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More "Parachute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... therefore, for a nice and expensive voyage with Mr. Green, I made a cheap and nasty arrangement with Mr. Hampton, the gentleman who courageously offers to descend in a parachute—a thing very like a parasol—and who, as he never mounts much above the height of ordinary palings, might keep his word without the smallest risk of any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... corner and the rest of us will get in front of the same building. When the plane comes over, watch it. If you receive no signal, go to the next house and wait for him to make a loop and come over you again. Continue this until the pilot throws a white parachute over. That is the signal that we are covering the right house. When you get that signal, Carnes, leave two men outside and break in with the other three. Get that apparatus on the roof and the men who are operating it. Bolton and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... dalliance"—it shrinks back from it as from a precipice, and keeps in the iron rail-way of the understanding. Irish oratory, on the contrary, is a sort of aeronaut: it is always going up in a balloon, and breaking its neck, or coming down in the parachute. It is filled full with gaseous matter, with whim and fancy, with alliteration and antithesis, with heated passion and bloated metaphors, that burst the slender, silken covering of sense; and the airy pageant, that glittered in ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... There is a slight breeze outside. The floating cable has snapped and the creature has gone off, borne on its parachute. I see it drifting away, showing, like a spot of light, against the dark foliage of the near cypresses, some forty feet distant. It rises higher, it crosses over the cypress-screen, it disappears. Others follow, some higher, some lower, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... attention I could see myself that it wasn't acting normally. It was losing elevation and was pursuing a very erratic course. Before we could reach it it lost flying speed and fell into a spinning nose dive and headed for the ground. I watched, expecting every minute to see the crew make parachute jumps, but they didn't and the plane hit the ground ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... bottom of the valley. A white smoke rose from between two masses of basalt, and the condor, shot in the head, gradually turned over and began to fall, supported by his great wings spread out like a parachute. He had not let go his prey, but gently sank down with it on the ground, about ten paces from ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... air grows mute, As her pearly parachute Cometh slowly down from heaven, softly floating to and fro; And the earth emits no sound, As lightly on the ground Leaps the silvery-footed Spirit of ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... from his wrist to his side, was possessed of a sort of leathery fiber like that of bat's swing, and that as their arms were of unusual length this fiber supported them in their downward flights like a parachute. ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... mathematically fixed in advance, and wait there until it comes up. The atmosphere of the approaching planet would act as a kind of buffer, and the fall of the car could be further checked by our means of recoil, and also by a large parachute. We should probably be able to descend quite slowly to the surface in this way without damage; but in case of peril, we could have small parachutes in readiness as life-buoys, and leap from the car when ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... the passengers were expected to take refuge, if the ship was about to sink, so the upper decks of these air-vessels are supplied with parachutes, from which are suspended boats; and in case of accident two sailors and ten passengers are assigned to each parachute; and long practice has taught the bold craftsmen to descend gently and alight in the sea, even in stormy weather, with as much adroitness as a sea-gull. In fact, a whole population of air-sailors has grown up ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... scared for tears. Mr. Miller, you seem to be in charge of this expedition—couldn't you do something? Throw out ballast, or let the boy down in a parachute? Or I've read of a shipwreck where the survivors, in an open boat, joined in a cry, and attracted the notice of a vessel that was going to pass them. We might join ...
— The Elevator • William D. Howells
... an account of the Umbrella, it would not be right to omit mentioning another, and far from legitimate use in which it has been employed by notoriety-hunting artistes—we allude to the Parachute; and a short narration of its origin and progress may not be uninteresting ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... had made in his spare time, each adapted to a particular method of escape from the Skylark. The one he selected was of heavy canvas, braced with steel netting, equipped with helmet and air-tanks, and attached to a strong, heavy parachute. He put it on, tested all its parts, and made his way unobserved to one of the doors in the lower part of the vessel. Thus, when the chance for escape came, he was ready for it. As the Skylark paused over the Isthmus, his lips parted in a sardonic ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... staring like the crowd of a county fair at a parachute act. For the next puff may get him. Who knows this better than the aviator? He is, likely, an old hand at the game; or, if he is not, he has all the experience of other veterans to go by. His ruse is the same as that of the escaped prisoner who ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the water, with the directness if not quite with the speed of an arrow. A moment later, tired of his flight, he sprawls his eight webbed legs out in every direction, breaking them seemingly into a thousand joints, and settles back like an animated parachute awreck. Then perchance he perches on a rock knowingly, with the appearance of owl-like wisdom, albeit his head looks surprisingly like a frog's. Anon he holds his head erect and stretches out his long arms in what is most palpably a yawn. Then, for pure ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... wares he dealt in, they would not stand a contraband trade? If so, their ground is at least defensible; for what chance of attraction would there be for the winking Virgin in competition with him who could "make a young lady ascend to the ceiling, and come slowly down like a parachute!"—a spiritual fact I have heard from witnesses who really, so far as character went, might ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... was an occasion when he might put these wings to good use, for if he spread them in the air and then leaped over the side of the basket they would act in the same way a parachute does, and bear him gently ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum
... of the dews of an immortal youth, and dieted on the ambrosial ether of gods, and sent his seedling offspring sailing ten thousand airy seas with the wind for master pilot and never a craft but the gypsy parachute of a seed with wings shaken out from the cones purpling ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... must have failed; but the shelf was nearly all rock, against some fragments of which the stick was propped. There was no failure then. There came up a faint rasping sound as of wood over stone, as the cord tightened, and then very slowly the umbrella began, parachute-like, to rise in the air, higher and higher, as it was hauled up hand over hand till the spike touched the lower twigs of ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... something pathetic in seeing any cheerful, light-hearted animal reduced to silence and depression. To watch a barking, worrying, jovial puppy suddenly desist from parachute expeditions on unsteady legs, and from shaking imaginary rats, and creep, tail close at home, overcome by affliction, into obscurity, is a sad sight. Mr. Alwynn felt much the same kind of pity for Dare as he glanced at him, resignedly blighted, ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... times of arrival and departure of trains at the German railhead at Achiet, for the smoke from the engines could be distinctly observed. Night after night our planes droned heavily over to the accompaniment of wonderful displays of "flaming onions," parachute flares, searchlights, and anti-aircraft gun-fire, and bombed these back areas with demoralising effect. Further along the enemy ridge to the right, and closer in, was what the trench maps grimly described as "Serre (site of)." If you want testimony of the complete destructive power of British ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... they sink Softly, slowly: one might think From the motions that are made, Every little leaf conveyed Sylph or fairy hither tending, To this lower world descending, Each invisible and mute, In his wavering parachute. But the kitten, how she starts, Crouches, stretches, paws and darts! First at one and then its fellow, Just as light and just as yellow; There are many now—now one— Now they stop and there are none: What intenseness of ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... laughter: round the lake A little clock-work steamer paddling plied And shook the lilies: perched about the knolls A dozen angry models jetted steam: A petty railway ran: a fire-balloon Rose gem-like up before the dusky groves And dropt a fairy parachute and past: And there through twenty posts of telegraph They flashed a saucy message to and fro Between the mimic stations; so that sport Went hand in hand with Science; otherwhere Pure sport; a herd of boys with clamour bowled And stumped the wicket; babies rolled about Like tumbled fruit ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... back on the hard bench and laughed a jet of cigarette smoke up to the lowest tree branches. The sudden severing of all his life's ties had brought him a free, thrilling, almost joyous elation. He felt precisely the sensation of the aeronaut when he cuts loose his parachute and ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... couple of parachute lights fired from "Little Archibald," as we called the special gun used for these larger flares, revealed nothing, so I gave up in disgust, woke the only two men who had not been disturbed all night, tied ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... eyes tight when the rope snapped. He opened them, gave a shuddering glance downward, then laughed almost hysterically: his cassock, ample even for a man, had caught the breeze and spread out on all sides like a parachute. ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... level, which was about midday, the wind was so severe that I looked with some anxiety to the stays of my wings, expecting momentarily to see them snap or slacken. I even cast loose the parachute behind me, and fastened its hook into the ring of my leathern belt, so as to be ready for the worst. Now was the time when a bit of scamped work by the mechanic is paid for by the life of the aeronaut. ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ejected from a pot at the end of the rocket's travel, and to emit a bright light during its slow descent. It consists of a small cylindrical cardboard box (Fig. 16) filled with common star paste or Lamarre stars, and attached to a parachute, e, by means of a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... eminent superintendent of the French Aeronautical Department, exhibited at the Paris Exposition of that year, an apparatus experimented with some years before, which he termed a "dirigible parachute." It consisted of an oviform body to which were pivoted two upright slats carrying above the body nine long superposed flat blades spaced about one-third of their width apart. When this apparatus was ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... they were still falling, but not so fast. The top of the buggy caught the air like a parachute or an umbrella filled with wind, and held them back so that they floated downward with a gentle motion that was not so very disagreeable to bear. The worst thing was their terror of reaching the bottom of ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... brilliant in their many different colours, red, green, and electric white. The French send up a beautiful light which bursts into four different flames that burn standing high in mid-air for three minutes; another, a parachute star, holds the sky for four minutes, and almost blots its more remote sisters from the heavens. The English and the Germans are content to fling rockets (p. 141) across and observe one another's lines while these flare out ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... of the parcel dislodged an unfolded sheet of note-paper, which made a parachute expedition to the floor. Mr. Gresley picked it up and ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... beneath a half-dead oak, hollow, and disfigured with white tumors, its roots spreading out like accipitrine claws grasping the ground. A chilly wind circled round them, upon whose currents the seeds of a neighboring lime-tree, supported parachute-wise by the wing attached, flew out of the boughs downward like fledglings from their nest. The vale was wrapped in a dim atmosphere of unnaturalness, and the east was like a livid curtain edged with pink. There was no sign nor sound ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... (Troglodytes calvus), here more generally called Nchigo Mpolo, "large chimpanzee," or Nchigo Njue, "white-haired chimpanzee." They recognized it at once; but when I turned over to the cottage ("Adventures," &c., p. 423), with its neat parachute-like roof, all burst ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... elapsed when there fluttered from the tiny monoplane a paper parachute. It dropped for several hundred feet before it spread to the air pressure and floated more gently toward the earth and a moment later there burst from its basket a puff of white smoke. Two more parachutes followed the ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... discover the enemy's working parties, &c. They are composed of saltpetre, sulphur, resin, and linseed-oil, and burn with great brilliancy. The parachute light-ball, which suspends itself in the air by the action of the heated gas from the light against the parachute, is most convenient. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... being merely able to sustain themselves in the air through the extensive leaps which they take from tree to tree, the wing-like expansions of the skin simply exercising the mechanical function of a parachute. The apparatus of flight in the "Pterosaurs" is of the most remarkable character, and most resembles the "wing" of a Bat, though very different in some important particulars. The "wing" of the Pterosaurs is like that of Bats, namely, in consisting of a thin leathery expansion ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... assumed a character more distinguished than any ever seen under the old regime. These modern Olympics consist of chariot-races and wrestling, horse and foot races, ascensions of balloons, carrying three or four persons, descents from them by means of a parachute, mock-fights and aquatic tilting. After the sports of the day, come splendid illuminations, grand fire-works, pantomimes represented by two or three hundred performers, and concerts, which, aided by splendid ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... sky for balloons within striking distance. After all, strafing infantrymen wasn't half as much fun as knocking down balloons. They went up with such a glorious bang! And it was delicious to watch the frightened observer tumble over the side of the basket in an effort to escape by parachute. That last one had somehow gotten fouled in the rigging and had been clawing frantically when the bag exploded. As for that, Yancey had been sorry; not for the man, but because he had wanted to see the parachute ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... try the experiment unless you provide yourself with a parachute! An aeroplane could make a good start up here. Do you ever get any guillemots' ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... not shut; Harris fell, and was killed! Sadler, deprived of ballast by his long sojourn in the air, was dragged over the town of Boston and dashed against the chimneys; Sadler fell, and was killed! Cokling descended with a convex parachute which he pretended to have perfected; Cokling fell, and was killed! Well, I love them, these victims of their own imprudence, and I shall die as they ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... not been killed in his fall because of a parachute which had been so arranged, unknown to him, to save him ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... little town. The island was perhaps a mile in length. Between it and the mainland a boat was coming toward us. It was a dark blob of hull on the shining water, and above it a queerly shaped circular sail was puffed out, like a balloon parachute, by ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... Palmyra palm (Borassus flabelliformis), and this grew in some places in numbers sufficient to be called a grove; the fruit was not ripe while we passed, otherwise we might have enjoyed it as a novelty. The other vegetation consisted of the several species of thorn bush, and the graceful parachute-topped ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... silk of his parachute bellied out in the denser air of the lower heights. His respirator tube was still in his mouth, and the double, vacuum-interlined leather of his safety suit had kept him from freezing in the spatial cold of the stratosphere. ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... question. The Alligator may use his tail as a club, the Horse, his tail as a fly-flapper, the Porcupine his tail as a spiked war-club, the 'Possum his as a hooked hanger, the Fox his as a muffler, the Fish his as a paddle; but the Gray Squirrel's tail is a parachute, a landeasy. I have seen a Gray Squirrel fall fifty feet to the ground, but his tail was in good condition; he spread it to the utmost and it landed him safely ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... was now full of black wings and angry cries, as the crows from neighboring nests flocked to the help of their fellow citizen. But the little red robber was brave and kept his head. Spreading his legs wide and flat, he made a sort of parachute of himself, and, instead of falling like a stone, he glided down to another branch. Those beating wings and terrible jabbing beaks were all about him, but they got in each other's way. And he was a wonder at dodging, I can tell you, now that he was among the bigger branches, and, though ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... tail is not expanded: it is reserved for times of courtship. I have seen the female sitting quietly on a branch, and two males displaying their charms in front of her. One would shoot up like a rocket, then suddenly expanding the snow-white tail like an inverted parachute, slowly descend in front of her, turning round gradually to show off both back and front. The effect was heightened by the wings being invisible from a distance of a few yards, both from their great velocity of movement and from not having the metallic lustre of the rest of the body. ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... into space and trusting one's parachute to do its business properly. I felt a sudden tightening inside me as I thought of that dive into the void, but ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... perfected a parachute device. He was taken up in a balloon to make a test of the apparatus. Arrived at a height of a thousand feet, he climbed over the edge of the basket, and dropped out. He had fallen two hundred yards when he remarked to himself, in a ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... of chopped meat—offers the possibility of a new and neglected sport, in effect the inversion of baiting a school of fish. Toss a grasshopper into the air and he has only time to spread his wings for a parachute to earth, when a bat swoops past so quickly that the eyes refuse to see any single effort—but the grasshopper has vanished. As for the piece of meat, it is drawn like a magnet to the fierce little face. Once I tried the experiment of a bit of blunted ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... "Bless my parachute, I'd like nothing better than to make the trip!" he said a trifle wistfully. "To tell you the truth, though," his voice sank to a whisper, "between the doctors and Mrs. Damon I'll be lucky if I'm allowed to walk around the block alone for ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... of graceful tamarisks, whose vivid green looked doubly bright set off by tawny stubble and amethyst-blue sky. These freshets are the Edens of Adel. The banks are charmingly wooded with acacias of many varieties, some thorned like the fabled Zakkum, others parachute-shaped, and planted in impenetrable thickets: huge white creepers, snake-shaped, enclasp giant trees, or connect with their cordage the higher boughs, or depend like cables from the lower branches to the ground. Luxuriant parasites abound: here they form domes ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... quarantined, and daily the quarantine was extended. No plane could land and take off again. No ship could enter and leave. An airlift of supplies dropped by parachute was being organized. ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... everlastingly so. By-the-by, I should have told you that Captain Beauchamp was one hundred and ninety below Captain Baskelett when the state of the poll was handed to me. The gentleman driving with your father compared the Liberals to a parachute cut away from the balloon. Is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Cortaplumas (penknife) Chupaflores (humming-bird) Destripaterrones (navvy) Lavamanos (wash-hand stand) Limpiabotas (boot-black) Matamoros (boaster) Mondadientes (toothpick) Papahueros (ninny) Papamoscas (ninny) Papanatas (ninny) Paracaidas (parachute) Paraguas (umbrella) Pelagatos (ragamuffin) Pintamonas (slap-dasher or bad partner) Sacacorchos (corkscrew) Salvavidas ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... groundwards. As the boys watched they saw distinctly that each man, from his wrist to his side, was possessed of a sort of leathery fiber like that of bat's swing, and that as their arms were of unusual length this fiber supported them in their downward flights like a parachute. ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the ascent, there was a regimental band, and there were many preparations going on. The bottle saw all this from a basket, in which it lay with a living rabbit, who was very much frightened when it saw it was to go up in the parachute. The bottle did not know where it was to go; it beheld the balloon extending wider and wider, and becoming so large that it could not be larger; then lifting itself up higher and higher, and rolling restlessly until ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... girl was too far advanced for the first class and entered her in the second. "Just natural smartness," Captain Shadrach declared. "Natural smartness and nothin' else. She ain't had a mite of advantages, but up she goes just the same. Why, Teacher told me she considered her a reg'lar parachute." ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... her softly upon the forehead, but before she had time to suffer from a new fear her eye caught the glitter of a flake of snow in its parachute descent across the path of her lamps. "They hate snow...." she whispered, not knowing whether it was true. She tried to picture them as a band of workmen, who, content with their little pillage, were now far from her on their way to ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... last season. Let me reckon them up. There were the horse, the bull, the parachute, - and the tumbler hanging on - chiefly by his toes, I believe - below the car. Very wrong, indeed, and decidedly to be stopped. But, in connexion with these and similar dangerous exhibitions, it strikes me that that portion of the public ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... in front of the same building. When the plane comes over, watch it. If you receive no signal, go to the next house and wait for him to make a loop and come over you again. Continue this until the pilot throws a white parachute over. That is the signal that we are covering the right house. When you get that signal, Carnes, leave two men outside and break in with the other three. Get that apparatus on the roof and the men who are operating it. Bolton and I will ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... and this without descending more than a few feet below the level from which they started. This feat they are enabled to perform by means of a broad membrane that extends from the skin of their fore-legs to that of their thighs, and which, when stretched out, endows them with the properties of a parachute. Their bodies, too, have a flattened shape like the bats; and this also helps to sustain ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... Thoreau talks of the Red-squirrel flicking his tail like a whip-lash, and the word "Squirrel," from the Latin "Sciurus" and Greek "Skia-oura" means "shady tail." Thus all of its names seem to note the wonderful banner that serves the animal in turn as sun-shade, signal-flag, coverlet, and parachute. ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... directness if not quite with the speed of an arrow. A moment later, tired of his flight, he sprawls his eight webbed legs out in every direction, breaking them seemingly into a thousand joints, and settles back like an animated parachute awreck. Then perchance he perches on a rock knowingly, with the appearance of owl-like wisdom, albeit his head looks surprisingly like a frog's. Anon he holds his head erect and stretches out his long arms in what is most palpably a yawn. Then, for pure ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... and their use in all kinds of duties in all the arms and services. Petersen considered the composite unit one of the most important features of the new policy, and he wanted "at least a few" such units organized soon. He mentioned the assignment of a black parachute battalion to the 82d Airborne Division as a good place ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... char-a-banc or a tipping-waggon. The hood is reversible, so that passengers may be sheltered from the wind when the car runs backwards. In the rear of the boot, concealed by a door flush with the panels, is an EINSTEIN parachute, by means of which a passenger may leave the car before an imminent accident or when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... tree! Through the calm and frosty air Of this morning bright and fair, Eddying round and round they sink Softly, slowly: one might think From the motions that are made, Every little leaf conveyed Sylph or fairy hither tending, To this lower world descending, Each invisible and mute, In his wavering parachute. But the kitten, how she starts, Crouches, stretches, paws and darts! First at one and then its fellow, Just as light and just as yellow; There are many now—now one— Now they stop and there are none: ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... Dislinked with shrieks and laughter: round the lake A little clock-work steamer paddling plied And shook the lilies: perched about the knolls A dozen angry models jetted steam: A petty railway ran: a fire-balloon Rose gem-like up before the dusky groves And dropt a fairy parachute and past: And there through twenty posts of telegraph They flashed a saucy message to and fro Between the mimic stations; so that sport Went hand in hand with Science; otherwhere Pure sport; a herd of ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... 'No-Man's-Land,' for it is on that mighty graveyard stretching from Switzerland to the sea that the enemy's eyes are bent. The regiments used to get various kinds of flares to experiment with. We used to laugh over an incident that occurred when a new type, a species of parachute, had been served out. The Second-in-command, who fired it, miscalculated the strength of the wind, which was blowing from the enemy's trench, and the flare was carried in a stately curve backwards until it was directly over battalion headquarters. ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... serving to balance the posterior part of the body and the filaments of the abdomen during flight. On reaching a certain height they allow themselves to descend, stretching out while doing so their long wings and tail, which then serve as a parachute. Then a rapid working of these organs suddenly changes the direction of the motion, and they begin to ascend again. Coupling takes place during these aerial dances. Soon afterward the females approach the surface of the water and lay therein their eggs, spreading them out the while with the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... even among princesses, that you will permit the supposition, an all but impossible supposition I quite wish to believe.——Well, suppose that he goes, what will become of you without a husband? Keep well with your husband as you take care of your beauty; for beauty, after all, is a woman's parachute, and a husband also stands between you and worse. I am supposing that you are happy and loved to the end, and I am leaving unpleasant or unfortunate events altogether out of the reckoning. This being so, fortunately or unfortunately, you may have children. What are they to be? Montriveaus? Very ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... They halted beneath a half-dead oak, hollow, and disfigured with white tumors, its roots spreading out like accipitrine claws grasping the ground. A chilly wind circled round them, upon whose currents the seeds of a neighboring lime-tree, supported parachute-wise by the wing attached, flew out of the boughs downward like fledglings from their nest. The vale was wrapped in a dim atmosphere of unnaturalness, and the east was like a livid curtain edged with pink. There was no sign nor ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... bold and reckless in leaping through the trees is that, if they miss their hold and fall, they sustain no injury. Every species of tree-squirrel seems to be capable of a sort of rudimentary flying,—at least of making itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall or a leap from a great height. The so-called flying squirrel does this the most perfectly. It opens its furry vestments, leaps into the air, and sails down the steep incline from the top of one tree to the foot ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... passengers were expected to take refuge, if the ship was about to sink, so the upper decks of these air-vessels are supplied with parachutes, from which are suspended boats; and in case of accident two sailors and ten passengers are assigned to each parachute; and long practice has taught the bold craftsmen to descend gently and alight in the sea, even in stormy weather, with as much adroitness as a sea-gull. In fact, a whole population of air-sailors has grown up to manage these ships, never dreamed of by our ancestors. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... will follow, if linnets are minded, As blows the white-feather parachute; And ships will reel by the tempest blinded— Aye, ships and shiploads of men to boot! How deep ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... little bats fill every glade in the forest, a box of beetles or grasshoppers—or even bits of chopped meat—offers the possibility of a new and neglected sport, in effect the inversion of baiting a school of fish. Toss a grasshopper into the air and he has only time to spread his wings for a parachute to earth, when a bat swoops past so quickly that the eyes refuse to see any single effort—but the grasshopper has vanished. As for the piece of meat, it is drawn like a magnet to the fierce little face. Once I tried the experiment of a bit of blunted ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... of common use, among which he notes: grand-jury, grand-juror, eulogist, consignee, consignor, mammoth, maltreatment, iceberg, parachute, malpractice, fracas, entailment, perfectibility, glacier, fire-warden, safety-valve, savings-bank, gaseous, lithographic, peninsular, repealable, retaliatory, dyspeptic, missionary, nervine, meteoric, mineralogical, reimbursable; to quarantine, revolutionize, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... off a story and enclosed it in one of several leather cylinders he had provided for this purpose. Each one had a sort of miniature parachute connected to it, and a flag to attract ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... army reached a high peak looking into a deep valley, only to be reached over an inaccessible precipice, all the army would have to do would be to spread out your superb invention and use it as a parachute. The sight of the army of France gradually floating down into the valley would be so terrifying to the nations of Europe, that I imagine no enemy would wait for a gun to be fired. De Plonville, your invention will immortalize you, ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... reserved for times of courtship. I have seen the female sitting quietly on a branch, and two males displaying their charms in front of her. One would shoot up like a rocket, then suddenly expanding the snow-white tail like an inverted parachute, slowly descend in front of her, turning round gradually to show off both back and front. The effect was heightened by the wings being invisible from a distance of a few yards, both from their great velocity of movement ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... "In three months to parachute from first-class cafes to carrying home-made lunches; to go from threes for a half to twos for a nickel; instead of having plenty of money in pocket to be without even a cent! I tell you, Fanny, the way we're ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... of the skin, so-that when jumping from one tree to another the animal is able to sustain itself through a long distance in the air by merely spreading out its limbs, and thus allowing the skin-extensions to act after the manner of a parachute. Here, of course, we have not yet got a wing, any more than we have in the case of the flying-fish; but we have the foundations laid for the possible development of a future wing, upon a somewhat similar plan as that which has been so wonderfully perfected in the case of ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... went up, from the other side of the river. We had a fine view of it from the roof of our house. Two men were in it, and when they had risen so high that the balloon appeared quite small, they threw out a little machine, called a parachute. It looked something like an umbrella, and had a dog to it. The balloon sailed a great distance through the air, ...
— The Summer Holidays - A Story for Children • Amerel
... him dangling to one of the pieces. For a consideration which the citizens of Binghamton, New York, sensibly declined to give he offered to ascend to the height of a mile in a paper balloon, there set fire to it and descend in a parachute. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... his dripping form from the sea. Aboard the search plane they cut him out of the space suit to which was still attached his emergency twin parachute. But his helmet was gone, ripped loose, for Dan had been breathing fresh Earth air during the long ...
— Shipwreck in the Sky • Eando Binder
... (1657) has various cuts amongst which is a frontispiece, that occurs again at page 29 of the little volume, depicting Gonsales being drawn up to the lunar world in a machine, not unlike a primitive parachute, to which are harnessed his 'gansas ... 25 in number, a covey that carried him ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... straight down upon the vast frozen river called the Gorner Glacier, from the Gorner Grat, a sheer precipice twelve hundred feet high. We had one hundred and fifty-four umbrellas —and what is an umbrella but a parachute? ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ingenious machinery. You will see that his wings are arranged so that they are moved by his legs, and also by cords attached to his arms. The umbrella over his head is not intended to ward off the rain or the sun, but is to act as a sort of parachute, to keep him from falling while he is making his strokes. The basket, which hangs down low enough to be out of the way of his feet, is filled with provisions, which he expects to need in the ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... apprehended was from accidental and rapid descents. To countervail this danger, and enable the adventurer, in cases of alarm, to desert his balloon, and descend to the ground uninjured, Blanchard invented the parachute, or guard for falling, as the word signifies in French, an apparatus very much resembling an umbrella, but of much larger dimensions. The design is to break the fall; and, to effect this, it is necessary that the parachute ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... a fountain," said a Brown Pelican that had come sailing into Cuthbert Rookery with her wings sloped downward like a parachute. "It was the gold-seekers who filled the islands with the thunder of their guns and ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... that he would go there. A distant day had been named, before that exciting interview in the square, on which the Houghtons were to dine in Munster Court. The Mildmays were also to be there, and Mrs. Montacute Jones, and old Lord Parachute, Lord George's uncle. That would be a party, and there would be no danger of a scene then. He had almost determined that, in spite of his promise, he would not go to Berkeley Square before the dinner. But Mrs. Houghton was not of the same mind. ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... chaise-umbrella, which had been raised by no other artificial means than the simple application of highly carbonated soda-water as manure. He explained that by scooping out the head, which would afford a new and delicious species of nourishment for the poor, a parachute, in principle something similar to that constructed by M. Garnerin, was at once obtained; the stalk of course being kept downwards. He added that he was perfectly willing to make a descent from a height of not less than three miles and a quarter; and had in fact already proposed ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... is a slight breeze outside. The floating cable has snapped and the creature has gone off, borne on its parachute. I see it drifting away, showing, like a spot of light, against the dark foliage of the near cypresses, some forty feet distant. It rises higher, it crosses over the cypress-screen, it disappears. Others follow, some higher, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... a little dandelion," said the sprout. "I was in mother's head, with a heap of brothers and sisters. Each of us had a little parachute. 'Fly away now, darlings,' said mother. 'The farther away you go, the better. I can do no more for you than I have done; and I won't deny that I am a little concerned about all the children that I have brought into the world. But that can't be helped either; and I hope you will find a spot ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... dozens of other types, monoplanes, bi-planes, machines of the helicopter type, and a few devices based on the parachute principle. But no Prescott. The names the various machines bore were weird: The Sky Pilot, the Cloud Chaser, the Star Bug, the Moon Mounter, the Aerial Auto, the Heavenly Harvester, and some titles even more far-fetched graced ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... us, Captain Robers," replied Winford coldly. "I am in a hurry to be on my way. Kindly move down the ladder and join your men. Your hand weapons and food supplies will be dropped by parachute as we leave. I might add that in a short time I expect to be in a position to broadcast an S O S message for you which should bring rescue ships here ...
— The Space Rover • Edwin K. Sloat
... some fragments of which the stick was propped. There was no failure then. There came up a faint rasping sound as of wood over stone, as the cord tightened, and then very slowly the umbrella began, parachute-like, to rise in the air, higher and higher, as it was hauled up hand over hand till the spike touched the lower twigs of ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... dawn—he knew what action had been taken. Army planes had flown northward in the darkness, moved by the Mayor's, and Coburn's, and Janice's tale of Bulgarian soldiers on Greek soil, sleeping soundly. They had released parachute flares and located the village of Naousa. Parachutists with field radios had jumped, while other flares burned to light them to the ground. That was that. Judging by the placards, their reports had borne out the story Coburn had brought down. There would be a motorized Greek ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... thinking that he is wholly right, that his cause is greater than himself and represents the rights of the entire community. But a counter-blast from the other side will deflate his balloon in a second and he'll come down to earth without even a parachute to soften the jolt ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... says kind Cousin John, who concludes I take an unusual interest in his speculations; and forthwith we proceed to criticize the three animals brought to the post, and to agree that Captain Lovell's Parachute is far the best-looking of the lot; or, as Sir Guy Scapegrace says to the well-pleased owner, "If make and shape go for anything, Frank, she ought to beat them, as far ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... about it myself. They're shooting off this new type rocket, a really big affair, loaded with all sorts of instruments. Some sort of experiment with cosmic rays. The rocket will go up to the outer layers of the Earth's atmosphere, where a clocked mechanism will release a parachute-attached section containing the instruments. This will float back to the surface of ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... one sways himself over the edge of his frame, making signals of distress in all directions, and with that and his windy flights of oratory suggests twenty minutes in a balloon-car, till he comes down to earth at the finish with the Doxology for a parachute. His shepherd's crook is one long note of interrogation, with which he tries to hook down the heavens to the understanding of his hearers, and his hearers up to an understanding of himself. All his arguments are ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... brought about a stirring up of old history, for many and humorous had been Toby's attempt to construct a flying machine, and also a parachute that would save the lives of daring aeronauts when their engines gave out a mile or two up ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... are not in the future, they are trying to get us to destroy ourselves because that would be safer and surer than trying to destroy us by—say—transmitters of death dropped upon us by parachute. Yet if we do not destroy ourselves, ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... it is silly, it will not do! If they succeed in unmaking their legend of Boulanger, where are they? Not even where they were when they began to make it. On the contrary! They have made it perfectly plain that the republic is a parachute which falls without a balloon. Where are they to find the balloon? The Exposition has given the parachute a lift. The visit of the Prince of Wales gave it a lift. The Shah, if he comes, will give it a lift—not much—but a lift. But all these are expedients of a moment. All ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... and not a parachute? Some remnant rather of the ancient folly, Some touch of times before the Big Dispute? I have it now! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... organise a levee en masse, to drive from our territory the impious hordes which are overrunning it." These missionaries would, I presume, go to their posts in balloons. It never seems to occur to anyone here that the authority of a Parisian dropping down from the clouds in a parachute in any province would be contested. The right of Paris to rule France is a dictum so unquestioned in the minds of the Parisians, that their newspapers are now urging the Government to send new men to Tours to oust those who ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... Know Whether He's On His Head Or His Heels. He's Always Up In The Air About Something, But You Can't Upset Him! Vaudeville To-night—The Bodongo Brothers, Brilliant Burmese Balancers—Arctic Annie, the Prima Donna of Sealdom, and Tristan LeHuber, The Balloon Man—He Uses An Anchor For A Parachute!" At last indeed the LeHuber family will have arrived sensationally in ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... sink Softly, slowly: one might think, 10 From the motions that are made, Every little leaf conveyed Sylph or Faery hither tending,— To this lower world descending, Each invisible and mute, 15 In his wavering parachute. ——But the Kitten, how she starts, Crouches, stretches, paws, and darts! [3] First at one, and then its fellow Just as light and just as yellow; 20 There are many now—now one— Now they stop and there are none: What ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... and which he might break his shins over at any moment. It might be here, it might be there, it might come at any hour of the day. The next post might bring it. It might be in yonder Parcel Delivery van,—nothing more probable. Or at any moment it might fall from heaven in a parachute, or be at that second passing through the dock-gates, wearily home from the Islands of Sugar and Spice. You ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... he saw a package drop over the side of the cabin. It fell straight downward, with tremendous velocity. But there came a sudden check. It was attached to a parachute. The parachute had opened. Its course was now marked by a little down-rush, then a pause, ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... less than a foot in diameter, and rising in a straight shaft to the height of nearly a hundred feet. On the top is a splendid head of leaves like gigantic ostrich plumes, that gracefully curve over on all sides, forming a shape like a parachute. Each leaf is full five yards in length, and of the kind called pinnate—that is divided into numerous leaflets, each of which is itself more than a foot and a half long, shaped like the blade of a rapier. Under the shadow of this graceful plumage the ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... fact, is better established, by experiment and calculation, than that the air is highly resistant. A circumference of only a yard in diameter in the shape of a parachute can not only impede descent in air, but can render it isochronous. That is ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... swiftness of an Indian's arrow, his head bent downward, his wings partly folded, and his tail perked upward at precisely the proper angle to make a rudder, all the various organs so finely adjusted as to convert him into a perfectly dirigible parachute. Swift as his descent was, he alighted on the ground as lightly as a tuft of down. It was the poetry of motion. One or two writers have insisted that the horned lark's empyrean song compares favorably with that of the European skylark; but, loyal and patriotic an American ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... there came to him by aeroplane not only food (in quantities sadly insufficient for his needs), but salt, saccharine, opium, drugs and surgical dressings, mails, spare parts for wireless plant, money, and a millstone weighing seventy pounds, which was dropped by means of a parachute. In the actual operations of the war the uses of aircraft, and especially of the aeroplane, were very rapidly extended and multiplied. The earliest and most obvious use was reconnaissance. To the Commander-in-Chief a detailed knowledge of the enemy's dispositions ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... the dandelion are next examined, the tiny seeds are found standing on tiptoe on a raised platform, each grasping a tiny parachute and waiting for a puff of wind to start them off. A pupil is permitted to give the puff. Seeds are distributed, and the means of flight is compared with that of the milkweed. The shape of the seeds is observed and also the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... of the heavens, yet there are certain periods at which they appear in large numbers, and have been observed to radiate from certain well-defined parts of the sky. When the radiant point is overhead, the falling stars spread out and resemble a parachute of fire; but when it is below the horizon, the stars ascend upwards like rockets into the sky. The radiant point is fixed among the stars, so that at the commencement of a shower it may be overhead, and before the termination of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... lightning express on the Irish Air Service at half-past sixteen. They will drop you by a parachute in the bay. The dip will do you good. I will pick you up and dry you and give you ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... Sunday. A great crowd assembled to witness the sight; military music had been engaged, and many other preparations made. The bottle saw it all from the basket in which he lay close to a live rabbit. The rabbit was quite excited because he knew that he was to be taken up, and let down again in a parachute. The bottle, however, knew nothing of the "up," or the "down;" he saw only that the balloon was swelling larger and larger till it could swell no more, and began to rise and be restless. Then the ropes which held it were cut through, and ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... between whose utterances and thoughts there is no organic nexus, who declines to take the initiative unless he sees adequate forces behind him ready to his to his support, who lacks the moral courage that serves as a parachute for a fall from popularity, but possesses in abundance that of taking at the flood the rising tide which balloon-like lifts its possessor high above his fellows. But judging him in the light of the historic events in which he played a prominent part, one cannot ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... birds come over disguised as clouds and spit mouthfuls of red-hot tracer-bullets at it, and then the observers hop out. One of them "hopped out" into my horse-lines last week. That is to say his parachute caught in a tree and he hung swinging, like a giant pendulum, over my horses' backs until we lifted him down. He came into "Mon Repos" to have bits of tree picked out of him. This was the sixth plunge overboard he had done in ten days, he told us. Sometimes he plunged ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... engage our attention. In several groups of animals of strictly arboreal habits, nature has gone beyond the ordinary limits of agility afforded by muscular limbs alone, and has supplemented those limbs with elastic membranes which act like a parachute when the animal takes a leap into space, and gives it a gradual and easy descent. Amongst the lemurs the Galeopithecus, the Pteromys in the squirrels, and the Anomalurus in another family of rodents, are all thus provided with ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... flight. As Darius Green expressed it so long ago, the trouble about flying comes when you want to alight. That holds as true to-day with the most perfect airplanes, as in boyhood days when one jumped from the barn in perfect confidence that the family umbrella would serve as a parachute. To alight with an airplane the pilot—supposing his descent to be voluntary and not compelled by accident or otherwise—surveys the country about him for a level field, big and clear enough for the machine to run off its momentum in a run of perhaps two hundred ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... preparations had been made. The bottle saw everything, from a basket in which it lay next to a live rabbit, which latter was quite bewildered because he knew he was to be taken up into the air, and let down again in a parachute; but the bottle knew nothing of the "up" or the "down;" it only saw the balloon swelling up bigger and bigger, and at last, when it could swell no more, beginning to rise, and to grow more and more restless. The ropes that held it were cut, and the huge machine floated aloft with ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... and Fair came to an end as all days, big or little, have to come. Captain Obed Bangs and his guests enjoyed every minute of it. They inspected the various exhibits, witnessed the horse races and the baseball game, saw the balloon ascension, and thrilled with the rest of the great crowd at the "parachute drop." It was six o'clock when they left the Fair grounds and Thankful began to worry about the condition of affairs at ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the trigger the report of a gun resounded from the bottom of the valley. A white smoke rose from between two masses of basalt, and the condor, shot in the head, gradually turned over and began to fall, supported by his great wings spread out like a parachute. He had not let go his prey, but gently sank down with it on the ground, about ten ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... went straight toward the earth; then, like a parachute opening, the wings spread gracefully, the descent slackened, and Hawkins floated down, down, down—until he landed in the center of the yard without ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... to entice Him to do a thing of that sort, by quoting Scripture to Him—'He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee, to keep Thee in all Thy ways. Cast Thyself down. Trust to the promise as a kind of parachute to keep Thee from falling bruised on the stones of the Temple-court.' Christ's answer was: 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.' You will not get God's protection in ways of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... were sauntering. Nor was he tumbling over and over. He had shut his eyes tight when the rope snapped. He opened them, gave a shuddering glance downward, then laughed almost hysterically: his cassock, ample even for a man, had caught the breeze and spread out on all sides like a parachute. ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... reached the nineteen-thousand-foot level, which was about midday, the wind was so severe that I looked with some anxiety to the stays of my wings, expecting momentarily to see them snap or slacken. I even cast loose the parachute behind me, and fastened its hook into the ring of my leathern belt, so as to be ready for the worst. Now was the time when a bit of scamped work by the mechanic is paid for by the life of the aeronaut. But she held together bravely. Every cord and strut was humming and ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her senses they were still falling, but not so fast. The top of the buggy caught the air like a parachute or an umbrella filled with wind, and held them back so that they floated downward with a gentle motion that was not so very disagreeable to bear. The worst thing was their terror of reaching the bottom of this great crack in the earth, and the natural fear that sudden death was about to overtake ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... we here?" inquires the Baron—Seven Summers, An Eton Medley, by the Editors of the Parachute and Present Etonian. Now, Heaven forgive my ignorance, but I have never seen the Parachute nor the Present Etonian, so without prejudice I dip into this book, and am at once much interested and amused by a paper "On ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... that was planted in his breast while it removed tufts of his wool with its hooked beak, and leapt boldly from the nest, which had become too hot to hold him. The eagle's outspread wings broke his fall, for they acted as a parachute; and so did Umbezi, upon whom he chanced to land. Springing from the prostrate shape of the chief, who now had a bruise in front to match that behind, Scowl, covered with pecks and scratches, ran like a lamp-lighter, leaving me to collect my second gun, which he had dropped ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... foxes, are very skilled in going from one tree to another. They have regular aerial highways, and some of the tree frogs are veritable wonders in the accuracy of their leaps from tree to tree. Even more skilled than these are the agamid lizards of India, whose chief means of travel is a folding parachute, which at a moment's notice can be erected and carry to another tree its lucky possessor. In Borneo is an aviator tree-snake which is able to so spread his ribs and inflate his body that he can actually sail from branch ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... had a chance to turn from the path of the titanic ship. But even as the plane spun downward, the pilot had managed to release a magnesium flare, a blindingly brilliant light that floated down on a parachute, and in the blaze of the white light it gave off, the other scouts at a few miles distance had seen the mighty bulk of the Kaxorian plane. At once they had dropped to the ground and then, by telephone lines, had sent their ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... bright set off by tawny stubble and amethyst-blue sky. These freshets are the Edens of Adel. The banks are charmingly wooded with acacias of many varieties, some thorned like the fabled Zakkum, others parachute-shaped, and planted in impenetrable thickets: huge white creepers, snake-shaped, enclasp giant trees, or connect with their cordage the higher boughs, or depend like cables from the lower branches to the ground. Luxuriant parasites abound: ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... with him, he opened a locker, exposing to view four suits which he had made in his spare time, each adapted to a particular method of escape from the Skylark. The one he selected was of heavy canvas, braced with steel netting, equipped with helmet and air-tanks, and attached to a strong, heavy parachute. He put it on, tested all its parts, and made his way unobserved to one of the doors in the lower part of the vessel. Thus, when the chance for escape came, he was ready for it. As the Skylark paused over the Isthmus, his lips parted in ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... environment, all far larger than those of the little town. The island was perhaps a mile in length. Between it and the mainland a boat was coming toward us. It was a dark blob of hull on the shining water, and above it a queerly shaped circular sail was puffed out, like a balloon parachute, by the wind. ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... the moving picture business we will have to learn to take chances. I read in the paper the other day how a couple leaped from the Brooklyn Bridge with a parachute—a man ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... along the broad national road between Arras and Bethune has been won except Souchez, and last night another quarter mile of trenches in the Souchez web was torn away. The attack was made under parachute rocket lights, the French burning bluish white and the Germans greenish white, covering the scene of the desperate conflict with a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... like a whip-lash, and the word "Squirrel," from the Latin "Sciurus" and Greek "Skia-oura" means "shady tail." Thus all of its names seem to note the wonderful banner that serves the animal in turn as sun-shade, signal-flag, coverlet, and parachute. ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... his wrist to his side, was possessed of a sort of leathery fiber like that of bat's swing, and that as their arms were of unusual length this fiber supported them in their downward flights like a parachute. ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... altitude-as high as 100,000 feet. By this time the gas bag has swelled to full size, about l00 feet high and 70 feet in diameter. At a set time, a device releases the case of instruments under the balloon. The instruments descend by parachute, and the balloon, rising quickly, explodes from ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... Durant devoted no small attention to the disposition of a little fellow-passenger he purposed giving a lift to,—a rabbit, muzzled and netted within a small basket, which, being appended to a parachute, was destined to come from aloft with the latest lunar intelligence. Chance, however, robbed the rabbit of the honour of performing this desperate service; for as the balloon was about to mount, the pipe bound within the neck of the valve was by some unlucky pull withdrawn, and, before this ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... out. Took part in a debate or two and then off to the North Pole in a balloon. Managed to see a good deal of snow and ice, and fancy we caught a sight of the Pole itself. Sent home (by parachute) to one of my Magazines, "How I got within Measurable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 31, 1892 • Various
... got the joy-rider into the parachute harness for such emergencies and over the side, then himself, both descending safely on the right side of the British trenches—which was rather "smart work," as the British would say, but all to the taste of the one-armed pilot ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... unless you provide yourself with a parachute! An aeroplane could make a good start up here. Do you ever get any guillemots' eggs? ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... Archipelago, possess, on the other hand, no power of genuine flight, being merely able to sustain themselves in the air through the extensive leaps which they take from tree to tree, the wing-like expansions of the skin simply exercising the mechanical function of a parachute. The apparatus of flight in the "Pterosaurs" is of the most remarkable character, and most resembles the "wing" of a Bat, though very different in some important particulars. The "wing" of the Pterosaurs is like that of Bats, namely, in consisting of a thin ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... territory the impious hordes which are overrunning it." These missionaries would, I presume, go to their posts in balloons. It never seems to occur to anyone here that the authority of a Parisian dropping down from the clouds in a parachute in any province would be contested. The right of Paris to rule France is a dictum so unquestioned in the minds of the Parisians, that their newspapers are now urging the Government to send new men to Tours to oust those who were sent ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... when jumping from one tree to another the animal is able to sustain itself through a long distance in the air by merely spreading out its limbs, and thus allowing the skin-extensions to act after the manner of a parachute. Here, of course, we have not yet got a wing, any more than we have in the case of the flying-fish; but we have the foundations laid for the possible development of a future wing, upon a somewhat similar plan as that which has been so wonderfully perfected in the case ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... they saw distinctly that each man, from his wrist to his side, was possessed of a sort of leathery fiber like that of bat's swing, and that as their arms were of unusual length this fiber supported them in their downward flights like a parachute. ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... does not know where to stand it among the litter, she puts it on the floor and crouches to regulate the wick. There rises from the medley of the old lady, vividly variegated with vermilion and night, a jet of black smoke, which returns in parachute form. Mame sighs, but she cannot ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... a slight breeze outside. The floating cable has snapped and the creature has gone off, borne on its parachute. I see it drifting away, showing, like a spot of light, against the dark foliage of the near cypresses, some forty feet distant. It rises higher, it crosses over the cypress-screen, it disappears. Others follow, some higher, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... It is childish, it is silly, it will not do! If they succeed in unmaking their legend of Boulanger, where are they? Not even where they were when they began to make it. On the contrary! They have made it perfectly plain that the republic is a parachute which falls without a balloon. Where are they to find the balloon? The Exposition has given the parachute a lift. The visit of the Prince of Wales gave it a lift. The Shah, if he comes, will give it a lift—not much—but a lift. But all these are expedients of a moment. All these will not give the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... to an end as all days, big or little, have to come. Captain Obed Bangs and his guests enjoyed every minute of it. They inspected the various exhibits, witnessed the horse races and the baseball game, saw the balloon ascension, and thrilled with the rest of the great crowd at the "parachute drop." It was six o'clock when they left the Fair grounds and Thankful began to worry about the condition of affairs at the High ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... reckon up the times of arrival and departure of trains at the German railhead at Achiet, for the smoke from the engines could be distinctly observed. Night after night our planes droned heavily over to the accompaniment of wonderful displays of "flaming onions," parachute flares, searchlights, and anti-aircraft gun-fire, and bombed these back areas with demoralising effect. Further along the enemy ridge to the right, and closer in, was what the trench maps grimly described as "Serre (site of)." If you want testimony of the complete ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... as I own it can be, humdrum, I protest, is everlastingly so. By-the-by, I should have told you that Captain Beauchamp was one hundred and ninety below Captain Baskelett when the state of the poll was handed to me. The gentleman driving with your father compared the Liberals to a parachute cut away from the balloon. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of parachute lights fired from "Little Archibald," as we called the special gun used for these larger flares, revealed nothing, so I gave up in disgust, woke the only two men who had not been disturbed all night, tied a couple ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... of the Australian Dormouse Phalangers, or little Opossum- or Flying-Mice, as they are locally called. See Opossum, Opossum-mouse, and Phalanger. They are not really the "Flying"-Mice or Flying-phalanger, as they have only an incipient parachute, but they are nearly related to the Pigmy Petaurists (q.v.) or small Flying-Phalangers. (Grk. dromikos, good ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... He took a parachute from a locker. "Holl is below." He buckled the thing across his chest and stepped up on the edge of ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... Through the calm and frosty air Of this morning bright and fair, Eddying round and round they sink Softly, slowly: one might think From the motions that are made, Every little leaf conveyed Sylph or fairy hither tending, To this lower world descending, Each invisible and mute, In his wavering parachute. But the kitten, how she starts, Crouches, stretches, paws and darts! First at one and then its fellow, Just as light and just as yellow; There are many now—now one— Now they stop and there are none: What intenseness of desire In her upward ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... Julian Ewell of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, reaching Bastogne, Belgium, on the night of December 18, 1944, with only his lead battalion at hand, insisted that he be given orders, even though higher headquarters could tell him almost nothing about the friendly or enemy ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... you'll ask me how they took the order, so I tell you without waiting. I saw a few pale faces—but it was only for a moment. A group of them stood in front of me in the library. I had just received from the front, by post, the silk parachute of a fusee volante, on which was written: "A Miss Mildred Aldrich Ramasse sur le champ de bataille a 20 metres des lignes Boches. Souvenir de la patrouille de Fevrier 22, 1917," and the signature of the Aspirant, and that was the only way I knew he had probably ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... the amateur driver to convert the present body into a char-a-banc or a tipping-waggon. The hood is reversible, so that passengers may be sheltered from the wind when the car runs backwards. In the rear of the boot, concealed by a door flush with the panels, is an EINSTEIN parachute, by means of which a passenger may leave the car before an imminent accident or when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... the wines of the dews of an immortal youth, and dieted on the ambrosial ether of gods, and sent his seedling offspring sailing ten thousand airy seas with the wind for master pilot and never a craft but the gypsy parachute of a seed with wings shaken out from the cones purpling to the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... had all fallen from heaven—one may mean many things by heaven—and landed with more or less severity, according to the resources of padding with which Nature furnished us. To Varvilliers' case, indeed, the metaphor is inadequate; he had a parachute, sailed to earth gaily with never a bruise, and was ready to mount again had any of us offered to bear him company. His invitation, given with a heartiness that mocked his bidden companions, found no acceptance. We were all for our own planet in the morning. ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... Red-squirrel flicking his tail like a whip-lash, and the word "Squirrel," from the Latin "Sciurus" and Greek "Skia-oura" means "shady tail." Thus all of its names seem to note the wonderful banner that serves the animal in turn as sun-shade, signal-flag, coverlet, and parachute. ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... trouble about flying comes when you want to alight. That holds as true to-day with the most perfect airplanes, as in boyhood days when one jumped from the barn in perfect confidence that the family umbrella would serve as a parachute. To alight with an airplane the pilot—supposing his descent to be voluntary and not compelled by accident or otherwise—surveys the country about him for a level field, big and clear enough for the machine to run off its momentum in ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... quantities sadly insufficient for his needs), but salt, saccharine, opium, drugs and surgical dressings, mails, spare parts for wireless plant, money, and a millstone weighing seventy pounds, which was dropped by means of a parachute. In the actual operations of the war the uses of aircraft, and especially of the aeroplane, were very rapidly extended and multiplied. The earliest and most obvious use was reconnaissance. To the Commander-in-Chief a detailed knowledge of the enemy's dispositions ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... see myself that it wasn't acting normally. It was losing elevation and was pursuing a very erratic course. Before we could reach it it lost flying speed and fell into a spinning nose dive and headed for the ground. I watched, expecting every minute to see the crew make parachute jumps, but they didn't and the plane hit the ground with a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... balloons within striking distance. After all, strafing infantrymen wasn't half as much fun as knocking down balloons. They went up with such a glorious bang! And it was delicious to watch the frightened observer tumble over the side of the basket in an effort to escape by parachute. That last one had somehow gotten fouled in the rigging and had been clawing frantically when the bag exploded. As for that, Yancey had been sorry; not for the man, but because he had wanted to see the parachute poof-op! ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... up and crack this suit and let some air in. But I can't. I fell fifty miles without a parachute. I'm dead so I ...
— Accidental Death • Peter Baily
... falling, the skirt of her dress, spreading as a parachute, lessened the velocity of the descent. This still extended, hinders her from sinking. As she knows not how to swim, it will not sustain her long; itself ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... or a flake of snow came drifting down on the icy breeze. And then, falling like a snowflake, a little figure, a little man-insect, clinging to a parachute, drove down very swiftly towards the central ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... should break," he exclaimed, in a frightened whisper, "it would be the last of a fellow! No one could drop down there, and save his neck without a parachute. I guess the best thing I can do is to get over as ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... formation of two P-82's and an A-26 aircraft flying at 20,000 feet. They were preparing to carry out a seat-ejection experiment. We observed a round object, white aluminum color, which at first resembled a parachute canopy. Our first impression was that a premature ejection of the seat and dummy had occurred but this was not the case. The object was lower than 20,000 feet, and was falling at three times the rate observed for the test ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... which was too large and would not shut; Harris fell, and was killed! Sadler, deprived of ballast by his long sojourn in the air, was dragged over the town of Boston and dashed against the chimneys; Sadler fell, and was killed! Cokling descended with a convex parachute which he pretended to have perfected; Cokling fell, and was killed! Well, I love them, these victims of their own imprudence, and I shall die as they did. ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... balance the posterior part of the body and the filaments of the abdomen during flight. On reaching a certain height they allow themselves to descend, stretching out while doing so their long wings and tail, which then serve as a parachute. Then a rapid working of these organs suddenly changes the direction of the motion, and they begin to ascend again. Coupling takes place during these aerial dances. Soon afterward the females approach ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... drew his right arm; she felt his muscles tauten as he clasped her to him. Useless now, he knew, any further struggles with the aeroplane. Its speed, its plummetlike drop checked only by the huge sweep of its parachute wings, Stern knew now it must fall clear to the bottom of the abyss—if bottom there were. And if ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... aerial voyages, the chief danger apprehended was from accidental and rapid descents. To countervail this danger, and enable the adventurer, in cases of alarm, to desert his balloon, and descend to the ground uninjured, Blanchard invented the parachute, or guard for falling, as the word signifies in French, an apparatus very much resembling an umbrella, but of much larger dimensions. The design is to break the fall; and, to effect this, it is necessary that the parachute present a surface sufficiently large to experience ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... diameter, and rising in a straight shaft to the height of nearly a hundred feet. On the top is a splendid head of leaves like gigantic ostrich plumes, that gracefully curve over on all sides, forming a shape like a parachute. Each leaf is full five yards in length, and of the kind called pinnate—that is divided into numerous leaflets, each of which is itself more than a foot and a half long, shaped like the blade of a rapier. Under the shadow of this ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... a button on his desk. "Get me Air Force Chief of Staff Burns," he said, and, a moment later: "Bernie? Chuck here. We need a plane. A jet-transport to go you-know-where. Cargo? One man, in a parachute. Can you manage it? Immediately, if not sooner. Good boy, Bernie. No ... no, I'm sorry, I can't tell you a thing about it." The Secretary cut the connection, ...
— Summer Snow Storm • Adam Chase
... circle of canvas out of the tent, about three times the size of that table-cover, and plugged the hole in the centre, and I tied eight ropes round it to meet in the middle and make a parachute. The other chaps lay about and watched me as though they thought it was a new kind of delirium. Then I explained my notion to the two British soldiers and how I meant to do it, and as soon as the short dusk had darkened into night, I risked it. ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... steamer for the twenty-mile trip across to Catalina Island, and on the way over they saw a whole "school" of whales and a flight of flying-fishes. Yes, really and truly, these little fish fly or sail through the air, for their fins balance them like a parachute. They skim along ten or twelve feet above the waves, and then drop in the water to rest, taking another flight whenever their ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... of the Umbrella, it would not be right to omit mentioning another, and far from legitimate use in which it has been employed by notoriety-hunting artistes—we allude to the Parachute; and a short narration of its origin and progress may not be uninteresting to ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... was illuminated, trench light after trench light rising over the dark branches. There would be a rocket like the trail of bronze-red powder sparks hanging for an instant in the sky, then a loud Plop! and the French light would spread out its parachute and sail slowly down the sky toward the river. The German lights (fusees eclairantes), cartridges of magnesium fired from a gun resembling a shotgun, burned only during their dazzling trajectory. At ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... that brought about a stirring up of old history, for many and humorous had been Toby's attempt to construct a flying machine, and also a parachute that would save the lives of daring aeronauts when their engines gave out a mile or two up in ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... picture of his enemies on the open field. The flares prepared by our Government for the war consist of a sheet iron cylinder, four feet long and six inches thick, containing a stick of magnesium attached to a tightly rolled silk parachute twenty feet in diameter when expanded. The whole weighed 32 pounds. On being dropped from the plane by pressing a button, the rush of air set spinning a pinwheel at the bottom which ignited the magnesium stick and detonated a charge of black powder sufficient to throw off ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... primrose path of dalliance"—it shrinks back from it as from a precipice, and keeps in the iron rail-way of the understanding. Irish oratory, on the contrary, is a sort of aeronaut: it is always going up in a balloon, and breaking its neck, or coming down in the parachute. It is filled full with gaseous matter, with whim and fancy, with alliteration and antithesis, with heated passion and bloated metaphors, that burst the slender, silken covering of sense; and the airy pageant, that glittered in empty ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... that mighty graveyard stretching from Switzerland to the sea that the enemy's eyes are bent. The regiments used to get various kinds of flares to experiment with. We used to laugh over an incident that occurred when a new type, a species of parachute, had been served out. The Second-in-command, who fired it, miscalculated the strength of the wind, which was blowing from the enemy's trench, and the flare was carried in a stately curve backwards until it was directly over battalion headquarters. Here it hung ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... harm in a fountain," said a Brown Pelican that had come sailing into Cuthbert Rookery with her wings sloped downward like a parachute. "It was the gold-seekers who filled the islands with the thunder of their guns and the ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... live in the tops of the trees, which were then often more than a hundred feet high. They no longer needed their legs for the purpose of walking, but it was necessary for them to move quickly from branch to branch. And so they changed a part of their skin into a sort of parachute, which stretched between the sides of their bodies and the small toes of their fore-feet, and gradually they covered this skinny parachute with feathers and made their tails into a steering gear and flew from tree to tree and developed into ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... comes down very gently when the gas gives out." said the man. "It's almost like a parachute. Your children will come down like feathers. We'll get up a searching party and go after them." He knew there was great danger but he did not want to add to Mrs. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the County Fair • Laura Lee Hope
... a story and enclosed it in one of several leather cylinders he had provided for this purpose. Each one had a sort of miniature parachute connected to it, and a flag to attract attention as ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... nearly all rock, against some fragments of which the stick was propped. There was no failure then. There came up a faint rasping sound as of wood over stone, as the cord tightened, and then very slowly the umbrella began, parachute-like, to rise in the air, higher and higher, as it was hauled up hand over hand till the spike touched the lower twigs ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... could fly by the aid of this ingenious machinery. You will see that his wings are arranged so that they are moved by his legs, and also by cords attached to his arms. The umbrella over his head is not intended to ward off the rain or the sun, but is to act as a sort of parachute, to keep him from falling while he is making his strokes. The basket, which hangs down low enough to be out of the way of his feet, is filled with provisions, which he expects to need in the course of ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... grand plunge, made with the swiftness of an Indian's arrow, his head bent downward, his wings partly folded, and his tail perked upward at precisely the proper angle to make a rudder, all the various organs so finely adjusted as to convert him into a perfectly dirigible parachute. Swift as his descent was, he alighted on the ground as lightly as a tuft of down. It was the poetry of motion. One or two writers have insisted that the horned lark's empyrean song compares favorably with that of ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... This feat they are enabled to perform by means of a broad membrane that extends from the skin of their fore-legs to that of their thighs, and which, when stretched out, endows them with the properties of a parachute. Their bodies, too, have a flattened shape like the bats; and this also helps to sustain them in ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... their occupants busily observing, sketching, mapping, or reporting the enemy's movements. Each of these is a target for the attacking aeroplanes and the occupants must be ready, at a moment's notice, to leap into a parachute when they are shot down. High above these balloons a score of British planes are darting about or dashing over the enemy's lines, acting as the eyes of the huge guns hidden away behind us. We are looking at one far up seemingly ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... would ever for a moment dream of doubting its close affinity to the flying squirrels of the American woodlands. It has just the same general outline, just the same bushy tail, just the same rough arrangement of colours, and just the same expanded parachute-like membrane stretching between the fore and hind limbs. Why should this be so? Clearly because both animals have independently adapted themselves to the same mode of life under the same general circumstances. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... drawn into the shape of an umbrella top, or an inverted parachute, by thongs of deer-skin, with which both the labourers were well provided. A few light sticks served to keep the parts from collapsing, or falling in. When this simple and natural expedient was arranged, it was placed on the water, the Indian ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... part in a debate or two and then off to the North Pole in a balloon. Managed to see a good deal of snow and ice, and fancy we caught a sight of the Pole itself. Sent home (by parachute) to one of my Magazines, "How I got within ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 31, 1892 • Various
... expanded: it is reserved for times of courtship. I have seen the female sitting quietly on a branch, and two males displaying their charms in front of her. One would shoot up like a rocket, then suddenly expanding the snow-white tail like an inverted parachute, slowly descend in front of her, turning round gradually to show off both back and front. The effect was heightened by the wings being invisible from a distance of a few yards, both from their great velocity of movement and from not having ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... its young. In all these respects it differs from birds. It differs from mammals only in its wings. But we remember that flying squirrels have a membrane stretching along the sides of the body and serving as a parachute, though not as wings. We naturally consider the wings as a sort of after-thought superinduced on the mammalian structure. We do not hesitate ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... wondering air grows mute, As her pearly parachute Cometh slowly down from heaven, softly floating to and fro; And the earth emits no sound, As lightly on the ground Leaps the silvery-footed Spirit ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... from small mortars, or placed well to the front to be set off by trip wires close to the ground. The best light devised is one that can be fired well to the front from a small mortar and then hung suspended from an open parachute above the enemy. Bonfires can be laid ready for lighting when no other means is at hand. Whatever form of illumination is adopted, it should withstand bad ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... attention. In several groups of animals of strictly arboreal habits, nature has gone beyond the ordinary limits of agility afforded by muscular limbs alone, and has supplemented those limbs with elastic membranes which act like a parachute when the animal takes a leap into space, and gives it a gradual and easy descent. Amongst the lemurs the Galeopithecus, the Pteromys in the squirrels, and the Anomalurus in another family of rodents, are all thus provided with the apparatus necessary to enable them to float awhile ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... Johnson patented a balloon and parachute dingus which worked on the principle of a duck's foot in the mud. I use scientific terms because I am unable to express myself in the common language of the vulgar herd. This machine had a tail which, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the heavens, yet there are certain periods at which they appear in large numbers, and have been observed to radiate from certain well-defined parts of the sky. When the radiant point is overhead, the falling stars spread out and resemble a parachute of fire; but when it is below the horizon, the stars ascend upwards like rockets into the sky. The radiant point is fixed among the stars, so that at the commencement of a shower it may be overhead, and before the termination of the display it may have travelled ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... this morning bright and fair, Eddying round and round they sink Softly, slowly: one might think, 10 From the motions that are made, Every little leaf conveyed Sylph or Faery hither tending,— To this lower world descending, Each invisible and mute, 15 In his wavering parachute. ——But the Kitten, how she starts, Crouches, stretches, paws, and darts! [3] First at one, and then its fellow Just as light and just as yellow; 20 There are many now—now one— Now they stop and there are none: What intenseness of desire In her upward eye of fire! With a tiger-leap half-way ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... the little nuts become loosened and begin to drop off a few at a time. Certain birds eat a few and loosen others, which escape. The illustration shows some of these nuts, each supplied with a ring of bristles about the base, which acts as a parachute to permit the wind the easier to carry them for some distance before falling, or to drift them on the surface of ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... watched me in my work of manumission. This, owing to the fluttering terror of the prisoners, was an affair of some delicacy; but ere long I was rewarded by seeing one of them fly away to a neighboring tree, while the cripple, making a parachute of his wings, came lightly to the ground, and hopped off as well as he could with one leg, obsequiously waited on by his elders. A week later I had the satisfaction of meeting him in the pine-walk, in good spirits, and already so far ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... swaying to and fro. The globe plunges upward; the pendant drops like a shot. There is a rustling sound. It is the intake of the breath of horror from ten thousand pairs of lungs. Look! Look! The edges of the parachute ruffle, and then it blossoms out like an opening flower. It bounces on the air a little, and rocking gently sinks like thistle-down ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... not quite with the speed of an arrow. A moment later, tired of his flight, he sprawls his eight webbed legs out in every direction, breaking them seemingly into a thousand joints, and settles back like an animated parachute awreck. Then perchance he perches on a rock knowingly, with the appearance of owl-like wisdom, albeit his head looks surprisingly like a frog's. Anon he holds his head erect and stretches out his long arms in what is most palpably a yawn. Then, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... machines of dozens of other types, monoplanes, bi-planes, machines of the helicopter type, and a few devices based on the parachute principle. But no Prescott. The names the various machines bore were weird: The Sky Pilot, the Cloud Chaser, the Star Bug, the Moon Mounter, the Aerial Auto, the Heavenly Harvester, and some ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... space and trusting one's parachute to do its business properly. I felt a sudden tightening inside me as I thought of that dive into the void, ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... advanced for the first class and entered her in the second. "Just natural smartness," Captain Shadrach declared. "Natural smartness and nothin' else. She ain't had a mite of advantages, but up she goes just the same. Why, Teacher told me she considered her a reg'lar parachute." ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... granted: and from this time there is a great deal of correspondence (mainly with Mr Baily) upon the details of the experiment and the theory of the calculation.—On July 24th I saw the descent of the parachute by which Mr Cocking was killed. I attended the coroner's inquest and gave ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... an astonishing deficiency of judgment, the animal endeavoring to do much more than was in its power to accomplish. All its endeavors, therefore, were unsuccessful, though made without doing itself any hurt—thanks to the parachute with which Nature had provided it. Had the kaguang not been in the habit of relying so entirely on this convenient contrivance, it probably would have exercised its judgment to a greater extent, and formed a more correct estimate of its ability. The animal repeated ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... Montgolfier (hot-air balloon). Associated words: parachute, inflate, inflation, deflate, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... fact, they do not fly at all; but the membrane which unites their limbs acts like a parachute in keeping them up in the air, and materially assists them in some of their ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... Renard, the eminent superintendent of the French Aeronautical Department, exhibited at the Paris Exposition of that year, an apparatus experimented with some years before, which he termed a "dirigible parachute." It consisted of an oviform body to which were pivoted two upright slats carrying above the body nine long superposed flat blades spaced about one-third of their width apart. When this apparatus was properly set at an angle to the longitudinal axis of the body and ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... up a balloon a long ways, but it can't keep it there. And when a fellow's turning flip-flops up among the clouds, he's naturally going to have the farmers gaping at him. But in the end there always comes a time when the parachute fails to work. I don't know anything that's quite so dead as a man who's fallen three or four thousand feet off the edge of ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... the skin on their flanks rather full, to the so-called flying squirrels; and flying squirrels have their limbs and even the base of the tail united by a broad expanse of skin, which serves as a parachute and allows them to glide through the air to an astonishing distance from tree to tree. We cannot doubt that each structure is of use to each kind of squirrel in its own country, by enabling it to escape birds ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... environment, all far larger than those of the little town. The island was perhaps a mile in length. Between it and the mainland a boat was coming toward us. It was a dark blob of hull on the shining water, and above it a queerly shaped circular sail was puffed out like a balloon-parachute by the wind. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... it is, eh?" exclaimed the odd man, as he looked at the aeroplane, for there had been much work done on it since he had last seen it. "Bless my parachute, Tom! But it looks as though you ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... buffet the waves, ride the storm, skim, effleurer [Fr.], dive, wade. fly, be wafted, hover, soar, flutter, jet, orbit, rocket; take wing, take a flight, take off, ascend, blast off, land, alight; wing one's flight, wing one's way; aviate; parachute, jump, glide. Adj. sailing &c v.; volant^, aerostatic^; seafaring, nautical, maritime, naval; seagoing, coasting; afloat; navigable; aerial, aeronautic; grallatory^. Adv. under way, under sail, under canvas, under steam; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... senses they were still falling, but not so fast. The top of the buggy caught the air like a parachute or an umbrella filled with wind, and held them back so that they floated downward with a gentle motion that was not so very disagreeable to bear. The worst thing was their terror of reaching the bottom of this great crack in the earth, and the natural fear that sudden death was about ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... a pot at the end of the rocket's travel, and to emit a bright light during its slow descent. It consists of a small cylindrical cardboard box (Fig. 16) filled with common star paste or Lamarre stars, and attached to a parachute, e, by means of a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... distinguished than any ever seen under the old regime. These modern Olympics consist of chariot-races and wrestling, horse and foot races, ascensions of balloons, carrying three or four persons, descents from them by means of a parachute, mock-fights and aquatic tilting. After the sports of the day, come splendid illuminations, grand fire-works, pantomimes represented by two or three hundred performers, and concerts, which, aided by splendid decorations, are not deficient in point of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... air have been countless, a large number of them being due to the use of the parachute. But this invention has frequently been employed effectively. Though the idea of such a machine may be traced back many hundreds of years in old drawings and old books, the inventor of the first in which a descent was actually made, was Jacques Garnerin, a pupil of ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... atomic blasts. These pressures were computed for various distances from X, and curves were then plotted which were checked against the theoretical predictions of what the pressures would be. A further check was afforded from the readings obtained by the measuring instruments which were dropped by parachute at each atomic attack. The peak pressure figures gave a direct clue to the equivalent T.N.T. tonnage of the atomic bombs, since the pressures developed by any given amount of ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... largest, belonging to a closely allied subgenus, is known as the "Flying Squirrel,"[1] from its being assisted in its prodigious leaps from tree to tree, by the parachute formed by the skin of the flanks, which on the extension of the limbs front and rear, is laterally expanded from foot to foot. Thus buoyed up in its descent, the spring which it is enabled to make from one lofty tree to another resembles the flight of a bird rather than the bound ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... capsule in a mesh message ball, attaching it to a couple of wires and flipping a switch. The ball flashed and vanished, leaving the wires cleanly sheared off. When it got back to Police Terminal, half an hour later, it would rematerialize, eject a parachute, and turn on a whistle to call attention to itself. Then he sealed on his helmet, climbed into an aircar, and turned on his helmet-radio to speak to the driver. The car lifted a few inches, floated out an open ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... round they sink Softly, slowly: one might think, 10 From the motions that are made, Every little leaf convey'd Sylph or Faery hither tending, To this lower world descending, Each invisible and mute, In his wavering parachute. —But the Kitten, how she starts, Crouches, stretches, paws, and darts; First at one and then it's fellow Just as light and just as yellow; 20 There are many now—now one— Now they stop; and there are none— What intenseness of desire In her upward eye of fire! With ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... a physician. It would be impossible without the aid of diagrams, and I do not remember sufficient, to explain his mechanical contrivances; but the general principle was, to suspend the man under a kind of flat parachute of extremely thin feather-edge boards, with a power of adjusting the angle at which it was placed, and allowing the man the full use of his arms and legs to work any machinery placed beneath; the area of the parachute being proportioned, as in birds to the weight ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... not a parachute? Some remnant rather of the ancient folly, Some touch of times before the Big Dispute? I have it now! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... common use, among which he notes: grand-jury, grand-juror, eulogist, consignee, consignor, mammoth, maltreatment, iceberg, parachute, malpractice, fracas, entailment, perfectibility, glacier, fire-warden, safety-valve, savings-bank, gaseous, lithographic, peninsular, repealable, retaliatory, dyspeptic, missionary, nervine, meteoric, mineralogical, reimbursable; to quarantine, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... killed in his fall because of a parachute which had been so arranged, unknown to him, to save ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... Brock, whose delightful compositions, somewhat in the "Hugh Thomson" manner, embellish several volumes of Messrs. Macmillan's Cranford series, has illustrated also "The Parachute," and "English Fairy and Folk Tales," by E. S. Hartland (1893), and also supplied two pictures to that most fascinating volume prized by all lovers of children, "W. V., Her Book," by W. Canton. Perhaps "Westward Ho!" should also be included ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... from the other side of the river. We had a fine view of it from the roof of our house. Two men were in it, and when they had risen so high that the balloon appeared quite small, they threw out a little machine, called a parachute. It looked something like an umbrella, and had a dog to it. The balloon sailed a great distance through the air, ...
— The Summer Holidays - A Story for Children • Amerel
... Gootes; "some miserable castoff from a fourthrate quickie studio masquerading as a newscameraman; and a party of sheep—perhaps I could simplify my whole sentence by saying merely a party of bloody sheep—will be landed by parachute on top of the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... seem that the principle of the parachute was to some extent at least brought into play. If also circumstantial accounts can be credited, it would appear that a working model of a flying machine was publicly exhibited by one John Muller before the Emperor Charles V. at Nuremberg. Whatever exaggeration ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... is a lightning express on the Irish Air Service at half-past sixteen. They will drop you by a parachute in the bay. The dip will do you good. I will pick you up and dry you and give you a ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... we do, Miles!" He looked to Ashe. "You'll parachute in. The packs with which you will be equipped are special stuff. Once you have them off sprinkle them with a powder Miles will provide and in ten minutes there won't be enough of them left for anyone to identify. We haven't but a dozen of these, and we can't ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... see a thing open out like a parachute, while below it trailed something that might have been the stick of the rocket. Eagerly Kennedy followed the parachute as the wind wafted it along and it sank slowly to the earth. When, at last, he recovered it I saw that between the parachute and ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... At 153d, the beautiful cemetery of Trinity Parish, leafy paths lying peaceful in the strong glow. At 166th Street is an open area now called Mitchel Square, with an outcrop of rock polished by the rearward breeks of many sliding urchins. Some children were playing on that small summit with a toy parachute made of light paper and a pebble attached by threads. On 168th Street alongside the big armoury of the Twenty-second Engineers boys were playing baseball, with a rubber ball, pitching it so that the batter received it on the bounce and struck ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... minutes had almost elapsed when there fluttered from the tiny monoplane a paper parachute. It dropped for several hundred feet before it spread to the air pressure and floated more gently toward the earth and a moment later there burst from its basket a puff of white smoke. Two more parachutes followed the first and two more puffs ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... you get sick right away. Pop was poking into two of the large mound-shaped cases that were sitting loose and open on the right-hand seat, as if ready for emergency use. One had a folded something with straps on it that was probably a parachute. The second had I judged a thousand or more of the inch cubes such as I'd pried out of the Pilot's hand, all neatly stacked in a cubical box inside the soft outer bag. You could see the one-cube gap where he'd taken ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... into the parachute harness for such emergencies and over the side, then himself, both descending safely on the right side of the British trenches—which was rather "smart work," as the British would say, but all to the taste of the one-armed pilot who was looking for adventures. ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... gad-about members of his flock. This one sways himself over the edge of his frame, making signals of distress in all directions, and with that and his windy flights of oratory suggests twenty minutes in a balloon-car, till he comes down to earth at the finish with the Doxology for a parachute. His shepherd's crook is one long note of interrogation, with which he tries to hook down the heavens to the understanding of his hearers, and his hearers up to an understanding of himself. All his ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... which the passengers were expected to take refuge, if the ship was about to sink, so the upper decks of these air-vessels are supplied with parachutes, from which are suspended boats; and in case of accident two sailors and ten passengers are assigned to each parachute; and long practice has taught the bold craftsmen to descend gently and alight in the sea, even in stormy weather, with as much adroitness as a sea-gull. In fact, a whole population of air-sailors has ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... From these instances, and the reasons given, a man with wings large enough and duly connected might learn to overcome the resistance of the air, and by conquering it, succeed in subjugating it and rising above it. [Footnote: A parachute is here sketched, with an explanatory remark. It is reproduced on Tav. XVI in the Saggio, and in: Leonardo da Vinci als Ingenieur etc., Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Technik und der induktiven Wissenschaften, von Dr. Hermann Grothe, Berlin ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... out caustically that to imprison a sub-Freshman would be to ruin his reputation, break his spirit and disgrace the school—that one world's record was worth fifty points, and that, if allowed to, I would pole-vault so high the next day that I would have to come down in a parachute. The result was the council broke up in one big row and Martha ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... laughed bitterly. "In three months to parachute from first-class cafes to carrying home-made lunches; to go from threes for a half to twos for a nickel; instead of having plenty of money in pocket to be without even a cent! I tell you, Fanny, the way we're ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... colonel, "during the war the British dropped our group a radio transmitter. It was the only way to get the stuff into Africa quickly. The parachute failed to open. The transmitter fell two thousand feet, hit the side of a mountain, and tumbled down another eight hundred feet. When we found it, four days later, its wiring was in better shape than that thing is ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... table, and unbroken from gable to gable; the windows were glazed with sheets of plate glass, a temporary iron stovepipe passing out near one of these, and running up to the height of the ridge, where it was finished by a covering like a parachute. Walking round to the end, he perceived an oblong white stone let into the wall just above the plinth, on which was ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... an occasion when he might put these wings to good use, for if he spread them in the air and then leaped over the side of the basket they would act in the same way a parachute does, and bear him ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum
... inquires the Baron—Seven Summers, An Eton Medley, by the Editors of the Parachute and Present Etonian. Now, Heaven forgive my ignorance, but I have never seen the Parachute nor the Present Etonian, so without prejudice I dip into this book, and am at once much interested and amused by a paper "On Getting Up." ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... Edition (1657) has various cuts amongst which is a frontispiece, that occurs again at page 29 of the little volume, depicting Gonsales being drawn up to the lunar world in a machine, not unlike a primitive parachute, to which are harnessed his 'gansas ... 25 in number, a covey that ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... full of black wings and angry cries, as the crows from neighboring nests flocked to the help of their fellow citizen. But the little red robber was brave and kept his head. Spreading his legs wide and flat, he made a sort of parachute of himself, and, instead of falling like a stone, he glided down to another branch. Those beating wings and terrible jabbing beaks were all about him, but they got in each other's way. And he was a wonder ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... season. Let me reckon them up. There were the horse, the bull, the parachute, - and the tumbler hanging on - chiefly by his toes, I believe - below the car. Very wrong, indeed, and decidedly to be stopped. But, in connexion with these and similar dangerous exhibitions, it strikes me that that portion of the public whom they ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
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