"Inventor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at Orham fust, this Henrietta Bassett did, and the style she slung killed every female Goliath in the Orham sewin' circle dead. Seems her husband that was had been an inventor, as a sort of side line to peddlin' tinware, and all to once he invented somethin' that worked. He made money—nobody knew how much, though all hands had a guess—and pretty soon afterwards he made a will and Henrietta a widow. She'd been livin' in New York, so she said, and had come ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... mind of man is turned upon any given subject with a sufficient concentration, he obtains illumination with regard to it sooner or later. The particular individual in whom the final illumination appears is called a genius, an inventor, one inspired; but he is only the crown of a great mental work created by unknown men about him, and receding back from him through long vistas of distance. Without them he would not have had his material to deal with. Even the poet ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... with Dartmouth of late years is Newcomen, the inventor of the steam engine. He carried on business in the town as an ironmonger. All honour is due to his memory, although others perfected the ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... Schoenbrunn was the rendezvous of all the illustrious savants of Germany; and no new work, no curious invention, appeared, but the Emperor immediately gave orders to have the author presented to him. It was thus that M. Maelzel, the famous inventor of metronomy, was allowed the honor of exhibiting before his Majesty several of his own inventions. The Emperor admired the artificial limbs intended to replace more comfortably and satisfactorily than wooden ones those carried off by balls, and gave him orders to have a wagon constructed ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... have been equally eloquent in the praise of sleep. 'Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care!' But sleep will knit up effectually no broken stitches unless it be enjoyed in bed. 'Blessings on him who invented sleep,' said Sancho. But the great inventor was he who discovered mattresses and sheets and blankets. These two unfortunates no doubt slept; but in the morning they were weary, comfortless, and exhausted. Towels and basins were brought to them, and then they prepared themselves ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... closed his eyes. Marsilius says he has never found a man proof against this torture; but here he claims more than he is justly entitled to. Farinacci states that, out of one hundred accused persons subjected to it, five only refused to confess—a very satisfactory result for the inventor. ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Weeks did all they could to get her back to a place where there was no chance of anyone finding out who she was. They nearly succeeded—but I have been able to block their plans. And one reason is that they were greedy and they couldn't let Zara Slavin and her father alone. He is a great inventor and they profited by his ignorance ...
— A Campfire Girl's Happiness • Jane L. Stewart
... 1819, Dr. Brewster received from the Royal Society the Rumford gold and silver medals, for his discoveries on the Polarization of Light. In 1816 he invented the Kaleidoscope, the patent-right of which was evaded, so that the inventor gained little beyond fame, though the large sale of the instrument must have produced considerable profit. In 1819, in conjunction with Dr. Jameson, he established the "Edinburgh Philosophical ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the royalty, but he's a prince in good standing in his own land, and he is also an excellent blacksmith." The Lieutenant chuckled a little. "He and his sister have both been touched a good deal by Tolstoian doctrine. Jack is the most wonderful inventor, I think, that is at present on the earth, Edison notwithstanding. Why, he is just now engaged on a scheme by which he can float houses from the mountains here down to New York. Float them— pipe-line them would perhaps be a better ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... stake, Charles Dennison should not have been careless. An inventor cannot afford carelessness, particularly when his invention is extremely valuable and obviously patentable. There are too many grasping hands ready to seize what belongs to someone else, too many men who feast upon ...
— Forever • Robert Sheckley
... excellency's own design." Kaunitz was not aware of it, but this wig of his, with its droll mixture of flowing locks before, and prim purse behind, was an exact counterpart of the life and character of its inventor. He had had no intention of being symbolic in his contrivance; it had been solely designed to conceal the little tell-tale lines that were just about to indent the smooth surface of his white forehead. He bent his proud head, while the hair-dresser placed the wonderful wig, and then fell ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... fashion at present, This Wellington nostrum, restoring by stealth, So purges the memory of all that's unpleasant, That patients forget themselves into rude health. For instance, the inventor—his having once said "He should think himself mad if at any one's call, "He became what he is"—is so purged from his head That he now doesn't think he's a madman at all. Of course, for your memories of very long standing— ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Milton Sanford, a connection of mine and a noted character. He had lived in Florence and known Browning and his wife. He was, I believe, uncle of Miss Kate Field. He introduced me to Colonel Colt, the celebrated inventor or re-discoverer of the revolver; to Alf. Jaell, a very great pianist; and Edward Marshall, a brother of Humphrey Marshall. Sanford, Colt, Marshall, and I patronised the pistol-gallery every day, nor did we abstain from mint-juleps. I found that, in shooting, Colonel Colt could beat me ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... climate for a year. He left his idea, his invention, behind him—his complete idea. While he was gone his bosom friend stole his perfected idea—yes, stole it, and sold it for twenty thousand dollars. He was called a genius, a great inventor. And then he married her. You don't know her, Bouche. You never saw beautiful Rose Varcoe, who, liking two men, chose the one who was handsome and brilliant, and whom the world called a genius. Why didn't Jaspar Hume expose him, Bouche? Proof is not always easy, and then he had to think of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... announcement that a murder had been committed in a country town in Staffordshire; and that the victim was Mr. Vivian Callingham, a gentleman of means, residing in his own house, The Grange, at Woodbury. Mr. Callingham was the inventor of the acmegraphic process. The servants, said the telegram to the London papers, had heard the sound of a pistol-shot, about half-past eight at night, coming from the direction of Mr. Callingham's library. Aroused by the report, they rushed hastily to the ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... [Chopin] not the most retiring and unambitious of all living musicians, he would before this time have been celebrated as the inventor of a new style, or school, of pianoforte composition. During his short visit to the metropolis last season, but few had the high gratification of hearing his extemporaneous performance. Those who ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... good deal of controversy as to whether this very ancient book was in Welsh or Breton, but the first question is, Did it ever exist? Was Geoffrey a translator, or an inventor, or a collector of oral traditions current in Wales or ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... that at any rate the youngsters were amusing themselves, spoke a word to Mrs. Greenacre over the ditch, and took one look at the quintain. Three or four young farmers were turning the machine round and round and poking at the bag of flour in a manner not at all intended by the inventor of the game; but no mounted sportsmen were there. Miss Thorne looked at her watch. It was only fifteen minutes past twelve, and it was understood that Harry Greenacre was not to begin ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... of Loewen, proclaimed Dierick Bouts, born like his predecessor Ouwater at Haarlem, to be the inventor of landscape painting (claruit inventor in describendo rare); but the van Eycks were certainly before him, though he increased the significance of landscape painting and shewed knowledge of aerial perspective and gradations of tone. Landscape was a distinct entity to him, and could excite ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... 67). This would be late in the Sutra period, no doubt, according to Professor Miller's reasoning. Can the learned gentleman cite any record within that comparatively recent period showing the name of the inventor of that cotton-paper, and the date of his discovery? Surely so important a fact as that, a novelty so transcendently memorable, would not have passed without remark. One would seem compelled, in the absence of any such chronicle, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... a fish story after all, and the old inventor's vain attempt to make a new kind of flying machine was the key ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... MENTAL CONTROL THROUGH CREATION. An inventor's vision. Why It is easy to project your thoughts to another. How your mental powers can draw to you forces of a helpful nature. The big business man must possess mental power of control. How to make a friend or relative succeed. ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... didn't take the field as an offensive partisan, but as an inventor. It was a condition and not a theory that confronted me. (Yes, Sir, I'm a Democrat by conviction, and that was one of the best things Grover Cleveland ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... will land, subject to your approval, at Hamilton Inlet, using the town of Rigolet as a base. By availing ourselves of the Nascopee River and the lakes through which it flows, we can easily penetrate to the highland where the inventor of the Ring machine has located himself. The auxiliary brigantine Sea Fox is lying now under American colours at Amsterdam, and as she can steam fifteen knots an hour she should reach the Inlet in about ten days, passing to the north ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... present Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Jameson, Mrs. Ogleby," said Carton quickly. "Both of them know as much about how experts use those little mechanical eavesdroppers as anyone—except the inventor." ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... time the story crops up in other quarters; so that we cannot look upon Otto as the inventor of the myth. The celebrated Maimonides alludes to it in a passage quoted by Joshua Lorki, a Jewish physician to Benedict XIII. Maimonides lived from 1135 to 1204. The passage is as follows: "It is evident both from the letters of Rambam (Maimonides), whose memory be blessed, and from ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... beholder a peculiar feeling of solemnity—perhaps the thought that men have worshipped there for six hundred years. It contains some choice paintings, which are carefully cherished as the productions of the old masters. A glance at the university, the Kaufhaus, the statue of Schwarz, the inventor of gunpowder, and a walk around the Schlossberg, or Castle Hill, which commands a splendid view of the Black Forest Mountains, exhausted the place, and at the time appointed the party reassembled at the railroad ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... full of sparkling good nature, under-study for her brother, prospective inventor and aviator whose experiments put the Kane family into great difficulties, in the crisis proves resourceful and plucky, and saves the day ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... reduce the profits of foreigners, who are of course dissatisfied. Copyrights are now granted in both those countries for new patterns, new forms of clothing, &c. &c., and our next step will be towards the arrangement of a treaty for, securing to the inventor of a print, or a new fashion of paletot, the monopoly of its production in our markets; and when the claim for this shall be made, it will be found to stand on precisely the same ground with that now made in behalf of the producers of books, and must be granted. ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... surviving patients. The Tyngs, too, resided there, long honorably connected with colonial history and still represented by descendants of national repute. Amongst other remarkable individuals was Jacob Perkins, the famous inventor, who at an advanced age ended his useful career with no little foreign celebrity in the great city of the world. I have read lately of his successful exhibition of his wonderful steam-gun, in the presence of the Duke of Wellington and other competent judges of the experiment, and know not what ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... Mr. Colton, pointing to Kauffman, "is known to me as a munition expert. He bears the endorsement of the Secretary of War and is the inventor of the most effective shells we now manufacture. What you have mistaken for a bomb is his latest design of projectile for an eight-inch gun. He had arranged to bring it here and explain to me its mechanism to-night, and also to submit a proposition giving our company the control ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... months ago there was exhibited, in the society's reading room, a working model of an application to railway working of what the inventor calls "division of the mass." In causing a body, moving at a high velocity, to communicate motion to another at rest, or moving at a lower velocity, he splits one of them up into parts all the more numerous, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... mettlesome old war-horse "Button," back and forth from Philadelphia, often stopping and seating himself by the roadway to write out a thought while the horse that had known the smell of powder quietly nibbled the grass. The success of Benjamin Franklin as an inventor had fired the heart of Paine. He devised a plan to utilize small explosions of gunpowder to run an engine, thus anticipating our gas and gasoline engines by nearly a hundred years. He had also planned a bridge to span the Schuylkill. Capitalists were ready to build the bridge, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... They are very numerous and ingenious. No matter how extraordinary might be the work in hand, the machine to accomplish the end was made on strictly scientific principles, to accomplish that exact piece of work. It would seem that if he had not been an inventor of plots he might have been an inventor of instruments. This idea is sustained by the fact that he had been a wood-engraver only a short time when he invented and patented a double graver which cuts two parallel lines at the same time. It is somewhat ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... and looked at him. Meantime Raven, bending in his search, went toward him, scrutinizing the road from side to side. He had a good idea of the fellow in the one glance he gave him: a pale, thin face, black eyes with a strange spark in them, a burning glance like the inventor's or the fanatic's, and black hair. It was an ascetic face, and yet there was passion of an unnamed sort ready to flash out and do strange things, overthrow the fabric of an ordered life perhaps, or contradict ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Bourse and at baccarat, and the reputation of a lady-killer which he must maintain at any price. Oh! he was a typical patient of Jenkins, and he certainly owed that visit in princely state to the inventor of the mysterious Pearls, which gave to his eyes that glance of flame, to his whole being ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... possible form of Matter is manifested. This process is called the stage of Involution, in which THE ALL becomes "involved," or "wrapped up," in its creation. This process is believed by the Hermetists to have a Correspondence to the mental process of an artist, writer, or inventor, who becomes so wrapped up in his mental creation as to almost forget his own existence and who, for the time being, almost "lives in his creation," If instead of "wrapped" we use the word "rapt," perhaps we will give a better idea ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... sense of practical duties, or whether their common suffering had more endeared to him his gentle companion, and affection sharpened reason, Adam Warner became puissant and majestic in his rights and sanctity of father,—greater in his homely household character, than when, in his mania of inventor, and the sublime hunger of aspiring genius, he had stolen to his daughter's couch, and waked her with ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stand it any more. Maybe it's all right for some fellows. Maybe I'll want to go back some day. But me, I want to get into mechanics. I think I'd get to be a good inventor. There's a fellow that would give me twenty dollars a week ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... immeasurably vaster, I think you will concede. Now I have been looking over a list of inventors—the creators of this amazing material development—and I find that they were not college-bred men. Of course there are exceptions—like Professor Henry of Princeton, the inventor of Mr. Morse's system of telegraphy—but these exceptions are few. It is not overstatement to say that the imagination-stunning material development of this century, the only century worth living in since time itself was invented, is the creation of men not college-bred. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... no fixed time for an adult to sleep. The amount varies with different individuals. The idea is quite prevalent that eight hours nightly are necessary. This may be true for some. Many do very well on seven hours' sleep, and even less. The great inventor, Thomas Edison, is said to have had but very little sleep for many years, and it is reported that when interested in some problem he would miss a night or two. Yet he has lived longer than the average individual and is now in good health. Very few have done as much ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... was not a hundred yards from Robespierre's lodging. His successor was scarcely more fortunate than himself. Cesar Birotteau, the celebrated perfumer of the "Queen of Roses," bought the premises; but, as if the scaffold had left some inexplicable contagion behind it, the inventor of the "Paste of Sultans" and the "Carminative Balm" came to his ruin in that very shop. The solution of the problem here suggested belongs to the ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... bored with William was when he turned inventor. It came rather as a surprise to us; and when he began to be abstracted, profoundly meditative, almost sullen, with an apparent desire to be alone, we thought at first that it was the onset of hydrophobia. In fact, ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... turned the fortune of a day. All manoeuvering has this object in view. Superior numbers facilitate the operation, and victory has most often resolved itself into superior numbers pressing a flank and nothing more; though subsequently his admiring countrymen acclaimed the victor as the inventor of a strategic plan which was old before Alexander took the field, when the victor's genius consisted in the use of opportunities that enabled him to strike at the critical point with more men than his adversary. In flank of the Southern Confederacy Sherman ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... fine, and eaten with oil and vinegar; some derive the name of this mess from the French words SELON MON GOUST, because the proportions of the different ingredients are regulated by the palate of the maker; others say it bears the name of the inventor, who was a rich Dutch merchant; but the general and most probable opinion is, that it was invented by the countess of Salmagondi, one of the ladies of Mary de Medicis, wife of King Henry IV. of France, and by ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... three-volume novels; that is the only conventional incident in the book. C. W. S., although he trains for painting, is admitted by Mr. Hind to be quite a bad artist. Apart, therefore, from the admirable criticism which is the main feature of the book, it shows great courage on the part of the inventor, great sacrifice, to admit that C. W. S. was a failure as an artist. Bad artists, however, are always nice people. I do not say that the reverse is true; indeed, I know many good and even great artists who are charming; ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... knights-errant, from hot-headed, ill-fated Pilatre de Rozier down to Gaston Tissandier, the man who still edits La Nature in the lower strata of an ocean into the treacherous upper depths of which he has risen seven miles. Your true aeronaut is not an inventor of flying-machines, not much concerned about what is known as the "problem of aerial navigation." He is content to take the wings of the morning and be carried away to the uttermost parts of the earth. Problems he leaves to the scientists: he wooes the wilderness he cannot subdue. He is an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... taken another aspect. But whether there existed already a Slavic alphabet or not, it is very doubtful whether Cyril knew it; since the Slavic tribes among whom he and Methodius lived, were not acquainted with it; for all the legends and early historical annals agree in calling Cyril the inventor of the Slavic alphabet. ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... some secret sympathy, Madame F. was exceedingly fond of the comfits. She asserted before all her friends that they were the universal panacea, and knowing herself perfect mistress of the inventor, she did not enquire after the secret of the composition. But having observed that I gave away only the comfits which I kept in my tortoise-shell box, and that I never eat any but those from the crystal box, she one day asked ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... is remarkable. It contains the greatest publisher in the world, the most notable department store baron (and inventor of that new form of literary essay, the department store ad.), the most fragrant gas tanks in the Department of the East, the greatest number of cinders per eye of any arondissement served by the R—— railway, and the most bitterly afflicted hay fever sufferer on this sneezing sphere. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... heaven-born inventor. He had dissipated his substance in inventing an incubator that worked with wonderful success till the day the chickens were to come out, when it took fire and burned up, taking with it chickens, barn, house, and furniture, ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... the first stanza [of The Bard] the abrupt beginning has been celebrated; but technical beauties can give praise only to the inventor. It is in the power of any man to rush abruptly upon his subject that has read the ballad of Johnny Armstrong.' Johnson's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... penny to twopence halfpenny. Grannie fully believed in numbers. She knew from past experience that the children would rather have half a dozen small things than one big thing. The worsted stockings, too, which had been knit in a bygone age, by the celebrated Mrs. Simpson, the inventor of the sprig, were deep and long. They took a great deal of filling, and Grannie knew what keen disappointment would be the result if each stocking was not chock-full. She collected her wares, sorted them into six parcels, laid the six stockings on the table by the side of the ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... nice boy, and you've no idea, mother, what a inventor he is. He could invent anythink, I do believe—if he tried, and I'm sure he'll think of some way ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... powerful family in Aberdeenshire. Though he was disposed to follow a seafaring life, and had obtained a commission in the Navy, he abandoned his early intentions at the urgent solicitation of his parents, and thereafter employed himself as a copperplate engraver, and was the inventor of an ingenious revolving press for copperplate printing. At Edinburgh and Stirling, he afterwards qualified himself for the business of a letterpress printer, and in 1816 opened a printing-office in his native town. In 1819, he compiled the "Annals of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... explains an ingenious holocryptic cipher, written with the English alphabet, with no more letters than would be required for ordinary writing, yet so curiously complicated, that, while with the key easy to understand, it is without the key absolutely undecipherible, even to the inventor of the plan; and the key is capable of so many variations, that every pair of correspondents in Christendom may have their own cipher practically different from all others. In the November and December numbers, a popular account of Donati's Comet was given by Geo. P. Bond, then assistant, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... John Milton, who seems to have known him well, assures us that the devil was the inventor of gunpowder. But, for my own part, were I in the humor to ascribe any particular invention to the author of all evil, it should be that of distilling apple-brandy. We have scripture for it, that he began his capers with the apple; then, why not go ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... the gods of Etruria, the innumerable AEsars. Here is Tages, the inventor of auguries. He attempts with one hand to increase the divisions of the heavens, while with the other he leans upon the earth. Let him come ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... time enough into it yet," replied Mr. Hazen. "Don't you remember how long Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, experimented before ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... century, among whom may be named Hans Schieferstein, Hans Kellerthaler, of Dresden, and Simon Winkler, N. Fischer, and his son Johann Georg, of Munich, the last of whom, with his contemporary Adam Eck, practised relief intarsia, of which the latter is said to have been the inventor. It was known in the art trade as "Praeger arbeit," which was not a name which accurately described its origin. Panellings of walls and doors were often decorated with inlays, most frequently of arabesques, of which the town halls ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... down in that big chair there, Kendrick. I'm the celebrated inventor of a new phosphate drink that ought to hit the spot on a morning like this. Trouble nothing, sir! I was just on the point of mixing one for myself. Make yourself at home, my ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... The inventor has to work out his idea mentally before he produces it materially. The architect first sees the mental picture of the house he is to plan and from this works out the one we see. Every object, every enterprise, ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... their whole support. Washington had been in Hawkeye off and on, attracted away occasionally by some tremendous speculation, from which he invariably returned to Gen. Boswell's office as poor as he went. He was the inventor of no one knew how many useless contrivances, which were not worth patenting, and his years had been passed in dreaming and planning to no purpose; until he was now a man of about thirty, without a profession or a permanent ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... to the central conception of the Social Contract, the dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, the memorable doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine Rousseau was assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggerated language of some popular writers in France leads us to suppose that they think of him as nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the constitution of the Orders, and the contests of the friars with the clergy, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Mackenzie's river, I see how even there too I could dwell. They are our little vegetable redeemers. Methinks our virtue will hold out till they come again. They are worthy to have had a greater than Minerva or Ceres for their inventor. Who was the benignant goddess that ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... clear. Among other things, tax systems were such that it became all but impossible for a citizen born poor to accumulate a fortune. Through ability he might rise to the point of earning fabulous sums—and wind up in debt to the tax collector. A great inventor, a great artist, had little chance of breaking into the domain of what finally became the small percentage of the population now known as Uppers. Then, too, the rising cost of a really good education ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... one State were easily put in circulation in far distant communities, and considerable sums, through the operations of wear and tear and the vicissitudes incident to its fragile nature, never returned to plague the inventor. ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... a scrap of fiction told for true, put in to enliven the column of morning news when it is flat. We owe the discovery to Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the lightning conductor and the republic. That journalist completely deceived the Encyclopaedists by his transatlantic canards. Raynal gives two of them for facts in his Histoire ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... instrument-maker of those days. This was Jesse Ramsden (1735-1800), famous as the improver of the sextant, as the constructor of the great theodolite used by General Roy in the English Survey, and as the inventor of the dividing engine for graduating astronomical instruments. Ramsden had built for Sir George Schuckburgh the largest and most perfect equatorial ever attempted. He had constructed mural quadrants for Padua and Verona, which elicited the wonder of astronomers when Dr. Maskelyne declared ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... you'd got an awful cheek of your own, young Greenfield," said Bramble, laughing, as if he was the inventor of the ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... Torricellius,[2] the inventor of the common weather-glass, made the experiment of a long tube which held thirty-two foot of water; and that a more modern virtuoso finding such a machine altogether unwieldly and useless, and considering that thirty-two inches ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... been a portly gentleman—his neck something short, and remarkable for the largest pimple on his nose, which, by his particular desire, is still extant in his picture, said to be a striking likeness, though taken when young. He is said also to be the inventor of raspberry whisky, which is very likely, as nobody has ever appeared to dispute it with him, and as there still exists a broken punch-bowl at Castle Rackrent, in the garret, with an inscription to that effect—a great curiosity. ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... sunburn, I knew it was caused by the ultraviolet rays, the same as from the sun; and I knew that nothing but my light could produce those rays at night time. And as a physician I knew what I did not know as an inventor—the swift amblyopia that follows the impact of this light on the retina. As a physician, too, I can inform you that your country has not permanently blinded a single American seaman or officer. The ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... a passage in your letter, call to my mind the wicked wasp of Twickenham; his lies affect me now no more; they will be all as much despised as the story of the seraglio and the handkerchief, of which I am persuaded he was the only inventor. That man has a malignant and ungenerous heart; and he is base enough to assume the mark of a moralist in order to decry human nature, and to give a decent vent to his hatred to man and woman kind.—But ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... no exception to this rule. He was lord of the voice, master of words and of books, possessor or inventor of those magic writings which nothing in heaven, on earth, or in Hades ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... unlimited belief in the future of These States (as, with reverential capitals, he loves to call them), made the war a period of great trial to his soul. The new virtue, Unionism, of which he is the sole inventor, seemed to have fallen into premature unpopularity. All that he loved, hoped, or hated, hung in the balance. And the game of war was not only momentous to him in its issues; it sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and tortured him intimately by the spectacle ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... infected with original corruption; for I dare say he learned none of them of his father and mother; nor was he admitted to go much abroad among other children that were vile, to learn to sin of them: nay, contrariwise, if at any time he did get abroad amongst others, he would be as the inventor of bad words, and an example in bad actions. To them all he used to be, as we say, the ringleader, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... spade-grip trigger for the Lewis gun, so that the observer can always have one hand free to manipulate the movable back-sight. When one of these deathless inventions is completed the real hard work begins. The new gadget is adopted unanimously by the inventor himself, but he has a tremendous task in making the rest of the ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... given to the surgery of wounded, mortified or diseased pieces of intestine by the introduction from Chicago of an ingenious contrivance named, after the inventor, Murphy's button. This consists of a short nickel-plated tube in two pieces, which are rapidly secured in the divided ends of the bowel, and in such a manner that when the pieces are subsequently "married'' the adjusted ends of the bowel ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... rites, we have two very long and fair galleries: in one of these we place patterns and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inventions: in the other we place the statues of all principal inventors. There we have the statue of your Columbus, that discovered the West Indies: also the inventor of ships: your Monk that was the inventor of ordnance and of gunpowder: the inventor of music: the inventor of letters: the inventor of printing: the inventor of observations of astronomy: the inventor of works in metal: the inventor of glass: the inventor ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... "you have done well—remarkably well. I am certainly proud of you. Some day the people of the United States will be proud of you. I am sure that the inventor's instinct and the scientist's indefatigable energy are characteristics you ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... against the fury of the sea and the power of tempests." Behind the choir is the tomb of the poet Bilderijk, who only died in 1831, and near this the grave of Laurenz Janzoom—the Coster or Sacristan—who is asserted in his native town, but never believed outside it, to have been the real inventor of printing, as he is said to have cut out letters in wood, and taken impressions from them in ink, as early as 1423. His partizans also maintain that while he was attending a midnight mass, praying for patience to endure the ill-treatment of his enemies, all ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... lunatic in a check suit, describing his apocalyptic visions; a dragoman with sore eyes and a grievance against the Board of Guardians; a venerable son of Jerusalem with a most artistic white beard, who had covered the editorial table with carved nick-nacks in olive and sandal-wood; an inventor who had squared the circle and the problem of perpetual motion, but could not support himself; a Roumanian exile with a scheme for fertilizing Palestine; and a wild-eyed hatchet-faced Hebrew poet who told me I was a famous ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... however plague and pestilence and famine and the cruelties of man to man might darken life, still it loved these things. But there were no two views possible about what the Church thought of dancing; it was accurately summed up by one moralist in the aphorism, 'The Devil is the inventor and governor and disposer of dances and dancing.' Yet when we look into those accounts which Madame Eglentyne rendered (or did not render) to her nuns at the end of every year, we shall find payments for wassail at New Year and Twelfth Night, for May games, for bread and ale on bonfire ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... disappear in a mighty whirlpool never to rise again. But he made a mistake, so far as Mrs. Powell was concerned, in naming the spot. She knew very well that there was no danger whatever in Brown's Hole, and that the river in this pretty park was the quietest on the whole course. But for its inventor the yarn had fulfilled its purpose, and he found himself east of the Mississippi, where he wanted to be, with a pocket full of dollars. A week or two after the story appeared letters were received from Powell via the Uinta ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... had had several deaf pupils, instructing them largely in articulation methods, published a treatise on the art of instructing the deaf, called "Reduccion de las Letras y Arta para Ensener a Hablar los Mudos;" and he was the inventor of a manual alphabet, in considerable part like that used in America to-day. Sir Kinelm Digby of England, visiting Spain about this time, saw Bonet's work and wrote ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... Bacon, and shows that he was not the original inventor of the inductive method, "which," he says with truth, "has been practiced ever since the beginning of the world by every human being."[91] Nor was he the "first person who correctly analyzed that method and explained its uses," as Aristotle ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... sodden together, moisten'd and cemented with a little seeth'd Fat, not much unlike our Gritt or Oatmeal Pudding; yet were they of such Esteem among the ancient Romans, that a Statue was erected to Fulvius Agricola, the first Inventor of these Lentil Dumplings. How unlike the Gratitude shewn by the ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... flute music! Pan, the god of pastures and woodlands, was the inventor of the syrinx, or shepherd's flute, with which he accompanied himself and his ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... greatest inventions of the age. It has been the result of a large amount of study on the part of the inventor to perfect a polish that would work easily and satisfactorily in a perfectly dry state, thereby obviating the disagreeable task of mixing and preparing. A good stove polish is an absolute necessity in every family. To be assured that ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... in answer to BLUEBELL, who wishes to know when and by whom organs were invented: "Jubal is mentioned in Gen. iv. 21, as 'the father of all such as handle the harp and organ;' but neither the century of its invention nor the name of the inventor can be given. Hero and Vitruvius speak of a water-organ, invented or made by Ctesibius, of Alexandria, about 180 or 200 B.C., so that it may be inferred that other kinds of organs were then in existence. Aldhelm, an Anglo-Saxon writer, mentions that organs were used in England at the end of the ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... you that I am a sort of inventor," the Spaniard went on. "I have not had much success, but I think my new alarm clock is going to bring me in some money. It works on a new principle, but I am giving it a good test, privately, before I try to put it ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... has been produced by some persons from the similarity of names of Faustus, the supposed magician of Wittenberg, and Faust or Fust of Mentz, the inventor, or first establisher of the art of printing. It has been alleged that the exact resemblance of the copies of books published by the latter, when no other mode of multiplying copies was known but by the act of transcribing, was found to be such, as could ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... letters, and as Bobby watched him he seemed to him like some automaton, something wound into life by some clever inventor. The hand moved across the paper—the dead eyes encountered nothing in their gaze, the shoulders were the loosely drooping shoulders of ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... any poets but our own. All others, from Homer, with his catalogue of leaders and ships, down to Metastasio himself, though he wrote for music, appear to have overlooked this opportunity of playing a voluntary of fine sounds, where they had no other theme on which to modulate. Its inventor, as far as I am aware, is that great ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... Lord Brougham, in his beautiful Discourse on the Advantages of Science, that the inventor of the new mode of refining sugar made more money in a shorter time, and with less risk and trouble, than perhaps was ever realized from ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... would serve her a dish of Jerusalem artichokes! It would be something fresh to replace those everlasting potatoes, and Mother Barberin would not suffer too much from the sale of poor Rousette. And the inventor of this new dish of vegetables was I, Remi, I was the one! So I was of some ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... what would be the condition of the northern inventor? Why, sir, the Vermont inventor protected by his own law would come to Massachusetts, and there say to the pirate who had stolen his property, "Render me up my property or pay me value for its use." The Senator from Vermont would receive for answer, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... safe to predict that Plato would not reject the possibility of providing a 'good life' for the modern man in a world divested of most of the rattling and tinkling paraphernalia of which the nineteenth century so plumed itself as the inventor. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... have lived to found a British peerage; but as it was, the genius of the Armstrong dynasty was for a time extinguished, only, however, to reappear, after the lapse of a few centuries, in the person of the eminent engineer of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the inventor of the Armstrong gun. ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... Mary Lant! She was the inventor of a story called "John and Julia," which went on for weeks and months without ever producing the smallest satiety in Marcella. Unlike her books of adventure, this was a domestic drama of the purest sort; it was extremely moral and evangelical, designed indeed by its sensitively religious author ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... method. The notable discoveries are often made by his successors, who can apply the method with fresh vigour, unimpaired by the previous labour of perfecting it; but the mental calibre of the thought required for their work, however brilliant, is not so great as that required by the first inventor of the method. There are in science immense numbers of different methods, appropriate to different classes of problems; but over and above them all, there is something not easily definable, which may be called the method of science. It was formerly customary to identify this with the inductive ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... without hook, or net, or spear. One thing about him we can know: he was a radical. And we can be sure that he was considered feather-brained and anarchistic by his conservative tribesmen. His difficulty was much greater than that of the modern inventor, who has to convince in advance only one or two capitalists. That early inventor had to convince his whole tribe in advance, for without the co-operation of the whole tribe the device could not be tested. One can well imagine the nightly pow-wow-ings in that ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... incontinent philosophy—which, by-the-bye, he did not himself act on—spoils his story as it did so much else. Such an ending to such a romance is worse even than any blundering such as the commonplace inventor could be guilty of, for he would be in a low sense natural if he were but commonplace. We need not therefore be surprised to find Mr ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... merely a specialist, he has the gift of universality. Do you think that an engineer from the Ecole Polytechnique could ever create one of those miracles of architecture such as Leonardo da Vinci knew how to build,—mechanician, architect, painter, inventor of hydraulics, indefatigable constructor ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... attend to the prophetic entrails of cattle, which often take all kinds of shapes, learn from them what happens. Of this practice a man called Tages was the inventor, who, as is reported, was certainly seen to rise up out of the earth ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... Alexiad (l. iii. p. 78, 79) of Anna Comnena, who, except in filial piety, may be compared to Mademoiselle de Montpensier. In her awful reverence for titles and forms, she styles her father, the inventor of this royal art.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... the painter affects me as hardly less interesting, and one can't but become conscious of one's style when one's style has become, as it were, so conscious of one's, or at least of its own, fortune. If he was the inventor of a remarkably calculable facture, a calculation that never fails is in its way a grace of the first order, and there are things in this special appearance of perfection of practice that make him the forerunner of a mighty and more modern race. More than any of the early painters ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... he attempted to conceive; it is Rembrandt who attempts to conceive events, not Duerer. He is very far from being a realist in this sense: though certain of his etchings possess a considerable degree of such realism, it is not what characterises him as a creator or inventor. But a "profound realistic perception" almost unequalled he did possess; what he saw he painted not as he saw it, not where he saw it, but as it appeared to him to really be. So he painted real girls, plain, ugly or pretty as the case might be, for ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... of Cambridge, about 1713. Two aged ministers, who were at the College in that town, have told me, they remembered it to have been then in use among the students, but had no recollection of it before that period. The inventor used it to express excellency. A Yankee good horse, or Yankee cider, and the like, were an excellent good horse and excellent cider. The students used to hire horses of him; their intercourse with him, and his use of the term upon all occasions, led them to adopt it, and ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... and as the province, the transactions of which I narrate, owes its improvements almost entirely to this hardy race of labourers, it may not be improper here to give some account of the origin and first inventor of this trade. ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt |
