"Steam engine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I remember somewhat vaguely, that precisely the same idea might be applied to a carriage or a wagon on the road. A horseless carriage was a common idea. People had been talking about carriages without horses for many years back—in fact, ever since the steam engine was invented—but the idea of the carriage at first did not seem so practical to me as the idea of an engine to do the harder farm work, and of all the work on the farm ploughing was the hardest. Our roads were poor and we had not the habit of getting around. One of the most remarkable ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... Fire Brigade for hire or purchase, and in the following year (1860) the Fire Brigade took one on hire for one year. This experiment proved so successful, that in 1861 the committee purchased, from Shand and Mason, the fourth steam engine of their construction. This, with one of the two made in 1859, were the only land steam engines that were at work at the Great Tooley Street ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... thousand pounds to any one who could guess what it was; and though Bendigo Jones's pocket was helped considerably by his percentage of the gate money, his pride suffered considerably when the answers were made public. They ranged from, "Model of the first steam engine when out of control," to "An explosion of a ship at sea," both of which happy efforts gained a bag of nuts. The answer adjudged most nearly correct was sent in by a Fulham butcher, who banked on "Angry gentleman quarrelling with his landlord on quarter-day": which at ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... The cactuses gathered from us whatever tribute they could, and the Babu's disheveled hair swarmed with a whole colony of grasshoppers and fireflies, which, probably, were attracted thither by the smell of cocoa-nut oil. The stout Sham Rao panted like a steam engine. Narayan alone was like his usual self; that is to say, like a bronze Hercules, armed with a club. At the last abrupt turn of the path, after having surmounted the difficulty of climbing over huge, scattered stones, ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... overcrowded population of Europe, cramped by man, and priest-ridden, have been brought across the ocean into republican America. They have been placed in this seemingly unpropitious Salt Lake country. There they have founded a city; they have erected factories and mills. The steam engine, the plow, and the sewing machine have aided them; and now, in place of a company of barbarous peasants, ignorant and benighted, and steeped in poverty, you find them transformed into energetic, intelligent citizens, surrounded ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... Vizard; "but it does not account for this fellow. He is not an antediluvian; he is a barefaced modern, for he is A STEAM ENGINE." ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... born at Brachay on the 29th of May, 1767. At the age of twenty, he was admitted to the School of Bridges and Roads, where he soon distinguished himself by his ingenious and investigating turn of mind. His first labors were in connection with the steam engine, then in its infancy, and on April 18, 1792, the young engineer obtained a national award of $400 to continue the experiments that he had begun on the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... the first was man's lip-work, but I see what you mean. It is God working through his creature's natural development. The same is equally true of all man's 'toys.' Man moulded his language in pursuance of his ends under God. Under the same guidance he moulded the steam engine, the typewriter, shorthand, the semaphore, and all kinds of signals. What are the philosophical differentia that make Esperanto a toy, and natural language God's handiwork? Apparently the fact that Esperanto is 'artificial,' ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... generally a much cheaper source of energy than steam motors, but they are not so reliable and constant as the latter. The very irregular supply of water sometimes causes stoppages of the mill, and often a reserve steam engine has to be provided in order to assist the water motor when the quantity of water decreases during the summer months. Wind motors were formerly extensively used for milling purposes, but they are now gradually disappearing. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... himself. I do not compare myself, in point of imagination, with Wordsworth—far from it; for [his] is naturally exquisite, and highly cultivated by constant exercise. But I can see as many castles in the clouds as any man, as many genii in the curling smoke of a steam engine, as perfect a Persepolis in the embers of a sea-coal fire. My life has been spent in such day-dreams. But I cry no roast-meat. There are times a man should remember what Rousseau used to say: Tais-toi, Jean-Jacques, car on ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... her immense commerce, did not begin to assume that importance and extent to which they have at present reached, till the middle, or rather the latter part of the eighteenth century; then her potteries, her hardware, her woollens, and above all her cotton goods, began to improve. Certainly the steam engine is the grand cause to which England's wealth and commerce may be attributed in a great degree; but the perfection to which it has been brought, the multifarious uses to which it is applied, both presuppose skill, capital, and industry, without which the mere possession ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... History of the Growth of the Steam Engine. By Professor R. H. Thurston. With numerous Illustrations. Third Edition. ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... hand. I made a snatch at this and dropped off that gate like a shot. I didn't stop to think about anything except that beautiful picture was on the point of being swallowed up, and with a screech I dashed at those hogs like a steam engine. When they saw me coming with my screech and the umbrella they didn't stop a second, but with three great wiggles and three scared grunts they bolted as fast as they could go. I picked up the picture of the bridge, together ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... exhaust; impoverish; spill, drain, empty; disperse &c 73. cast away, fool away, muddle away, throw away, fling away, fritter away; burn the candle at both ends, waste; squander &c 818. waste its sweetness on the desert air [Gray]; cast one's bread upon the waters, cast pearls before swine; employ a steam engine to crack a nut, waste powder and shot, break a butterfly on a wheel; labor in vain &c (useless) 645; cut blocks with a razor, pour water into a sieve. leak &c (run out) 295; run to waste; ebb; melt away, run dry, dry up. Adj. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... eight-wheel passenger locomotive engine costs about $8500. 2. The strength of a steam engine is commonly marked by its horse-power. By one horse-power is meant a force strong enough to raise up 33,000 pounds one foot high in a minute. James Watt, the noted mechanician, engineer and scientist, famous ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... of woman if to-day should be removed from Christian civilization the school, the steam engine, the smokestack and the printing press, and leave but the Scriptures, the steeple and the parson. Would Elizabeth Cady Stantons, Mary A. Livermores and Frances E. Willards be the products of this ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... could have been perpetrated, even in a Government office. It is true that no demand existed for some of them, but it is equally true that in numerous cases, especially in the early specifications of the steam engine and printing machine, the want of them has caused great disappointment. To add a climax to the story, many of the "pulped" specifications have had to be reprinted more than ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... That motionless steam engine, all in gray, harmonizing with the Travertine, was furiously at work. Into the air it sent clouds of steam that turned to red and blue and green under Ryan's magic. And up there, at the top of the Column of Progress, we saw the Adventurous Bowman and his companions in two groups, one reflected ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... with certainty, any tool, from the club with which he defends himself against his enemies or cracks the shells of fruit, up to the finest instruments of optics and chemistry, and even to the telegraph and steam engine. The conformity to law, with which the forces of nature act, far from being an impediment to his appointing and reaching his ends is much more the indispensable means by which he is enabled in general ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... there were no wars in it; so the only other thing that I have to tell you about it is, that people had gone on from finding that steam could be made to work their ships to making it draw carriages. Railways were being made for trains of carriages and vans to be drawn by one steam engine. The oldest of all was opened in 1830, the very year that William IV. began to reign, and that answered so well that more and more began to be made, and the whole country to be covered with a network of railways, so the people and goods could be carried about ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... electric light; sixty years, and there was no photograph, and no sewing machine; seventy-five years, no telegraph; one hundred years, no railway and no steamship; one hundred and twenty-five years, no steam engine; two hundred years, no post-office; three hundred years, no newspaper; five hundred years, no printing press; one thousand years, no compass, and ships could not go out of sight of land; two thousand years, no writing paper, but parchments of skin and tablets of ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... implements of husbandry—the mower, the reaper, the thresher, the binder, the sulky plow, an infinite variety of mechanical contrivances to make the labor of the farmer easier, or rather to dispense with a multitude of laborers, and substitute in their places the horse, the mule and the steam engine. In other words, to convert the business of farming from an agricultural pursuit, where the labor of men and women was the chief factor of production, to a mechanical pursuit, in which the chief element of ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Barbie got up like a queen an' walked out o' the room as though she was steppin' on the necks of the airy-stockracy. She went to the office, an' after a couple o' minutes I follered her, expectin' to cheer her up a bit; but she wasn't mournin' none; she was workin' like a steam engine, with her face cold an' white except for a little patch o' red in each cheek; an' when she raised her eyes to mine I knew 'at the ol' man had gone a ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... said the iron, travelling proudly over the shirt-collar, for it thought it was a steam engine and ought to be at the ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... thin material, like a large hood with a cape, is useful to draw over the bonnet and neck, to keep off dust, sun, and sparks from a steam engine. Green veils are very apt to stain bonnets, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... recorded that Cadmus invented letters? Why should we inquire who first made gunpowder and glass? Why should every schoolboy be taught that Watt was the inventor of the steam engine? Can any of these be put in the scale, as benefactors of our race, with the man who first trained a horse to carry him on its back, or drew milk with his hands from the udders of a cow? The familiarity of the thing has made us callous to the wonder of it. Let us put it before us, like a painting ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... of building a sailing ship, and the craft was practically completed before Capt. Moses Rogers, the originator of the venture, induced Scarborough & Isaacs, ship merchants of Savannah, to buy her and fit her with a steam engine for service between Savannah ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... Columbus among all the navigators who crossed from Europe to America; there can only be one Watt among all the inventors and improvers of the steam engine; only one Newton among those who discuss the great discovery of the basal ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... half a chance to develop the finer qualities of his nature—and he knew it. He was a tremendous worker and as an aggressive editor, an ambitious politician and an ardent reformer, driven like a steam engine, he could give little heed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but he was sensitive as a girl to rebuffs bringing to mind what might have been. Among friends with whom he felt at home and in really congenial company, ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... find her nephew engaged in so profitless an occupation, and soundly scolded him for what she called his trifling. The good lady little dreamed that James Watt was even then unconsciously studying the germ of the science by which he "transformed the steam engine from a mere toy into the most wonderful instrument which human industry has ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... property. The inception of the Industrial Revolution, and its spread beyond England to Europe, America, and, later, to Asia, were possible only because these bases of capitalism were already laid. To a large extent, thus, the steam engine, the railroad, the steamship, the electric light, and countless other inventions which have helped to revolutionize the world we live in, may be traced directly or indirectly to individual freedom and ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... steam engine, only I couldn't bring it over," said Joe, who used to be lame but who was better now. "So I just brought my old Nodding Donkey," he added. "He was in the hospital once, as I was, and Mr. Mugg ...
— The Story of a Stuffed Elephant • Laura Lee Hope
... communicating with Charles the Second. In consideration of these services he was created a baronet of Sulhamstead Banister, Berks, after the Restoration. He was an ingenious mechanic, supposed by some persons to have invented the Steam Engine, and lived to an advanced age.] In the afternoon a council of war, only to acquaint them that the Harp must be taken out of all their flags, it being very offensive to the King. Late at night we writ letters to the King of the news of our coming, and Mr. ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... and sits down in Adolphe's lap, and Adolphe cannot help smiling. This smile, extracted as if by a steam engine, Caroline has been on the watch for, in order to make a weapon ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... or stewing it gently, saves all its goodness. After the pot once boils you cannot make its contents cook any faster if you have fire enough under it to run a steam engine; so save your fuel, and add it to the fire, little by little, only enough at a time to keep the pot boiling. Remember, if you boil meat hard and fast it will be tough and tasteless, and most of its goodness will ...
— Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six • Juliet Corson
... two). You saw Duke, the Hawaiian world champion swimmer, come in on a surf-board, standing straight and slim and naked like a god of bronze, balancing miraculously on a plank carried in on the crest of a wave with the velocity of a steam engine. You saw Japanese women in tight kimonos and funny little stilted flapping footgear running to catch a street car; and you laughed at the incongruity of it. You made the three-day trip to the living volcano at Hilo and sat at the crater's brink watching the molten ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... greatly excited us, and redeemed from monotony (though at the eleventh hour) the year Eighteen ninety-two. I refer to the great fire on Freethy's Quay, where Mr. Wm. Freethy has of late been improving his timber-store with a number of the newest mechanical inventions; among others, with a steam engine which operates on a circular saw, and impels it to cut up oak poles (our winter fuel) with incredible rapidity. It was here that the outbreak occurred, on Christmas Eve—of all days in the year—between five and ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is done, has to feed his horses through the winter. If he said to his horses: 'Quadrupeds, I have no longer work for you; but work exists abundantly over the world: you are ignorant (or must I read you Political Economy pictures) that the steam engine always in the long-run creates additional work? Railways are forming in one quarter of this earth, canals in another, much cartage is wanted; somewhere in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, doubt it not, ye will ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... rocking. In some cases we see the All in the little; the law that spheres a tear spheres a globe. That Nature is seen in leasts is an old Latin maxim. The soap bubble explains the rainbow. Steam from the boiling kettle gave Watt the key to the steam engine; but a tumbler of water throws no light on the sea, though its sweating may help ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... On the first attempt to frame a resolution; to crowd a complete thought, clearly and concisely, into three lines; they felt as helpless and hopeless as if they had been suddenly asked to construct a steam engine. And the humiliating fact may as well now be recorded that before taking the initiative step, those ladies resigned themselves to a faithful perusal of various masculine productions. The reports of Peace, Temperance, and Anti-Slavery conventions were examined, but ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... accession of Queen Victoria the 'industrial revolution,' the vast development of manufacturing made possible in the latter part of the eighteenth century by the introduction of coal and the steam engine, had rendered England the richest nation in the world, and the movement continued with steadily accelerating momentum throughout the period. Hand in hand with it went the increase of population from less than thirteen millions in England in 1825 to nearly three times as many at the end of the period. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Concentrating.—There is a common impression that whatever saves labor usually requires an increase of capital in the industry where the economy is secured, and this impression is justified by the experience of the century following the invention of the steam engine and the early textile machinery. Hand spinning and weaving require small amounts of fixed capital, while the mills in which spinning and weaving are done by steam or water power require a great deal. Fortunately in any long period this ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... drier has its own motor, a little steam engine, attached to the frame of the machine. See Fig 24. This of course demands fixed bearings. The engine is very small. One size used is 3"x4". When a higher velocity of basket is required, we have the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... fully grasped the importance and the powers of induction; and it laid the foundations of both mechanics and natural philosophy. Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Copernicus were the direct descendants of a Roger Bacon and a Michael Scot, as the steam engine was a direct product of the researches carried on in the Italian universities on the weight of the atmosphere, and of the mathematical and technical learning which ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin |
