A Compendium of Natural Philosophy: Adapted to the Use of the General Reader, and of Schools and Academies

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S. Babcock & Company, 1837 - Physics - 359 pages
 

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Page 138 - When the pipe AD is filled with water, the pressure upon the surface of the bellows, and consequently the force with which it raises the weights laid on it, will be equal to the weight of a cylinder of water, whose base is the surface of the bellows, and height that of the column AD. Therefore, by making the tube small, and the bellows large, the power of a given quantity of water, however small, may be increased indefinitely. The pressure of the column of water in this case corresponds to the force...
Page 53 - If three forces acting at a point are in equilibrium they can be represented in magnitude and direction by the three sides of a triangle taken in order.
Page 69 - Mechanical powers are six, viz : the lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, the inclined plane, the screw, and the wedge.
Page 148 - A very slight declivity suffices to give the running motion to water. Three inches per mile, in a smooth straight channel, gives a velocity of about three miles per hour. The Ganges, which gathers the waters of the Himalaya mountains, the loftiest in the world, is, at eighteen hundred miles from its mouth, only eight hundred feet above the level of the sea — that is, above twice the height of St.
Page 100 - The pulley is a small wheel, movable about its axis by means of a cord, which passes over it. When the axis of a pulley is fixed, the pulley only changes the direction of the power ; if movable pulleys are used, an equilibrium is produced, when the power is to the weight, as one to the number of ropes applied to them.
Page 68 - ... nor by different degrees of ramming, nor by firing the charge of powder in different parts of it. But that a very great difference in the velocity arises from a small degree in the windage : indeed with the usual established windage only, viz, about ^ of the calibre, no less than between -j- and £ of the powder escapes and is lost : and as the balls are often smaller than the regulated size, it frequently happens that half the powder is lost by unnecessary windage.
Page 10 - M any cause which moves or tends to move a body, or which changes or tends to change its motion.
Page 35 - A man in a boat pulling a rope attached to a large ship, seems only to move the boat: but he really moves the ship a little, for...
Page 82 - As the diameter of. the axle is to the diameter of the wheel, so is the power applied to the wheel, to the weight suspended on the axle.
Page 24 - ... speed in pursuit. The hare doubles, that is, suddenly changes the direction of her course, and turns back at an oblique angle with the direction in which she had been running. The greyhound, unable to resist the tendency of its body to persevere in the rapid motion it had acquired, is urged forward many yards before it is able to check its speed and return to the pursuit. Meanwhile the hare is gaining ground in the other direction, so that the animals are at a very considerable distance asunder...

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