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Fulcrum   /fˈʊlkrəm/   Listen
Fulcrum

noun
(pl. L. fulcra, E. fulcrums)
1.
The pivot about which a lever turns.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Fulcrum" Quotes from Famous Books



... what his note will sell for in the street. He knows to a feather's weight the influence of each of these items upon the mind of the seller of whom he wishes to make a purchase. Talk about diplomacy!—there's not a man in any court in Europe who knows his position, his fulcrum, and his lever, and the use he can make of them, as this man knows. He can unravel any combination, penetrate any disguise, surmount any obstacle. Beyond all other men, he knows when to talk, and when to refrain from talking,—how to throw ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... served to keep the Irish in the public eye. This was no less than an attempt to free Ireland and disrupt the British Empire, using the United States as a fulcrum, the Irish in America as the power, and Canada as the lever. James Stephens, who organized the Irish Republican Brotherhood, came to America in 1858 to start a similar movement. After the Civil War, which supplied a training school ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... the head is raised at the time weight is caught by the sound member—here the long axis of the subject's body may be likened unto a lever of the first class. The posterior part of the body, at the time weight is taken upon the sound leg, is as the long arm: the fore limbs the fulcrum, and the subject's head the weight, which is lifted. The head movements of a horse at a trot, in supporting-leg-lameness of a front leg, synchronize with the discharge of weight from a lame leg to the opposite one if sound; but in pelvic limb affections, the head is thrown or jerked upward ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix

... court of Ferrara the duchess, Renee de France, gathered a little circle of Protestants. Calvin himself spent some time here, and his influence, together with the high protection of his patroness, made the place a fulcrum against Rome. Isabella d'Este, originally of Ferrara and later Marchioness of Mantua, one of the brilliant women of the Renaissance, for a while toyed with the fashionable theology. Cardinal Bembo saw at her castle ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... been an exceptional bowler. His thoroughness would have assured his success. He studied his art diligently, and practised regularly in a barn through the winter. His physique, too, was a magnificent instrument. That long, muscular body was superbly steady on the short, thick legs. It gave him a fulcrum, firm, apparently immovable. And those weirdly long, thin arms could move with lightning rapidity. He always stood with his hands behind him, and then—as often as not without even one preliminary ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... Assyrian period, and that Deuteronomy belongs to its close. Moreover, however strongly I am convinced that the latter is to be dated in accordance with 2Kings xxii., I do not, like Graf, so use this position as to make it the fulcrum for my lever. Deuteronomy is the starting-point, not in the sense that without it it would be impossible to accomplish anything, but only because, when its position has been historically ascertained, we cannot decline to go on, but must demand that the position of the Priestly ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... and is now placing all his individual strength to the task of heaving off this incubus from the breast of our body politic, but with small avail, for he has no lever to assist him—no fulcrum whereon to rest it; otherwise he might say with Archimedes, 'With these I could move a world.' He is unaided, this eagled-eyed prophet of ours, looking sorrowfully, sagaciously down into the ages! South Carolina is the Joseph, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... resting upon one support or fulcrum, or that portion of any beam projecting out of a wall or beyond a support. (See ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record

... of their stamp; and the rest of us joining in to push that cart up the hill, then taking time to breathe until another came along that needed a lift. The social settlements, starting as neighborhood guilds to reassert the lost brotherhood, became almost from the first the fulcrum, as it were, whence the lever for reform was applied, because the whole idea of that reform was to better the lot of those whom the prosperous up-town knew vaguely only as "the poor." If parks were wanted, if schools needed bettering, there were at the College Settlement, ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis

... accent, may be made to balance a very much greater mass. The greater part of a canvas may be one mass, and be balanced by quite a small spot. But leverage must come in to help. Somewhere in the picture will be the point of support, the fulcrum. And the large mass and the small one will have an obvious relation with reference to that point. Or the element of apparent density will come in. The large mass will be the least dense, the small one the most dense, and the equilibrium is established. For composition is but ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

... consternation. Rounding the cliffs. Discovering their first boat among debris. Taking it along as a trailer. Sailing up Cataract River. Evidence that their boat had been used by some one. Proof of its use by the natives. One of the signs of civilization. Leverage. Fulcrum. Mechanical powers. Delay of voyage owing to weather. Tourmaline. Harry's invention. The bamboo tubes. Testing how fast the guns could be loaded and fired. Cartridges. The marine works. The boats. Three cheers ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay

... master of it. In removing the smaller slabs which lay around the big one he astonished me with his knowledge of how to place the bar. He'd come to my side where I was prying with all my strength and with a wave of his hand for me to stand back, would adjust two or three smaller rocks as a fulcrum and then, with the gentlest of movements, work the half-ton weight inch by inch to where he wanted it. He could swing the rock to the right or left, raise or lower it, at will, and always he made the weight of the rock, against which I had striven so vainly, do the work. ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton

... does not go out every morning before breakfast and, with ferula for Archimedean lever and Three R's for fulcrum, prize open the gates of day. The organization of infants of every conceivable degree of intellectuality into classes, and their formal elevation through successive "grades" by means of cunningly devised educational ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... won't find many volunteers for that occupation, and that is the fulcrum of my whole plan. You must understand that gold dust in the mass is practically indistinguishable in appearance from brass filings. Let us suppose that we secretly sell some perfectly pure brass filings for gold dust, and that they are readily bought of us, because we sell considerably below the ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... bar which turns about a fixed point of support, called the fulcrum. The force applied to the bar to make it turn is called the power, and that which is lifted or moved is termed the weight. The weight, the power, and the fulcrum may occupy different positions along the bar and this gives rise to the three kinds of levers, known as levers of the first class, the second class, and the third class (Fig. 115). In levers of the first class the fulcrum occupies a position somewhere between the power and the weight. In ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... In mechanics three classes of levers are described, according to the relative position of the power, the fulcrum, and the resistance. All the movements of the bones can be referred to one or another ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... with the short iron bar, in the end of which a V-shaped cut had been made. While Pete caught the slack wire with this bar, and, using the post as a fulcrum, the bar as a lever, drew it taut, Conniston with hammer and staples made it secure. Now and again they found a rotten post which must be taken out, while a new one from a row which had been dumped from a wagon yesterday was put ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory

... day. When Syracuse was taken by the Romans, he was unconscious of the fact, and slain, while busy on some problem, by a Roman soldier, notwithstanding the order of the Roman general that his life should be spared. He is credited with the boast: "Give me a fulcrum, and I will move the world." He discovered how to determine the specific weight of bodies while he was taking a bath, and was so excited over the discovery that, it is said, he darted off stark naked on the instant through the streets, shouting ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... church and, state. Still there were, on the whole, the elements of a controlling constitutional party throughout the fifteen provinces The great bond of sympathy, however, between all the seventeen was their common hatred to the foreign soldiery. Upon this deeply imbedded, immovable fulcrum of an ancient national hatred, the sudden mutiny of the whole Spanish army served as a lever of incalculable power. The Prince seized it as from the hand of God. Thus armed, he proposed to himself ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... darkness, and the moor, a chaos, a carnival of wind and snow. Worst of all the snow on the road was not BINDING, and their feet felt as if walking on sand. As long as the footing is good, one can get on even in the face of a northerly storm; but to heave with a shifting fulcrum is hard. Nevertheless Cosmo, beholding with his mind's eye the wide waste around him, rejoiced; invisible through the snow, it was not the less a presence, and his young heart rushed to the contest. There was no fear of ghosts in such a storm! ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... seizure of prey by the constrictor, though invisibly swift, is quite simple in mechanism; it is simply the return to its coil of an opened watch-spring, and is just as instantaneous. But the steady and continuous motion, without a visible fulcrum (for the whole body moves at the same instant, and I have often seen even small snakes glide as fast as I could walk), seems to involve a vibration of the scales quite too rapid to be conceived. The motion of the crest and dorsal fin of the hippocampus, which is one of the intermediate ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin

... Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... of force—both of these terms being "aspects" of God—and without a fulcrum no force can manifest itself; there is no heat without cold, and when it is summer in the northern hemisphere it is winter in the southern. There is no movement that does not depend upon a state of rest, no light without shadow, no pleasure without ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... or tentacles, was pointing out away from the parent mass. It was twice the diameter of his body, and was ponderously heavy; but by rigging a fulcrum and lever device, with a stone as the fulcrum and a tough log as the lever, he managed to raise it high enough to thrust one of the bed-plates under it. The other massive metal sheet he laid across ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst

... shoe bear on the button, and force it well in by repeated blows, the muzzle being the fulcrum. This done, disengage the button ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN

... themselves, and the banks that exist as a means to other things: those that function along methodically, without taking on any extraneous features; and those that serve as a nucleus for accumulating interests, as a fulcrum to move affairs through a wide and varied range. Of this kind was McComas's. Johnny was not the man to stand still and let routine take its way—not the man to mark time, even through the vacation ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... hold fast with his powerful beak. He had now gained the advantage, for which he had been all the while contending. He had got a "fulcrum for his lever," and he was not slow in using it. Suddenly turning back upward, with the aid of his wing and one of his claws, he held himself fast to the ground, while with his strong neck he drew the head of the serpent close under him until it lay within reach of his other claw. Then with ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid

... glowing light of the sun? She was laughing and chatting with Mme. Firmiani, one of the most charming women in Paris. A voice indeed cried, "Intellect is the lever by which to move the world," but another voice cried no less loudly that money was the fulcrum. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... at first sight, from flattest denial to positivest assertion of causal power, becomes intelligible when he is seen immediately afterwards using his newly adopted creed as a fulcrum whereon to rest his argumentative lever in his assault upon Miracles. About that celebrated piece of reasoning, startling as the avowal may sound, there is, to my mind, nothing more remarkable than its celebrity, for, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... equilibrium he rose uninjured though concussed by the impact, raised the latch of the area door by the exertion of force at its freely moving flange and by leverage of the first kind applied at its fulcrum, gained retarded access to the kitchen through the subadjacent scullery, ignited a lucifer match by friction, set free inflammable coal gas by turningon the ventcock, lit a high flame which, by regulating, he ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... a treatise on geometry which still holds its place in the schools. Archimedes of Syracuse, who had once studied at Alexandria, made many discoveries in engineering. A water screw of his device is still in use. He has the credit for finding out the laws of the lever. "Give me a fulcrum on which to rest," he said, "and I will move the earth." The Hellenistic scholars also made remarkable progress in medicine. The medical school of Alexandria was well equipped with charts, models, and dissecting ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... callosities for sitting on, like certain monkeys, and huge corns or hoofs for walking on. Bones would often be modified disastrously. Thus the condyle of the human jaw would become larger than the body of the jaw, because as the fulcrum of the lever it receives more pressure. Some organs (like the heart, which is always at work) would become inconveniently or unnecessarily large. Other absolutely indispensable organs, which are comparatively passive ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball

... the lever gently, Or the rock may be o'erturned! Or, perchance, your lever shattered, And little experience learned! Take time to adjust your fulcrum, Then thrust home your iron bar; Bear down and the rock is lifted, Is lifted ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant

... either the supernatural origin and infallible authority of the Bible, or the exactitude of the account of the supernatural world given in its pages. In fact, they could not afford to entertain any doubt about these points, since the infallible Bible was the fulcrum of the lever with which they were endeavouring to upset the Chair of St. Peter. The "freedom of private judgment" which they proclaimed, meant no more, in practice, than permission to themselves to make free with the public judgment of the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... rapidly, and in a wheedling undertone, with a continual snaky writhing of her whole body, except her eye, which seemed, in the intense fixity of its glare, to act as a fulcrum for all her limbs; and from that eye, as long as it kept its mysterious hold, there was ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... squash something backwards, or to force it forwards or to pull it downwards with ropes passed through pullies [Footnote 10: Compare the sketch on page 198 and on 201 (S. K. M. II.1 86b).]. And here remember that the weight of a man pulls in proportion as his centre of gravity is distant from his fulcrum, and to this is added the force given by his legs and bent back as he ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... movement, would have appeared as if blended together; but they were seen distinct against the blue sky. The head and neck were moved frequently, and apparently with force; and the extended wings seemed to form the fulcrum on which the movements of the neck, body, and tail acted. If the bird wished to descend, the wings were for a moment collapsed; and when again expanded with an altered inclination, the momentum gained by the rapid descent seemed to urge the bird ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... he had been a hindrance in the hunting her up. Well, the fellow thought proper to upset some arrangements my mother had made, and then was more insolent than I should have thought even he could have been towards her. I suppose he had got into the habit with poor Aunt Alice. That made a fulcrum, and my father went at my uncle with a will. I never saw my father so roused in my life. I don't mean by the behaviour to his wife, but at what he knew of the fellow, and all the harm he had done and is doing. And actually my uncle gave in at last, and consented to tell Gregorio to look out for ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge

... who had become grasping and arrogant. They began to discuss the question. A strong feeling pervaded the minds of many of the leading men of the day that a radical change was necessary for the well-being of the country, and they began to apply the lever of public opinion to the great fulcrum of agitation, in order to overturn the evils that had crept into the administration of public affairs. They demanded a government which should be responsible to the people, and not independent of them. They urged that the system of representation was unjust, and should be equalized. They ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight

... and got away. They've got one hundred fathoms of shell money on his head now, which is worth one hundred pounds sterling. Yet he goes into Suu regularly. He was there a short time ago, returning thirty boys from Cape Marsh—that's the Fulcrum Brothers' plantation." ...
— Adventure • Jack London

... if, and she did not mean it for "the one word," but Bobus caught at it as all he wanted. He meant it for the fulcrum on which to rest the strong lever of his will, and before Esther could add any qualification, he was overwhelming her with thanks and assurances so fervent that she could interpose no more doubts, and yielded to the sweetness of being ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... indicated, and it then becomes a matter of no difficulty. It is effected by the introduction of a round, smooth piece of wood into the rectum as far as the fragment of bone and using it as a lever, resting upon another as a fulcrum placed under it outside. The bone, having been thus returned, may be kept in place by the ordinary external means ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... point of resistance, which in the case just mentioned was the lid of the box. At the other end we apply our strength, force, or power. The edge of the box against which the chisel is worked serves as a fulcrum and lies between the handle where the power is applied and the bevelled edge which moves the resistance or weight. A pair of ordinary weighing scales also exemplifies the first order of levers. The knife edge on which the ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent

... may argue, what have we to do with the notion of angular movement in the lever at all? The case is one of rest, and of quiescent destruction of force by force. Now how is this destruction effected? Assuredly by the counter-pressure which supports the fulcrum. But would not this destruction equally arise, and by the same amount of counteracting force, if each force simply pressed its own half of the lever against the fulcrum? And what can assure us that it is not so, except removal of one or other force, and consequent tilting of the lever? The other ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... centuries improve this perfection of simplicity? Aerial navigation is altogether another thing. A swallow does not rise by displacing a volume of air whose specific gravity is greater than its own, but by using the atmosphere as a fulcrum. Otherwise it must possess a bulk which its tiny wings would be powerless to impel against the opposing breeze. Mr. Grimley, the aeronaut, writing of some experiments he has recently been making at Montreal with an ingenious arrangement of revolving fans invented by two gentlemen of that city, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... to displace?—install what it desires to found? The monarch would break his sceptre into fragments on it. There must be a lever capable of raising thirty millions of wills—this lever the nation alone possesses. It is in itself the moving power, the fulcrum and the lever. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... internally is found a series of bones, representing those of the hinder limbs, but of course imperfectly developed; yet they are acted upon by powerful muscles, and can be so used as to form a sort of antagonist to the tail while grasping any object; they thus become a fulcrum giving additional force to the grasp, which secured thereby to a fixed point, giving double power to the ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty

... this, Flint detached a couple of bricks from the party-wall, which were used as a fulcrum for the lever, made of the joist. The building was not inhabited, and there was little to be feared at that height above the street from any noise they might make. Flint sat down on the end of the lever, and the ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... of pitching hay. It was Tim who showed him how to stand with his back to the wagon so as to get the load properly poised with the least expenditure of strength; it was Tim who taught him the cunning trick of using his thigh as a fulcrum in getting his load up, rather than doing it by "main strength and awkwardness"; it was Tim who demonstrated the method of lifting half a cock by running the end of the fork handle into the ground so that the whole earth might aid in the hoisting of the ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor

... Pterodactyls could fly far, for they have at most a weak keel on their breast-bone; on the other hand, some of them show a marked fusion of dorsal vertebrae, which, as in flying birds, must have served as a firm fulcrum for the stroke of the wings. The quaint creatures varied from the size of a sparrow up to a magnificent spread of 15-20 feet from tip to tip of the wings. They were the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... indolence;—that man, to others, too often proves a cipher; though, to himself, his thoughts form an Infinite Series, indefinite, from its vastness; and incommunicable;—not for lack of power, but for lack of an omnipotent volition, to move his strength. His own world is full before him; the fulcrum set; but lever there is none. To such a man, the giving of any boor's resoluteness, with tendons braided, would be as hanging a claymore to Valor's side, before unarmed. Our minds are cunning, compound mechanisms; and one spring, or wheel, or axle wanting, the movement ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... nourished by it and thereby enabled to protract its undesirable activity for a very long period. It can, however, produce no effect upon the person towards whom it is directed unless he has himself some tendency which it can foster—some fulcrum for its lever, as it were; from the aura of a man of pure thought and good life all such influences at once rebound, finding nothing upon which they can fasten, and in that case, by a very curious law, they react in all their force upon their original ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater

... snow to a dusty powder in which Festing's lumber gang floundered awkwardly. Had there been a thaw, the surface would have hardened, but now they were forced to move the logs through loose, billowy drifts. The men sank to their knees, it was difficult to find a fulcrum for the handspikes, and the logs would not run well on the beaten roads. The latter broke into holes, and the dry snow retarded the smooth sliding of the lumber like dust. One could not touch a saw or ax-head ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss

... exposition of his conception of the Archimedes lever, as opposed to that which Allen Sanford had heard his father give. To Gorham the power of the lever depended upon the strength of the imaginative ideals, and the "cold, hard cash" was simply the necessary fulcrum upon which the ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt

... want this amendment of the charter first, because it is right and just to women; second, that women may have a political fulcrum on which to plant their lever for everything they wish to secure through government; third, that the opinions of the women of this city may be respected, and there is no other way to secure respect but to have them counted with those of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... that his number for October 1818 was one of the best he had ever read, and he desired him to "offer to his friends his very best thanks and congratulations upon the production of so admirable a number." "With this number," he said, "you have given me a fulcrum upon which I will move heaven and earth to get subscribers and contributors." Indeed, several of the contributions in this surpassingly excellent number had been sent to the Edinburgh publisher through the ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles

... expression; and it is in accordance with facts. For it is not my love to Jesus, but His love to me, that brings the real moulding power into my life, and my love to Him is only the condition on which the true power acts upon me. To get the fulcrum and the lever which will heave a life up to the heights you have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... was the wand of art, Her fulcrum was the human heart, Whence all unfailing aid is; She moved the earth! Its thunders pealed, Its mountains shook, its temples reeled, The blood-red fountains were unsealed, And ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... next following tug-boat with its attached train of barges. By this simple mode of employing the power of a steam-engine for canal boat traction, all risk of injury to the banks would be avoided, as the chain and not the water of the canal was the fulcrum or resistance which the steam-engine on the tug-boat operated upon in thus warping its way along the chain; and thus effectually, without slip or other waste of power, dragging along the train of barges attached to the stern of the steam-tug. I had arranged for two ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems forever twisting and untwisting its own strength. "And here are a few axioms: 'The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind'; ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... school fund, which proved so offensive to many thousand voters in New York. Indeed, it may be said with truth, that Seward's record on that one question did more to defeat him at Chicago than all his "irrepressible conflict" and "higher-law" declarations. It became the fulcrum of Curtin's and Lane's aggressive resistance, who claimed that, in the event of his nomination, the American or Know-Nothing element in Pennsylvania and Indiana would not only maintain its organisation, but largely increase its strength, because of its strong ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... succeeded in doing this, and at the same time he ran a board underneath the bow of the boat as it was slightly raised. This manoeuvre he repeated several times, each time raising his lever higher, by means of a higher fulcrum, and thus constantly raising the bow of the boat; while after each elevation the bow was secured in its new position by running an additional board underneath it, over the other preceding boards. By carefully and perseveringly ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille

... wanted to lift over into line a little. They were tugging on it hopefully and with very red faces, and it did not budge. I picked up a small beam about five feet long on my side of the road, that I thought would do for a crowbar, stepped over to the boys, fixed a fulcrum for them, and went on with my walk. When I came back after my walk that night to the place where the boys had been playing, I found the boys had given up working on their house. And as I looked about, every big stone for yards around—every ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... modern conception is as to the relation of mind and brain—of soul and body; and particularly the question of the "seat" of the soul—that central point which was, until late years, always considered necessary as a fulcrum or point of contact upon which ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... the ground. A stick of hard, unyielding wood was thrust through the ring beneath the ankle, so that each end of the stick rested on the earth. A man secured one end by standing upon it, while another placed a stone upon the stick thus secured, which he used as a fulcrum. The lever employed was a piece of abdnoos, which worked upon the stone, and pressed down the base of the ring at the same time that it opened the joint sufficiently to allow it to be passed over the thin portion of ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... lay the mare tenebrosum, the Mysterious Sea, girding the level world. England was not then one of the first nations of the earth. She was not yet a maritime power, she had not begun the work of colonisation and empire: the fulcrum of Europe lay further south. But as our Tudor sovereigns were making secure dominion in "these isles," the Byzantine Empire was moving slowly to its end, and favouring circumstances were already making Italy the centre of the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... or dipping lift, from temporary wells or from water-holes in rivers. The pole of the lift has a weight at one end and a kerosene tin suspended from the other. Another form of lift is a hollowed tree trunk worked on a fulcrum, but this only raises the water a foot or two. The Marars do general cultivation as well; but as a class are not considered skilled agriculturists. The proverb ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... With this fulcrum Bayanne had been moved to negotiate a formal treaty containing all Napoleon's stipulations. The Pope was exasperated by the occupation of his lands, and refused his assent to the paper; he would not even enter the French federative system. This attitude appears to have been quite ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... stationary, the other vibrating, and turning on the bolt that confined them to the iron bar which extends across the front of the frame. The vibrating motion was given by connecting the back end of one shear to a bar—making the bolt the fulcrum—and which was attached to a crank, revolving by ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various

... Democratic party, the United States had continued to descend the declivity of radicalism; a work of relentless levelling was thenceforth pursued, and the domain of the conscience became gradually invaded. The democratic party found its fulcrum in the South. The slave States forced the enclosure of the private tribunal, and confiscated in behalf of the State the inviolable rights of the individual: neither thought, the press, nor the pulpit, were free among them; the fundamental maxims of Puritan tradition were sacrificed ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... that I should be ruined at once. So I took my bucket of grease and climbed up to the royal-mast-head. Here the rocking of the vessel, which increases the higher you go from the foot of the mast, which is the fulcrum of the lever, and the smell of the grease, which offended my fastidious senses, upset my stomach again, and I was not a little rejoiced when I got upon the comparative terra firma of the deck. In a few minutes seven bells were struck, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... through a shimmer of green. The path was strung with pedlars and pilgrims; the latter of both sexes and all ages, under mushroom hats with their skirts neatly tucked in at the waist, showing their leggings; the former doing fulcrum duty to a couple of baskets swung on a pole over their shoulders. The pilgrims were on their way back from Zenkoji. Some of them would have tramped over two hundred miles on foot before they reached home again. A rich ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell

... to say to-day is that Greece, which has taken some eminent steps in progress and in modern culture, ought to repeat to Europe with assurance these words of her Archimedes: [Greek: Dos moi pou sto kai ten gen kineso] (Give me a fulcrum, and I will shake the earth). The narrow horizon within which this small kingdom was enclosed when it was created does not allow of that intellectual spring and flight which is necessary for the accomplishment of the views and wishes of those who see in Greece the most active and enlightened ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... grasped McKee's left arm, jerking it down sharply on his shoulder. With his right hand he grasped the back of his antagonist's neck, pulling his head downward and inward. Using his shoulder for a fulcrum, with a mighty heave of his legs and back he sought to toss McKee over ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller

... that time is included the fastening of the aperejo. It is surprising to note the degree of skill exercised by an experienced packer, and his apparently abnormal strength in handling the immense bundles that are sometimes transported. By the aid of his knees used as a fulcrum, he lifts a package and tosses it on the mule's back without any apparent effort, the dead weight of which he could not move ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... movement no doubt represents the decisive factor. The love of truth in the abstract is probably the weakest of human passions; but truth when attained ultimately gives the fulcrum for a reconstruction of the world. When a solid core of ascertained and verifiable truth has once been formed and applied to practical results it becomes the fixed pivot upon which all beliefs must ultimately turn. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... the dark ages put their light under a bushel? Dark ages will ever follow the increase of papal power. It is part of their system to keep the masses in ignorance. How truly it has been said that Rome asked but one thing, and that Luther denied her—'A fulcrum of ignorance on which to rest that lever by which she can balance the world.' They dare not allow their people light and knowledge; and what to others was indeed a dark age, is regarded by the priests of Rome as a golden season. Can you point to a single papal country which is ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans

... hackle something darted, seized it, and whirled to fly, with the unwholesome bit in its mouth, up the peaceful Ayboljockameegus. But the lucky man, and he happened to be the novice, forgot, while giving the capturing jerk of his hook, that his fulcrum was not solid rock. The slight shell tilted, turned—over not quite, over enough to give everybody a start. One lesson teaches the docile. Caution thereafter presided over our fishing. She told us to sit low, keep cool, cast gently, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... differently. Availing himself of every possibility of the situation, he converted his one room into a center of far-reaching activity and beneficence. On the few square feet of space allowed him he erected a fulcrum with which he moved the world, establishing within the walls of Nero's capital a sovereignty more ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker

... belonged; and as, in many cases, from the existence of such animals, we may go on, step by step, to the nature of the earth's surface at the period when they lived: so the meanest relic of art will serve the natural historian of man as a fulcrum by which he may turn up a mass of genuine information; with which, as with all knowledge, as its store increases, the power of applying it becomes more facile; until at length it scarcely becomes an exaggeration to say, that every material ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... manufacture of demagogues without adopting measures which would render us false to our acknowledged principles of government and to our civilising mission. But we may govern in such a manner as to give the demagogue no fulcrum with which to move his credulous and ill-informed countrymen and co-religionists. The leading principle of a government of this nature should be that low taxation is the most potent instrument with which to conjure discontent. This is the policy which will tend more than any other to the stability ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... girl in Edinburgh, the girl whose craving for the colour of existence has gone unsatisfied until Richard Yaverland enters her life. Yaverland, with his stories of Spain, and his imaginative appeal for that young girl, is the fulcrum of Ellen Melville's destiny. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... dependent upon absolute strength as it is on knowing how. The whole body, so far as it is a physical mechanism, may be thought of as a series of levers, of which the muscles, bones, and joints make up the parts and are fulcrum, power arm or weight arm as the case may be. Without going into the details of bodily structure or even knowing the names of the different bones and muscles, it is possible to learn a few simple things about the right use of these levers ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... birds and fishes, the impelling stroke and its return are in the same element; and if, for the bird, that medium yields easily to its impulses, it secedes as easily from the blow that gives it. And if you think what an effort you make to leap six feet, with the earth for a fulcrum, the dart either of a trout or a swallow, with no fulcrum but the water and air they penetrate, will seem to you, I think, greatly marvelous. Yet of the mode in which it is accomplished you will as yet find no undisputed account in any book on natural history, and ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... adjustable rim, or ring, i i, provided with the fork-like arms, K L K L, and with the moving lever or crank, m, and the fulcrum pin, h, all arranged to operate the chute gates, O O, ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various

... governor, and at the right an eccentric which gives a vibratory motion to the lever F. The crank C upon the end of the shaft operates the oil pump. The speed of the turbine is controlled by admitting the steam in puffs of greater or less duration according to the load. The lever F, having its fulcrum in the collar surrounding the shaft, operates with each vibration of the eccentric the pilot valve. The valve is explained ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins

... experience in the science of government, affording us an opportunity for actual participation in the shaping of legislation and in giving vitality to public policies. The press, however, occupies a most unique position with reference to all of them. It is the fulcrum upon which all these activities must depend for useful service. The press is the concentrated voice of the masses; the mouthpiece of the age; the universal censor—directed by popular opinion—from whose verdict ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... cut a strong bar six or eight feet long, while Pat McGuire chopped a hole alongside the log. Then one end of the bar was thrust into the hole, the logging chain fastened to the other; and, behold, a monster lever, whose fulcrum was the ice and whose power was applied by Molly, hitched to the end of the chain. In this simple manner a task was accomplished in five minutes which would have taken a dozen men an hour. When the log had been cat-a-cornered from its bed, the chain was fastened ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... slips between this loop and the strip C, and is held firmly in place by the pressure applied to the back end of D, which thus acts as a lever on the fulcrum E. ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes

... limbs, in all they do or can accomplish, implicitly obey the dictation of the mind? that this operating power, whatever its name, under certain limitations, exercises a sovereign dominion not only over our limbs, but over our intellectual pursuits? The mind of every man is evidently the fulcrum, the moving force,—which alike regulates all his limbs and actions: and in which example, we find a strong illustration of the subordinate nature of mere matter. That alone which gives direction to the organic ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... bark in his bill, tugging and fluttering, using his tail as a lever with the tree as a fulcrum, and objurgating in unseemly tones, as the bark resists his efforts, the drongo assists the Moreton Bay ash in discarding worn-out epidermis, and the tree reciprocates by offering safe nesting-place ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... restlessness were ready to welcome any foreign deliverer from its oppressive yoke. This state of general discontent rendered the revival of the old Angevine party, and their resort to French aid, a source of peril to the monarchy. It also served as a convenient fulcrum for the ambitious schemes of conquest which the princes of the House of Aragon in Spain began to entertain. In territorial extent the kingdom of Naples was the most considerable parcel of the Italian community. It embraced the whole of Calabria, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... be said that since the eye does not rotate like the pendulum, from a fulcrum above, the image of i in the case of the moving eye will be distorted as is indicated in Fig. 4, a. This is true, but the distortion will be so minute as to be negligible if the pendulum is rather ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... that it was concluded at a time when the French Government had not yet recognized the organization of St. Domingo, and afterwards the power of the negroes. The liberty of the blacks acknowledged at St. Domingo, and legitimized by the French Government, would be for all time a fulcrum for the Republic in the New World. In that case the sceptre of the New World must sooner or later have fallen into the hands of the negroes; the shock resulting for England is incalculable, whereas the shock of the empire ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt

... of the National Era, while it furnished a most appropriate field for Dr. Bailey's talents, also marked an era in the antislavery history of the country. At the centres of all governments there is found a fulcrum whose value politicians have long since demonstrated by its use,—too frequently for the most unworthy purposes. There had always been organs for conservatism at Washington, but none for progress. There were numbers of bold thinkers throughout the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... and deception. The man who never doubts never thinks. He is like a straw in the wind or a waif on the sea. He is one of the helpless, docile, unquestioning millions, who keep the world in a state of stagnation, and serve as a fulcrum for the lever of despotism. The stupidity of the people, says Whitman, is always inviting ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... the thumb is that of a pivot; a fulcrum. The bow is a lever resting thereon, and its pressure on the string is regulated by the first and second fingers on the one side and by the third and fourth on the other. It would thus appear that the ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George

... privileges, every form of national religion, and so on, may be regarded as the necessary chemical base or alloy; inasmuch as it is only when right has some such firm and actual foundation that it can be enforced and consistently vindicated. They form for right a sort of [Greek: os moi pou sto]—a fulcrum for supporting ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... one another; then the small would be less troublesome." For a quarter of a century this has been the Kaunitz faith. In 1753, when he miraculously screwed round the French into union with the Austrians to put down an upstart Prussia, this was his grand fulcrum, the immovable rock in which the great Engineer fixed down his political capstans, and levered and screwed. He did triumphantly wind matters round,—though whether they much profited him when ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... Personality, but a pair; some "laws of God;" the ideal of union versus the idea of possession; the highest manifestation of sex-love; the solar-man and the mental man in sex; qualities of sex-force; is the divine man less sexual than the physical? the divine fulcrum of Sex; how eternal youth and life are possible; why you can not lose in the "game of Love;" we cannot sin against the Eternal God; why and when the "eternal equasion" is perfect; no mistakes or flaws ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... Worcester, and the time when, if ever, there were true Englishmen. John Bull has suffered the idea of the Invisible to be very much flattened out of him. Jonathan is conscious still that he lives in the world of the Unseen as well as of the Seen. To move John, you must make your fulcrum of solid beef and pudding; an abstract idea will ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

... It became in time the fashion to call them lay institutions: legally they may have been so, but judged by their statutes, they were nearly all of them as ecclesiastical as the Chapter of a Cathedral. And Oxford was the fulcrum from which the theological revival hoped to move the Church. It was therefore a shock and a challenge of no light kind, when not merely the proposal was made to abolish the matriculation subscription with the express ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... but strong, carpenter's horse in the shed, to act as a fulcrum, and a seasoned bar of hickory as a lever. There was never an old farm yet that didn't have a useful heap of junk, and Hiram had already scratched over Uncle Jeptha's collection ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... field in Eastern Pennsylvania the difficulties met by the United Mine Workers were at first far greater than in the bituminous branch of the industry. First, the working population was nearly all foreign-speaking, and the union thus lacked the fulcrum which it found in Illinois with its large proportion of English-speaking miners accustomed to organization and to carrying on a common purpose. Secondly, the employers, instead of being numerous and united only for joint dealing with labor, as in bituminous mining, ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... necessity for fashioning of a proper form and size all apparatus, which in fracture or dislocation of the shoulder-bones shall be required to bear forcibly against the axillary region. While we know that the locality of the main vessels and nerves is that very situation upon which a pad or fulcrum presses, when placed in the axilla for securing the reduction of fractures of the clavicle, the neck of the humerus, or scapula, so should this member of the fracture apparatus be adapted, as well to obviate this pressure upon these structures, as to give the needful support to the limb in reference ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise

... the ice crowded in upon us. But as the points of the paddles were higher than the ice, of course they rested upon it for an instant. This was what my cool-headed, clever men wanted. They had a fulcrum for their paddles, and so they pulled carefully on the handle ends of them, and, the canoe sliding up as the ice closed in and met with a crash under us, we found ourselves seated in it on the top of the ice. The craft, although ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young

... long arm, L, is just a trifle greater than the combined weights of the short arms, A and S. The fulcrum of the lever is at C, where there is a staple. The lever swings on one arm of the staple and the other arm is so placed that when the lever is in an upright position, with the long arm at L', it will not fall because of its ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... is one blessed thought surviving; The heart's sure fulcrum in the saddest strait— An overture to this unequal striving— A hope, a home, a last and blest arriving! Bear ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... balance—the Steelyard, a small weight on the long arm of the fulcrum, admitting great range in the placement of ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore



Words linked to "Fulcrum" :   lever, pivot, pin



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