ... took the rough manuscripts to her cottage at the dawn of day and produced a fair copy of the night's work on the...
Page 22 - But of all this great man's scientific excellencies, the most remarkable is the smallness, the simplicity, the apparent inadequacy, of the means which he employed in his experimental researches. His discoveries were made with hardly any apparatus at all; and if, at any time, he had been led to employ instruments of a somewhat less ordinary description, he never rested satisfied until he had, as it were, afterwards translated the process, by resolving the...

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