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Thermometer   Listen
noun
Thermometer  n.  (Physics) An instrument for measuring temperature, founded on the principle that changes of temperature in bodies are accompanied by proportional changes in their volumes or dimensions. Note: The thermometer usually consists of a glass tube of capillary bore, terminating in a bulb, and containing mercury or alcohol, which expanding or contracting according to the temperature to which it is exposed, indicates the degree of heat or cold by the amount of space occupied, as shown by the position of the top of the liquid column on a graduated scale. See Centigrade, Fahrenheit, and Reaumur. To reduce degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Centigrade, subtract 32° and multiply by 5/9; to reduce degrees Centigrade to degrees Fahrenheit, multiply by 9/5 and add 32°.
Air thermometer, Balance thermometer, etc. See under Air, Balance, etc.
Metallic thermometer, a form of thermometer indicating changes of temperature by the expansion or contraction of rods or strips of metal.
Register thermometer, or Self-registering thermometer, a thermometer that registers the maximum and minimum of temperature occurring in the interval of time between two consecutive settings of the instrument. A common form contains a bit of steel wire to be pushed before the column and left at the point of maximum temperature, or a slide of enamel, which is drawn back by the liquid, and left within it at the point of minimum temperature.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Thermometer" Quotes from Famous Books



... if not too much decayed, cattle will eat them with avidity. Cabbages are hardy plants, and loose heads will stand a good deal of freezing and thawing without serious injury. They are not generally injured with the thermometer 16 deg. below freezing. The waste, after the seed and all market cabbage are removed, brings me about $10 per acre on the ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory

... more distant excursion in view, he took his usual walk—that is to say, he ran in double quick time, as if hunted by bailiffs, twice round the town—whether it rained, or snowed, or hailed, or the thermometer stood an inch or two below the freezing point—whether Boreas blew a chilling blast from the Bohemian mountains, or whether the thunder roared, and forked lightnings played, what signified it to the enthusiastic lover of his art, in whose genial mind, ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball

... as her jointure-house, "to his great charges and expenses he caused box the walls of the great parlour" (in which I was now sitting), "empanel the same, and plaster the roof, finishing the apartment with ane concave chimney, and decorating the same with pictures, and a barometer and thermometer." And in particular, which his good mother used to say she prized above all the rest, he had caused his own portraiture be limned over the mantlepiece by a skilful hand. And, in good faith, there he ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott

... right, Tom! It's all right!" declared Ned, and it needed but a glance to show that he was more serious than was his companion. "I'm not suffering from the heat, though the thermometer is getting close to ninety-five in the shade. And if you want to know where I get ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton

... from S.E. by E. to S.E. to avoid the St. Mary's bank; a Captain Livingstone having reported, about forty years ago, that he saw white waters hereabouts, and no nation having thought it worth while to verify the report. Thermometer 63 deg.. Heavy rain-squalls. The weather during the night was dirty and squally, with lightning all around the horizon by turns, and heavy rain.. ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes

... perpendicular shaft 677 ft. deep, or about 732 ft. English, with water at the bottom, the temperature of which was ascertained by Saussure. He does not tell us whether he used Reaumur's or the centesimal thermometer; but the result of his experiment was this:—In a lateral gallery, connected with the main shaft, but deserted, and, therefore, unaffected by breath or the heat of lamps, at 321 ft. 10 in. below the surface, the temperature of the water and the air was exactly ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... was a severe one. Its coming had been long deferred; but, by the middle of January, the cold weather had set in in real earnest. Sleet and snow and a constantly descending thermometer made campaigning quite out of the question. Colonel Phillips, no more than did his adversary, General Steele, gave any thought to an immediate offensive. Like Steele his one idea was to replenish resources and to secure an outfit for his men. They had been provided with the half worn-out ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... the island. Illness of Harry. Fever. Determining temperature. Making a thermometer. Substitutes for glass and mercury. How Fahrenheit scale is determined. Centigrade scale. Testing the thermometer. Determining fever. Danger point. Why a coiled pipe tries to straighten out under pressure. Medicine for fever. Rains and rising Cataract River. Decision to explore sea coast to the east. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay

... officials crowded importantly into their boat and rowed out to the Karlsefin. A boat from the steamer landed her purser with his papers, and took out the quarantine doctor with his green umbrella and clinical thermometer. Next a swarm of Caribs began to load upon lighters the thousands of bunches of bananas heaped upon the shore and row them out to the steamer. The Karlsefin had no passenger list, and was soon done with the attention of the authorities. The purser declared that the steamer would remain ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... the gardens at Nain when a northerly air made it feel chilly and the thermometer stood only a little above freezing. A troop of Eskimo women came out to cover up the potatoes. Every row of potatoes is covered with arched sticks and long strips of canvas along them. A huge roll of sacking is kept near each row and the whole is drawn over ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... were threefold—to test the effects of temperature, of gases, and of vapours. In the former, recourse was had to extremes of heat and cold. A bee placed in a temperature of 32 became at first more active, but the next morning was found torpid, as if dead; a register-thermometer shewing that 25 had been the lowest temperature during the night. Transferred to a temperature of 52, the bee revived in half an hour, and on the following day exhibited the same results under the same conditions. A fly which, on December 8, was lively on the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various

... temperature is estimated by means of a self-registering thermometer placed, for from one to five minutes, in close contact with the skin in the axilla, or in the mouth. Sometimes the thermometer is inserted into the rectum, where, however, the temperature is normally 3/4 F. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... River. Thermometer. Pigewis's Nephew. Wolves. Remarks of General Washington. Indian Woman shot by her son. Sufferings of Indians. Their notions of the Deluge. No visible object of adoration. Acknowledge a Future Life. Left the Colony for Bas la Riviere. ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West

... rebels and accomplices of the enemy, and as such condemned to death by a prevotal court. But this was not enough. At the end of December people, without distinction of sex or age, were dragged from their beds and conveyed out of the town on a cold night, when the thermometer was between sixteen or eighteen degrees; and it was affirmed that several old men perished in this removal. Those who survived were left on the outside of the Altona gates. At Altona they all found refuge and assistance. On Christmas-day ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... sunset landscape upon the flat roof of a studio building to dry, and on going to it a few hours afterward he found the surface of it so warm to the touch—so sensibly warmer than the gray and blue and green pictures around it—that he brought a thermometer to test it, and found it had acquired and retained heat. It was actually warmer by degrees than the gray and blue pictures ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler

... rigours of the upper atmosphere. An immediate ascent was accordingly made, with the satisfactory result, that at an elevation of three thousand feet above the sea-level they found themselves once more clear of the fog, with no perceptible fall of the thermometer, and with a clear view ahead. Twenty minutes more of travelling, and the northern skirts of the fog- bank were past, the clouds broke away, and the westering sun cast his ruddy beams upon the surface of the heaving waters. The sea was ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... air test, if it could be made of simpler application, would be invaluable to use in every sleeping and sick room. Just as without the use of a thermometer no nurse should ever put a patient into a bath, so should no nurse, or mother, or superintendent be without the air test in any ward, nursery, or sleeping-room. If the main function of a nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale

... to zero with mighty short notice. I've often turned in at night, feeling as if I were on 'India's coral strands' and woke up next morning thinking I had popped off in my sleep to 'Greenland's icy mountains.' Herb Heal! you know what tricks a thermometer, if we had one, might play in our camp from this out; talk sense ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook

... by the thermometer, by the proportion of rainy, cloudy, and clear days; by lightning, hail, snow, ice; by the access and recess of frost; by the winds prevailing at different seasons; the dates at which particular plants put forth, or lose their ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

... save myself; but at last I succeeded in rolling out upon the hard ice, and turning around to see if my help was needed in rescuing the women and children, found them already safely landed on the floe. The thermometer ranging thirty-eight degrees below zero, we were not long standing in the wind before our clothes were frozen stiff, so that it was almost impossible ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... It consists of a trough lined with some insulating material, covered with two layers of ordinary window glass. Under this window glass I flow crude oil, which absorbs the sun's heat as it comes through the glass. I get some remarkable temperatures, right here in Eagle's Wing. Here is a month's thermometer readings during July." ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie

... ten in the morning Emmie would be keeping an eye on the kitchen fire, lest the cook might let it out. And shortly after noon Mrs Blackshaw would be keeping an eye on the thermometer in the bedroom where the bath occurred. From four o'clock onwards the clocks in the house were spied on and overlooked like suspected persons; but they were used to that, because the baby had his sterilized milk every two hours. ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... ceiling, with a chair before it to serve as a barricade. The current of air so produced dislodges the hot air in the room that is above the level of the window openings and also provides a mild breeze that does not blow directly on a sleeper. By actual tests with an accurate thermometer, the temperature of a bedroom can be lowered a full five degrees. It is this difference between 80 and 85 degrees that can make an otherwise stifling night bearable ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... going to be influenza," he observed at intervals, shivering. "I feel extraordinarily weak, and ache all up my back. I fancy I have a high temperature, only Peter has broken the thermometer. You were a hundred and four, I think, Peter, the day you went to bed. I rather expect I am a hundred and five. But I suppose I shall never know, as it is impossible to afford another thermometer. I feel ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay

... are not as bad as they might seem, and outside one large suburb the other day I observed a gang of bricklayers actually in operation, anxiously hovered over by a clerk from the Ministry, thermometer in hand. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various

... from a powerful searchlight in the bow. By this light any object in the water could be seen some time before reaching it; but to guard more thoroughly against the most dreaded obstacle they feared to meet—down-reaching masses of ice—a hydraulic thermometer, mounted on a little submarine vessel connected with the Dipsey by wires, preceded her a long distance ahead. Impelled and guided by the batteries of the larger vessel, this little thermometer-boat would send back instant tidings of any changes in temperature ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton

... intellectual essence of Petersburg," as she herself put it. Besides this refined selection of society Anna Pavlovna's receptions were also distinguished by the fact that she always presented some new and interesting person to the visitors and that nowhere else was the state of the political thermometer of legitimate Petersburg court society so ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... seeds put a thermometer in the bed three inches deep in the soil. If it runs over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, do not sow. If below 55 degrees it is too cold; you will have to fork it over and add more manure. If the bed gets too hot, ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... winters and summers are very trying and severe; spring is so short as to be almost non-existent, but this is compensated for by the long autumn, a genial season which often lasts from the middle of September to the end of November. In summer the thermometer often reaches 90 deg. to 95 deg. Fahrenheit in the shade, whilst in winter it frequently falls to zero, but the annual average is about 57 deg. Fahrenheit. Bain is not nearly so frequent as with us, and it seldom lasts long. Comparisons ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... of eccentricity. That meant the moustache, and nothing else. Then, again, when was it first recognized as possible to take a pulse without the assistance of a gold chronometer? History is silent; but I am inclined to assign that discovery to the same date as the clinical thermometer, a toy unknown to the Doctors of my youth, who, indeed, were disposed to regard even the stethoscope as new-fangled. Then "the courtly manners of the old school"—when did they go out? I do not ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... this dog-day epidemic of silliness as an unfailing source of excruciatingly amusing jokes and pictures. Summer resort and seashore flirtations—what would the "comics" do without them when the mercury creeps high in the slender tube of the thermometer? ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... streight derives its name, except a high point towards the northern extremity. The weather, indeed, during three successive days, the 25th, 26th, and 27th July was so dark and gloomy, that the eye could scarcely discern the largest objects at the distance of a mile, yet the thermometer was from 80 to 83 the greater part of these days. A heavy and almost incessant fall of rain was accompanied with violent squalls of wind, and frequent bursts of thunder and flashes of lightning; which, with the cross and confused swell in the sea, made the passage ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... heat is, perhaps, the most fruitful source of cholera. Thus we find, that the disease makes its first appearance in the commencement of the hot weather, increases and becomes more fatal with the rise of the thermometer, and declines with the return of cool weather in autumn. During its continuance, it may be observed to vary with every permanent change of temperature. A few very hot days in succession, in the 6th month, are sufficient to call it into action; and during the height of its prevalence, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... The Desert is coming with a vengeance. Its breath is the pure flame of the furnace. I am obliged to tie a handkerchief over my face in passing through the verandahs of the garden. I had not the least idea it could be so hot here in the middle of May. At 2 P.M. the thermometer in the sun was ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... tons of coal, so that, in case we should have to live in the box houses, there would be plenty of fuel. At that time of the year it was not very cold. On the 8th of September the thermometer stood at 12 above zero, ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... Continent," says he cannot compare any thing else to the exhilaration of the air of the upland plains; neither sea nor mountain air can equal it. The extreme heat, too, seemed to intensify every thing in us, even our power of enjoyment, notwithstanding the discomfort of it. The thermometer marked 117 deg. in the shade. I felt as if I had never before known what breezes and shadows and streams were. Just as we had reached the last limit of possible endurance, the shadow of some great wall of rock would fall upon us, or a ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton

... up a bucket of water out of the sea, and putting the thermometer into it. But I ought to tell ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... at the ordinary freezing point if continued for some little time, and the tree itself is likely to be injured by a temperature of 25 or 27 if continued for a few hours. The matter of duration of a low temperature is perhaps quite as important as the degree which is actually reached by the thermometer. The condition of the tree as to being dormant or active also affects injury by freezing temperatures. Under certain conditions an orange tree may survive a temperature ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson

... liberators. Number yourself, my dear, among this happy class. I am so glad it is cool enough this morning for you to wear that lovely costume. It is as likely as not that by tomorrow it will be too warm. All these little things tell, my child, and I am glad to know that even the thermometer is ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton

... ice on a sandbank in sight of the Salsette, which had then only four feet water to spare; the former, immediately they struck, turned bottom up, and all hands perished, being instantly covered with the ice. The thermometer, in January 1809, sank to forty-five degrees below zero; the Sound and Belt were completely frozen over, and many passed between Sweden and Denmark ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross

... Colombo, and finally to be put ashore in a basket on a rope cable over a very rough sea at Albany in West Australia. There he was consigned, with the dozen other first-class passengers, mining adventurers like himself, to quarantine in a tent hospital on a sand spit out in the harbor with the thermometer never registering below ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg

... mastering the secrets of nature and life, and in applying them to human use. His method, in the attainment of this end, was rigid and pure observation, aided by experiment and fructified by induction.... He clearly invented a thermometer; he instituted ingenious experiments on the compressibility of bodies, and on the density and weight of air; he suggested chemical processes; he suggested the law of universal gravitation, afterward demonstrated by Newton; he foresaw the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... made it enough times to know," David replied. "Some folks stick a thermometer into it and figger how hot it will have to be; they say that's the best way. Others try the syrup in cold water or on snow like you would candy. Generally speaking, I can tell by the feel of it, and by the way it drips from the spoon. Sometimes, though, when I'm in doubt I ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett

... half-carried me upstairs, and I seemed to be getting into a deliciously comfortable bed, where I quickly fell asleep in earnest. I have an idea that Harper came to look at me once or twice during that night, and the next morning she took my temperature with a thermometer, but although she declared there was not anything the matter with me, I felt very tired, and not in the least sorry when she brought me ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... contains a great amount of moisture, and it shows as much variation in this characteristic as in the others. For the purpose of making known the changes in the moisture of the atmosphere, an instrument has been invented called a "wet-bulb" thermometer. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various

... so intense that everything freezes solid except pure spirits of wine. Unless you have studied the thermometer you cannot understand the intensity of this frost; but for the sake of those who do know something about extreme cold, I give here a few facts that were noted down during the winter that my ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne

... Drebbel, who performed such astounding feats for the amusement of Rudolph of Germany and James of Britain, is also supposed to have invented the thermometer and the barometer. But this claim has been disputed. The inventions of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... space, and could have attended in the spirit the lectures of one John Tyndall, a spirit of our earth, he would have had this matter rightly explained to him. In reality the sun's heat is as effective directly at the summit of the highest mountain as at the sea-level. A thermometer exposed to the sun in the former position indicates indeed a slightly higher temperature than one similarly exposed to the sun (when at the same altitude) at the sea-level. But the air does not get warmed to the same degree, simply because, owing to its ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... perhaps an account of how a Sabbath goes in Peking might not be uninteresting, and I'll just confine myself to to-day. Well, this morning, on getting up, I found my stove was out. This is a very unusual thing, but it just happens once, say, in three weeks. The thermometer was about 5 deg. The first thing after getting dressed was not to call my servant, as you might suppose, but to go in quest of letters. A mail had come in the night before, but I had returned home too late last night to see it. So I went over to Dr. Dudgeon's house before he was up, prowled about ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour

... and fro of muddle-headed aids-de-camp on impatient steeds, the heavy rumble of artillery wagons, the blue coats of the soldiers, the golden trappings of the field and staff, made a grand scene for the disinterested spectator to look upon; but with the thermometer ranging from eighty-five to one hundred, it was hard work for the soldier who bore knapsack, haversack, and gun, and calculated to produce an unusual amount of perspiration, and not a little profanity. Major-General Thomas guided ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... extent of thirty degrees below zero did not seem to attract his attention. He was absent-minded on that question! When it came to going out to hire an expressman to haul his effects to a storehouse he found no one would venture out with his horse until the thermometer should rise, and his astonishment knew ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern

... as usual, bright and cloudless, but it was bitterly cold. The mercury was frozen in one thermometer, and in the other one the spirit indicated fifty-five below zero. Yet so impatient were these spirited children to be off with their gifts to Souwanas, and with something also for each member of the family, that their pleadings prevailed. A cariole with plenty of fur robes was soon at the door, ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young

... Clockmaker, "how low they fly? Well I presume we shall have rain right away; and them noisy critters, them gulls how close they keep to the water, down there in the Shubenacadie; well that's a sure sign. If we study natur', we don't want no thermometer. But I guess we shall be in time to get under cover in a shingle-maker's shed about three miles ahead on us. We had just reached the deserted hovel when ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... continue a long time after the patient leaves the bath; and the subsequent heat approaches by unequal flushings, and he feels himself disordered for many hours. Hence the bathing in a cold spring of water, where the heat is but forty-eight degrees on Fahrenheit's thermometer, much disagrees with those of weak or inirritable habits of body; who possess so little sensorial power, that they cannot without injury bear to have it diminished even for a short time; but who can nevertheless bear the more ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... and delightful. While I was there the Fahrenheit thermometer registered 76 deg. at an elevation of 3,450 feet. With a fairly good soil, the municipality could produce cereals in plenty under proper cultivation. Land was cheap enough in that region—150 milreis per alqueire ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... the nurse came in with a thermometer he was asleep in his chair, his mouth slightly open, and snoring valiantly. Hearing Dick in the lower hall, she went to the head of the stairs, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... had been unjustly accused by her schoolmates. But Ginny at that moment was huddled in her bed under warm blankets with a hot-water-bag at her feet and an ice-bag on her head, her worried mother fluttering over her with a clinical thermometer in one hand and a castor-oil bottle in the other, wishing she could diagnose Ginny's queer symptoms and wondering if she had not ought ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott

... broiling sun, brought me to the ranges, where I continued to hunt up one ravine after another until 5 p.m. without success. Twelve hours' almost incessant walking, on a scanty breakfast and without water, with the thermometer over a hundred degrees of Fahrenheit, began to tell upon me severely; so much so that by the time I had tracked up my companions (who had reached the hills by 1 p.m. and were anxiously waiting for me) it was as much as I could do to carry ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc

... dairy farms have been swept and garnished, and even something like science introduced upon them. The thermometer in summer is in constant use to determine if the milk is sufficiently cooled to proceed upon its journey. That cooling of the milk alone is a process that requires more labour to carry it out. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... guessing at—it is what style of woman any man will fancy and select for his wife. It is utterly impossible to predict what matrimonial caprice may or may not seize even the wisest, most experienced, most practical, and reasonable of men; and I would sooner undertake to conjecture how high the thermometer stands at this instant on the crest of Mount Copernicus up yonder in the moon, than attempt to guess what freak will decide a ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... since that morning DeBar had built but one. Gray dawn had scarcely broken when he again took up the pursuit. It was bitterly cold, and a biting wind swept down across the barrens from the Arctic icebergs. His pocket thermometer registered sixty degrees below zero when he left it open on the sledge, and six times between dawn and dusk he built himself fires. Again DeBar built but one, and this time he found ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood

... obtaining the results were a thermometer and a hydrometer. Water was drawn at about six feet below the surface and heated to a temperature of 200 deg. F., and the saturation, or specific gravity is shown by the depth to which the hydrometer sank in the water. As sea water commonly contains one ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse

... already decided to take a thermometer; somebody was always complaining of being too hot or too cold at a picnic, and it would be a great convenience to see if she really were so. He thought now he might take a barometer, as "Probabilities" was ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale

... put a sudden check on the pressure of the vast floe. Nevertheless, there was no counter-movement, the ice remaining in the Great Bay seemingly as firmly fastened as if it had originally been made there. Notwithstanding this shift of the wind to a cold point of the compass, the thermometer rose, and it thawed freely about the middle of the day, in all places to which the rays of the sun had access. This enabled the men to work with more comfort than they could have done in the excessively severe weather; as it was found that respiration became ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... of trial—came. For sixty hours or more the heat of the weather had been intense; indeed, during all that time the thermometer in Owen's hut, notwithstanding the protection of a thick hatch, had shown the temperature to vary between a maximum of 113 and a minimum of 101 degrees. Now, in the early morning, it ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard

... lessons and write exercises immediately after dinner, on the whole the change was regarded with favour. General public opinion would have decided on swimming as the most suitable occupation in the state of the thermometer, but since the events related in the last chapter Miss Cavendish would not allow more than eight girls to go into the sea ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... the true secret of making men work. The African is no more lazy than other men, when he can get value for his labour. This is the true secret for abolishing the slave trade. Those men come hundreds or thousand of miles to cover themselves with coal-dust, in an atmosphere where the thermometer sometimes rises to 120 deg. in the shade, and work "day and night until they have finished their task," roaring and dancing all the time, besides—and all this for the stimulant of wages. It is to be presumed that their performance is "piece-work," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... As the political thermometer rose towards fever point through the years 1792-3, Government kept closer watch upon the political Societies; but for a long time Pitt took no action against them. It seems probable that, if they had confined themselves to their ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... breathe, and the peach and other fruit trees were in full blossom; it was so cold at Washington next day that we were shivering; but even in the same town you might often wear nothing but a shirt and trousers in the morning, and two greatcoats at night, the thermometer very frequently taking a little trip of thirty degrees between sunrise ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... their own, and giving them the food which they have stored. Then I have watched them carrying them up and down, that they may enjoy the warmth of the cellars or the air and sunshine of the upper rooms, just as if they had a thermometer to tell them the exact amount of heat or cold that was needed. And I must not forget to tell you that part of the duty of the nurses is to keep their babies white and clean, and this they do not neglect, but wash them with their tongues, as ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham

... probably reach you amidst the classical enjoyments of Rome. I feel myself kindle at the reflection, to make that journey; but circumstances will oblige me to postpone it at least. We are here under a most extraordinary degree of cold. The thermometer has been ten degrees of Reaumur below freezing: this is eight degrees of Fahrenheit above zero, and was the degree of cold here in the year 1740. The long continuance of this severity, and the snow now on the ground, give physical prognostications of a hard winter. You will be in a privileged ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... open the door, his attention was attracted by a thermometer which hung there in a prettily worked frame. Taking it down he looked at it for a space and then, unthinkingly, put it into his pocket. As the door was closing behind him his lips again moved: "Yes, ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith

... penury, he exhausts and oversteps his respite, and the state expends a great deal of money in the charges for compelling and collection. When work is abundant, when the country is rich and happy, the taxes are paid easily and cost the state nothing. It may be said, that there is one infallible thermometer of the public misery and riches,—the cost of collecting the taxes. In the course of seven years the expense of collecting the taxes had diminished three-fourths in the arrondissement of M. sur M., and this led to this arrondissement ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... arrangements made with Captain King and Mr. Dunlop, the King's astronomer at the Parramatta observatory, I halted the party this day in order to make hourly observations of the barometer, thermometer, the sky, etc. This plan had been strongly recommended by Sir John Herschel; and for our present purposes it was most desirable in order that we might ascertain how far the fluctuations of the atmosphere in two places so distant as Parramatta and Byrne's creek corresponded ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... balls: there were plenty of women—more than could get partners; the music was good, the women well dressed, and they waltzed exquisitely. Adjoining the ball-room was a billiard-room, in which those who preferred smoking cigars in a cool room to dancing, with the thermometer at 90 deg., had retreated. Nothing can be done at Manilla without the cigar: they smoke for an appetite, they smoke for digestion, they smoke when they are too hot, they smoke when it is chilly. As the hands of the ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat

... heavily, taking into his lungs the frost itself. It chills his lungs, freezes the edges of the tissues. He gets a dry, hacking cough as the dead tissue sloughs away, and dies the following summer of pneumonia, wondering what it's all about. I'll stay in this cabin for a week, unless the thermometer rises ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London

... distinguished from that of Spain and Italy, by having more of the character of an inland region. The diversity of local temperature is greater; the extremes of summer and winter more severe. In Arcadia the snow has been found eighteen inches thick in January, with the thermometer at 16 deg. Fahrenheit, and it sometimes lies on the ground for six weeks. The summits of the central chains of Pindus and most of the Albanian mountains are covered with snow from the beginning of November to the end of March. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... Normandy to Champagne, devastating sixty leagues of the most fertile territory, and causing damage to the amount of one hundred millions of francs. Winter came on, the severest that had been seen since 1709. At the close of December the Seine was frozen over from Paris to Havre, while the thermometer stood at 180 below zero. A third of the olive-trees died in Provence, and the rest suffered to such an extent that they were considered incapable of bearing fruit for two years to come. The same disaster befell Languedoc. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... all these delicate instruments, useless to a biologist who by the very nature of his labours had done without them all his life, and had never wearied of denying their utility, arrived at Srignan. He did not possess even one modest thermometer; and as for the superb microscope over which he so often bent, the only costly instrument in his rustic laboratory, it was a precious present which, at the instigation of Duruy, Dumas the chemist had given him years before; but a simple lens very often sufficed him. ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... make some experiments on the increased heat of inflammation, I should be obliged to you.... I opened the thorax of a dog between two ribs, and introduced the thermometer. Then I put some lint into the wound to keep it from healing by the first intention, THAT THE THORAX MIGHT INFLAME; but before I had time to try it again, my dog died on the fourth day. A deep wound might be made into the thick of a dog's thigh, then put in the thermometer and some extraneous ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... stored in bins should be turned every few days, especially after February, as this tends to prevent sprouting. They should not be kept in too warm and dry a place. It is best to keep them quite cool, the thermometer running as low as forty degrees Fahrenheit at times, and in an atmosphere of the ordinary cellar, which usually has some moisture. If they become troubled with green fly, sprinkle them with ...
— The Gladiolus - A Practical Treatise on the Culture of the Gladiolus (2nd Edition) • Matthew Crawford

... of poetry in Europe during these sixty years stand in relation to these underlying processes? On the surface, at least, it hardly resembles growth at all. In France above all—the literary focus of Europe, and its sensitive thermometer—the movement of poetry has been, on the surface, a succession of pronounced and even fanatical schools, each born in reaction from its precursor, and succumbing to the triumph of its successor. Yet ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... refused with thanks, she made the invalid eat and drink, especially the milk which she made a wry face at. When she had finished they all began to question whether her fever was rising for the day; the good sister felt the girl's pulse, and got out a thermometer, which together they arranged under her arm, and then duly inspected. It seemed that the fever was rising, as it might very well be, but the middle sister was not moved from her notable calm, and the eldest did not fear. At a place where a class of young men was to be seen before ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... shall be all right," he said, as he hastened from the room. It was characteristic of him that he forgot his clinical thermometer, and was never known to have ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various

... true, a standing invitation to dinner at Lady Garnett's when that old lady found herself at home; but Portman Square was remote, and evening dress, to a man with one lung in a climate which had so fickle a trick of registering itself either at the extreme top or bottom of the thermometer, presented various discomforts. His den behind the office—a little sitting-room with a bay-window facing Blackpool Reach, a room filled with books that had no relation to shipping, and hung round ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... unsheltered in blinding steam was not amusing, though it was exciting. But the steam-chapel (as it might be called) of the mosque was a delight compared to the second next chapel further on, where the woodwork of the chairs was too hot to touch and where a gigantic thermometer informed Mr. Prohack that with only another fifty degrees of heat he would ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... nature work on laws of their own in that part of California. There is no thunder or lightning; there is no snow, except a flurry once in five or six years; there are perhaps a dozen nights in the winter when the thermometer drops low enough so that there is a little film of ice on exposed water in the morning. Neither is there any hot weather. Yet most Easterners remaining in San Francisco for a few days remember that they were ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... As we neared Omaha the thermometer rose to 105 in the Pullman car, and remained there nearly all day. For twelve hours we steamed, sitting rigidly erect in our chairs, dreading to move, sweltering in silence, waiting with passionate intensity for the cool wind which we knew was certain ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... perished, the provisions were abandoned to the wolves and the drivers reached home in a half-frozen condition. But God cared for His servants. In this emergency, the Rev. M. N. Adams, of Lac-qui-Parle, performed a most heroic act. In mid-winter, with the thermometer many degrees below zero, he hauled flour and other provisions for the missionaries, on a hand sled, from Lac-qui-Parle to Yellow Medicine, a distance of thirty-two miles. The fish gathered in shoals, an unusual occurrence, near the mission and both the Indians and the missionaries lived through that ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell

... And, in turn, the wolf and the carcajo, the unoffending beaver and musquash, the mink, the fisher, the fox, and the otter are trapped by savage man and the pelts ripped from their twitching bodies while life and sensibility remain. They are harder to skin when cold. And with the thermometer at forty or sixty below zero, the little bodies chill almost instantly if mercifully killed—therefore, they are not killed, but flayed alive and their bleeding bodies tossed upon the snow. They die quickly—then. ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... nearly vertical granite rocks. The ascent requires 2 days, 6 or 8 guides are required, and each guide is paid 100 francs ($20.00). It was ascended by two natives, Jacques Belmat and Dr. Packard, August 8, 1786, at 6 a.m. They staid up 30 minutes, with the thermometer at 14 degrees below the freezing point. The provisions froze in their pockets; their faces were frost-bitten, lips swollen, and their sight much weakened, but they soon recovered on their descent. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... lumber-jacks in the wilds of Northern Ontario being pursued by a pack of timber-wolves, and the exhausted woodsmen barely escaping with their lives, being forced by the ferocious brutes to spend a whole night in a tree at a time when the thermometer registered — below zero. I am sorry I have forgotten the exact degree of frost the paper stated, but as a rule it is always close to 70 or 80 degrees below zero when the great four-legged demons of the forest ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... eat, but to sell,—and reduced the flock of hens and turkeys; but Waitstill was always as busy in the barn as in her own proper domain. Her heart yearned for all the dumb creatures about the place, intervening between them and her father's scanty care; and when the thermometer descended far below zero she would be found stuffing hay into the holes and cracks of the barn and hen-house, giving the horse and cow fresh beddings of straw and a mouthful of extra food between the slender meals ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... unvarying one—changes of temperature alter the bulk of all kinds of bodies. A metal rod runs up and down under increase and diminution of heat, as certainly as the thread of mercury in the tube of the thermometer does. A hot day, therefore, lengthens the metallic suspending-rod of a pendulum, and carries the centre of its weight to a greater distance from the point of suspension. By this means, the period of each vibration ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various

... themselves under the severest conditions of weather, and he must be an enthusiast, indeed, who will get his tripod from the sled, pull out its telescoped tubes, set it up and adjust it for a picture with the thermometer at 40 deg. or 50 deg. below zero; and when he is done he is very likely to be a ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... and a half of outfit from the middle of the river to the log-cabin Stine and Sprague had bought on the hill overlooking Dawson. This work finished, in the warm cabin, as twilight was falling, Sprague motioned Kit to him. Outside the thermometer registered sixty-five below zero. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... I have not yet sifted the rumour. I must say I shall be scarce surprised if it prove true; these rumours have the knack of being right. - Our weather this last month has been tremendously hot, not by the thermometer, which sticks at 86 degrees, but to the sensation: no rain, no wind, and this the storm month. It looks ominous, and is ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... wild-pig hunt. There were eight of us, including three young officers of the Royal Artillery, besides somewhere between seventy and a hundred native beaters. The day had been unusually hot, even for a country whose regular record on the thermometer reads 150 degrees ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman

... marked the progress of the Minturn case; and my feeling of depression was increased by the fact that our victory had not been nearly so complete as I had hoped it would be. Besides, there was the heat; always, during the past ten days, there had been the heat, unprecedented for June, with the thermometer climbing higher and higher and breaking ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson

... limits of the spectrum itself, there are rays, though invisible to us, beyond the red at the one end, and beyond the violet at the other: the existence of the ultra red can be demonstrated by the thermometer; while the ultra violet are capable of taking a photograph. But though the red and violet are respectively the limits of our vision, I have shown[16] by experiments which have been repeated and confirmed by other naturalists, that some of the lower ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... fears infected me with a slight, vague anxiety, as the evidences of extraordinary and still increasing cold went on multiplying. I had so far gotten over my bravado earlier in the evening that I should have been secretly relieved if the thermometer had taken ...
— The Cold Snap - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... well in towards the shore, sighting on the afternoon of the fourth day the Island of Abaco, largest of the Bahama Isles, with its famous "Hole in the Wall" and sponge-lined shore. The woolen clothing worn when we came on board ship had already become oppressive, the cabin thermometer indicating 72 deg. Fahrenheit. With nothing to engage the eye save the blue sky and the bluer water, the most is made of every circumstance at sea, and even trivial occurrences become notable. The playful dolphins went through their aquatic pantomime for our amusement. Half a ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... being 31-1/2 miles; while the nearest point from the mainland is only about 20 miles. From the proximity of this island to the equinoctial, there is only 14 minutes difference between the longest and shortest day; and the temperature is so equable, that the thermometer, throughout the year, never varies more than 10 degrees in the 24 hours. The spring-tides have a rise and fall between seven and eight feet; and it is high water all round the island, at the full and change of ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman

... eastern shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Low temperatures in winter, where there is only a moderate covering of snow, are far less fatal to clover plants than exposure to the sweep of the cold winds. Even where the thermometer is not so low as in the areas just referred to, such winds are particularly damaging to the plants when they blow fiercely just after a thaw which has removed a previous covering of snow. In some instances, one cold wave under the conditions named has ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw

... the next one about 'Motions,'" I explained. "But it was too hard. Carol wanted to be an Elevator!—Carol says an Elevator is like quick-silver in a giant thermometer that's gone mad!—He wanted to be the motion it makes when the Elevator's going down and the floor's coming up! But it made me feel queer ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... tell folks I've been house cleaning," she warned Jenny. "The town would think I was crazy, with the thermometer acting up zero so. Anyway, I ain't been house cleaning. I just simply got so sick to death of all the truck piled up in this house that I had to get away from it. And this morning it looked so clean and white and smooth outdoors that I felt so cluttered up I couldn't ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale

... weight of the column of air on a given point of the surface of the earth, rather than on the state of the evaporations, the relative humidity, and the dew point. And I have noticed that the best scenting days have been those when the thermometer has given readings from 38 up to 46 Fahrenheit in the shade. A high and steady glass, an almost imperceptible east or north-east wind, with the ground soaked with moisture and no frost during the previous night, is the only combination of conditions under which scent on the grass ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... been in vain for Scrooge to plead that the weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes; that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long way below freezing; that he was clad but lightly in his slippers, dressing-gown, and nightcap; and that he had a cold upon him at that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman's hand, was not to be resisted. He rose: but, finding that the Spirit made towards the ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens

... for there were sinks in the ice which had barely skimmed over since sun-down. The thermometer registered 18 above zero, however, and the biting cold was congealing all lakes and pools very rapidly. Where they tramped through the slush their footprints froze behind them. In an hour the mercury had fallen ten degrees ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood

... told to come out of his dolomite burrow and dwell in a tent with the Arabs in Tripolitania for the summer. A place so near the equator that his shadow at noon was hid by a none too prominent stomach; where the thermometer feels comfortable and perfectly at home at 130 in the shade and where the snow dogs of his winter home were replaced by the camel, the only reliable conveyance in ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... fascinating picnics they get up in Egypt, don't you know, where you dig in ancient burial grounds and find mummy beads and amulets. Somehow or other, all these people attributed their pleasures to me, as they had blamed me for their mishaps; and my spirits were at the top of the thermometer three days later when, after some hard work, the Enchantress Isis was ready to start ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... of the motives which impelled him to turn aside from an enterprise in which his whole heart was engaged, and take part in the struggle. "The Colonel bears embedded in the muscle of his right leg a little memento of the period in the shape of a minie-ball, which he jocularly referred to as his thermometer, and which relieves him from the necessity of reading 'The Probabilities' in his morning paper. This saves him just so much time; and for a man who, as he said, has not a moment of waste time on him anywhere, five ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... by the precious metals. But the theory of money has proved that, far from being the measure of values, specie is only their arithmetic, and a conventional arithmetic at that. Gold and silver are to value what the thermometer is to heat. The thermometer, with its arbitrarily graduated scale, indicates clearly when there is a loss or an increase of heat: but what the laws of heat-equilibrium are; what is its proportion in various ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... asleep in the gutter opposite the shop of Kerrigan, the butcher, no living thing was to be seen. Hot days are so rare in west of Ireland towns that the people succumb to them at once. Business, unless it happens to be market day, absolutely ceases in a town like Ballymoy when the thermometer registers anything over eighty degrees. Moriarty stretched himself again and yawned. He looked at the illustrated poster which hung on a board beside the barrack door. It proclaimed the attractiveness of service in the British ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham

... Now for miseries. At sunrise we came to our ground at Ahmedu, six parasangs, and pitched our little tent under a tree; it was the only shelter we could get. At first the heat was not greater than we had felt in India, but it soon became so intense as to be quite alarming. When the thermometer was above 112 degrees, fever heat, I began to lose my strength fast; at last it became quite intolerable. I wrapped myself up in a blanket and all the warm covering I could get to defend myself from the external air, by which means the moisture was kept a little ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea

... hand, seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates itself into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of self, as style is its unconscious abnegation. No poet of the first class has ever left a school, because his imagination is incommunicable; while, just as surely as the thermometer tells of the neighborhood of an iceberg, you may detect the presence of a genius of the second class in any generation by the influence of his mannerism, for that, being an artificial thing, is capable of reproduction. Dante, Shakespeare, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... said Mr. Gould, as the thermometer in the next room suddenly froze up and burst with a loud report. "And now, if you will excuse me from offsetting my time, which is worth $500 a minute, against yours, which I judge to be worth about $1 per week, I will bid ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... befell Mr. Grenville on his departure from England was inauspicious and discouraging. The weather was unusually severe. On the night of Christmas Eve, the thermometer was 14 deg. below freezing point; and for many weeks afterwards the snow lay so thickly on the ground that the service of the ordinary coaches was arrested, and the mails were forwarded on horseback. This delay and suspension ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham

... ascent to a height of 9,000 feet, and observed a fall in temperature of from degrees—at the level of London, where he began his ascent—to 29 degrees at the maximum height reached. He took up an electrometer, a hydrometer, a compass, a thermometer, and a Toricelli barometer, together with bottles of water, in order to collect samples of the air at different heights. In 1785 he made a second ascent, when trigonometrical observations of the height of the balloon ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian



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