"Self-acting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boilers is regulated by a plate of metal or a damper, as it is called, which slides like a sluice up and down in the flue, and this damper is closed more or less when the intensity of the fire has to be moderated. In wagon boilers this is generally accomplished by self-acting mechanism. In the small cistern pipe, which is called a stand pipe, the water rises up to a height proportional to the pressure of the steam, and the surface of the water in this pipe will rise or fall with the fluctuations in the pressure of the steam. In this pipe a float ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... has a 4 in. steel spindle with self-acting variable feed motion through a range of 10 in., and the radial arm is raised or lowered by power through a range of 2 ft. 8 in. When the arm is in its highest position there is room for a piece of work 4 ft. high between the circular table and the lower end of the spindle. The circular table serves ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... kind as that imagination has nothing to do with memory. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Individuality should rather be regarded as a feminine organisation which conceives and brings forth; or, better still, as a growing thing which feeds on what is germane to it, a thing with self-acting suctorial organs that operate whenever they come in contact with suitable food. A nucleus is of course necessary for the development of an individuality, and this nucleus is the physical and intellectual constitution of the individual. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... be so comfortable. How can the owner of a dainty chalet, with smoked-oak furniture, imitation Venetian tapestry curtains, hot and cold water laid on, a bed of geraniums and hollyhocks, a baby crawling down the veranda, and a self-acting twirly-whirly hose gently hissing over the grass in the balmy dusk of an August evening—how can such a man despair of the Republic, or descend into the streets on voting days and mix cheerfully ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... see that you never know where ignorance lurks. The hydra-headed upas tree and bete noir of self-acting progress, is such ignorance as that, lurking in the very shadow of magnificent educational institutions and hard words of great cast. Nothing can be more disagreeable to the scientist than a bete noir. Nothing gives him greater satisfaction than to ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... his original; but a more intellectual age than that of the Grecian epic had arrived, and with Aeschylus, philosophy passed into poetry. The dark doctrine of fatality imparted its stern and awful interest to the narration of events—men were delineated, not as mere self-acting and self-willed mortals, but as the agents of a destiny inevitable and unseen—the gods themselves are no longer the gods of Homer, entering into the sphere of human action for petty motives and for ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... daily importing some new improvement therein from the American shores? Look again at their perfect and beautiful invention for the manufacture of seamless bags, by Mr. Cyrus Baldwin, and which he has at work at the Stark Mills. There are 126 looms in operation, all self-acting and each one making 47 bags daily; the bags are a little more than three and a half feet long, and chiefly used, I believe, for flour and grain. When they are finished, sewing-machines are at hand, which can hem at the rate of 650 bags each daily. This ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... own John Smith—your John Smith—everybody's John Smith—again entered the arm-chair of our affections, the fire of our love stirred, like a self-acting poker, the embers of cooling good fellowship, and the strong blaze of resuscitated friendship burst forth with all its pristine warmth. John Smith wore Bluchers but he wore them like an honest man; and he was the only specimen of the genus homo (who sported trowsers) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... too has a broom specially placed at his service, namely, the tongue; and an unrivalled broom it is—for it is self-acting, never wears out, and makes no dust—qualities we cannot succeed in obtaining in any brooms of our ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... bill which may be injurious to those interests. On the other hand, as respects all local matters, he will act on and be guided by the advice of the Irish executive council. The system is, as has been shown above, self-acting. The governor, for local purposes, must have a council which is in harmony with the legislative body. If a council, supported by the legislative body and the governor do not agree, the governor must give way unless he can, by dismissing his council and dissolving the ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... properties—sensible properties, as they are commonly called—whereby matter affects the senses. Equally, whether matter be, in all and each of its various species, inanimate, inert, passive substance, or a combination of self-acting forces—equally whether it be the author or merely the subject of whatever activity it manifests, that activity is equally manifested in certain sequences which are as unvarying as if they were prescribed by inexorable and irresistible laws, and ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... resistance to prescription brings round disadvantageous results which he had not calculated upon. He had expected that it would save him from a great deal of social intercourse of a frivolous kind—that it would offend the fools, but not the sensible people; and so would serve as a self-acting test by which those worth knowing would be separated from those not worth knowing. But the fools prove to be so greatly in the majority that, by offending them, he closes against himself nearly all the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... understand what a market originally was, you must try to picture to yourselves a territory occupied by village-communities, self-acting and as yet autonomous, each cultivating its arable land in the middle of its waste, and each, I fear I must add, at perpetual war with its neighbour. But at several points, points probably where the domains of two or ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... recognizing the suggestions from both sides, Leibnitz called Cartesianism the antechamber of the true philosophy, and atomism the preparation for the theory of monads. From the first it followed that the substances were self-acting forces; from the second, that they were immaterial units. Through the combination of both determinations we gain information concerning the kind of force or activity which constitutes the being of the monad: the monads are representative forces. There is nothing truly real ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the deck, and the lower ones in the boat's floor, thus passing through the space between the deck and the floor, and, of course, hermetically closed to it. In some boats the tubes are kept open, but in the self-righting boats they are fitted with self-acting valves, which open downwards only, so that they will allow any water shipped to pass through them, whilst none can pass upwards. Papa explained that, as the deck is placed above the water-line, any water resting on it will be above the ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... the different muscles of respiration with a cluster of cell-bodies in the bulb, called the respiratory center. This center together with the nerves and muscles in question form an automatic, or self-acting, mechanism similar in some respects to that of the heart. Through the impulses passing from the respiratory center to the muscles, a rhythmic action is maintained sufficient to satisfy the usual needs of the body for oxygen. The demand of the body ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... domestic difficulty of which Julius could not speak; yet, as if answering the thought, Dr. Easterby said, "After all, charity is the true self-acting balance to many a sweet untaught nature. Self-denials which spring out of love are a great safeguard, because they are almost sure to be both ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... out of view the cases that are to be ascribed to the self-acting system of propagation, it would seem that the disease must be far from common. Mr. White of Manchester says, "Out of the whole number of lying-in patients whom I have delivered (and I may safely call it a great one), ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... There is a self-acting retribution in our evil passions which never fails to operate. One who hates must suffer, and Sir George for years had paid the penalty night and day, unconscious that his pain was of his ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... variation of temperature has not unfrequently brought down the whole edifice into which they were admitted. Good engineers and architects allow for such changes produced by temperature. In the tubular bridge across the Menai Straits, a self-acting record of the daily amount of its contraction ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... probably either Howell or Glindon. Dickens appears to have visited the Eagle Tavern in 1835 or 1836. It was then a notable place of entertainment consisting of gardens with an orchestra, and the 'Grecian Saloon,' which was furnished with an organ and a 'self-acting piano.' Here concerts were given every evening, which in Lent took a sacred turn, and consisted of selections from Handel and Mozart. In 1837 the organ was removed, and a ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood |
