Weigher

“ Imagine, if you can, a man weighing all of three hundred pounds, not more than five feet ten-and-one-half inches in height and yet of so lithesome a build that he gave not the least sense of either undue weight or lethargy. ”

“ Then weighing what they had borne, whether we should find it to be ten or thirty pounds—I cannot guess how much it might be at this distance—one might safely say, without fear of mistake, "The strength of this young lady is equal to ten, twenty, or thirty pounds"—in other words, "she represents a weight of ten, twenty, or thirty pounds" and by a similar plan people have ascertained the strength of the air—that is, the weight which it represents. They have weighed what it is capable of carrying. ”

“ The weight is the large body hanging from the short arm of the lever.
What is the power?
The power is the smaller body hanging from the long arm of the lever.
In Fig. 45, the distance from the fulcrum to the power is ten times the distance from the fulcrum to the weight; now, if the small body weighs one pound, how much must the large body weigh, so as to balance it?
The large body must weigh ten pounds.
When the small body weighs ten pounds, how much must the large body weigh, so as to balance it?
The large body must weigh ten times as much, or one hundred pounds. ”

“ If now you either pull or push the empty scale downwards, the beam may be brought into the horizontal position again, and the effort required to bring it into the horizontal position will be the greater, the greater the weight of the body in the opposite scale. An ounce in the one scale is easily raised by the pressure of a finger in the other. A pound requires more effort; ten pounds needs putting out the strength of the arm; to raise fifty pounds involves still more exertion; while a couple of hundredweight will not be stirred by the strongest push or pull upon the empty scale. ”

“ The weight which suspends itself in the angle will give from it some weight at the sides of this angle which will be between them in the same proportion as is that of the obliquity of their sides. Or: one such weight will distribute itself between its supports in the same proportion as is that of the two angles born of the division of the angle where this weight sustains itself, division of angle which is made by the vertical which descends in the center of the suspended heavy body ”

“ What kind of a quantity is that which now weighs more, and now weighs less, so to speak? But this apparent deviation from the method of determination commonly used in practical life, that by weight, is, closely considered, an agreement. On a high mountain a heavy mass also is less powerfully attracted to the earth than at the level of the sea, and if it is permitted us in our determinations to neglect the consideration of level, it is only because the comparison of a body with fixed conventional weights is invariably effected at the same level. ”

“ Hume supposed, that there is a pair of scales, one end of which is in darkness, and you find that a pound weight, or a ten-pound weight, placed upon that end of the scale in the light is raised; have you the right to say that there is an infinite weight on the end in darkness, or are you compelled to say only that there is weight enough on the end in darkness to raise the weight on the end in light? ”

“ Only think of wearing a thick, heavy girdle of many pounds' weight around the whole zone of the abdominal region—a sort of engirdling poultice, heating and pressing like a girdle of hot lava, day after day and year after year! Is it a wonder that you have so many weaknesses and pains and saddening afflictions upon you? ”

“ Letters, book parcels, an apple, an orange, a vegetable marrow, fifty things in the course of the day, give opportunities for this kind of object teaching; i.e. the practice of forcing judgments as to the relative and absolute weight of objects by the irresistance, that is their opposition to our muscular force, perceived by our sense of touch. By degrees the children are trained to observe that the relative weights of objects depend upon their relative density, and are introduced to the fact that we have a standard of weight. ”

“ I could hardly support my own weight; my legs were trembling with the burden; sweat broke out over my whole body; the rays of light beat down upon me fiercely, overpoweringly....
Desperately, I quickly turned the dial until the two red marks coincided. A great weight, soft and enveloping, seemed to drop upon me. The senses of sight and hearing and feeling all left me. ”

“ According to our best authorities, we are subjected to the weight of fifteen pounds to each square-inch of surface, and a man of ordinary size sustains a pressure on him of some thirty-thousand pounds of air. I am a man of ordinary size, but I no more knew that I laboured under the burden of thirty-thousand pounds than I did that I was subjected to the pressure of about the same burden of Mrs. Cribbage who sits on my shoulders all day and squats on my chest all night, till I turned up the matter in an encyclopædia. ”

“ Crawford of Belfast, who places his amateur medium in a weighing chair with her feet from the ground, and has been able to register a difference of weight of many pounds, corresponding with the physical phenomena produced, a result which he has tested and recorded in a true scientific spirit of caution, I do not see how it could be shaken. The phenomena are and have long been firmly established for every open mind. One feels that the stage of investigation is passed, and that of religious construction is overdue. ”

“ Perhaps you will wonder how it is that if we have a weight of 15 lbs. pressing on every square inch of our bodies, it does not crush us. And, indeed, it amounts on the whole to a weight of about 15 tons upon the body of a grown man. It would crush us if it were not that there are gases and fluids inside our bodies which press outwards and balance the weight so that we do not feel it at all.
This is why Mr. Glaisher's veins swelled and he grew giddy in thin air. ”

“ I say that the weight of the heavy body a b shares its gravity in two aspects, that is to say according to the line b c and according to the line n m; why and how much the weight is greater for one than for the other aspect and which obliquity is the one which shares the two weights in equal parts, will be said in the book On weights. ”

“ But, as we have already stated, the measures of weight must be subject to this condition, that they are susceptible of being added: and therefore we cannot take the deflexion of the bough for our measure, till we have ascertained, that which experience alone can teach us, that under the burden of two equal weights, the deflexion will be twice as great as it is with one weight, which is not true, or at least is neither obviously nor necessarily true. ”

“ Ponderal Index.—Stature and weight are the most synthetic and comprehensive measurements of the form. But we need a clear proportion between these two measures to tell us whether an individual weighs more or less relatively to his stature. It may happen, for instance, that a stout person of short stature actually weighs less than another person who is tall and thin; but relatively to his stature he may on the contrary be heavier, that is, he may have a higher ponderal index. A robust and plump child will weigh in an absolute sense less than an adult who is extremely thin and emaciated ”

“ No one wants to be fat and heavy of body—then why of head? For some clumsy reason we have come to confuse strength with weight. The crude methods of early building undoubtedly had much to do with this. The old ox-cart weighed a ton—and it had so much weight that it was weak! ”

“ A smothering weight flung itself on me, against which I struggled as hard as I could, shrinking in anticipation from the thirsty plunge of the knives. However, though the weight increased until further struggle was impossible, I was not harmed, and in a few moments found myself, wrists and ankles tied, beside a roaring fire. ”

“ If you weighed one hundred and fifty pounds normally, you would suddenly find yourself weighing six hundred pounds more, at seven hundred and fifty pounds altogether. The weight would be so well distributed that you could stand it if you kept your legs firmly braced, but it would be more than a frail chair could endure. ”

“ If I had the subject take up the 300 grain weight and then the others in succession, asking him to call them heavier or lighter or the same weight, and then made him go over all the weights again in a different order, I could have as accurately proved his sense of weight discrimination as an oculist can prove the power of sight of the eyes, and with as little possibility of anyone fooling me. ”

“ Now this has an important bearing on the problem we are going to investigate, for the weight of our body falls on the foot, so that only about one-third of the lever—that part of it which is formed by the heel—projects behind the point on which the weight of the body rests. ”

“ Weight has been defined as the measure of the earth's attraction. A body weighing one pound attracts the earth and is attracted by it with a force of one pound, but the same body at the sun's surface would attract the mass of the sun with a force of twenty-seven pounds, since its weight has been increased twenty-seven times by the sun's attraction. ”

“ But those arms which, as they ought, distribute an equal weight to all the parts of the body, that join upon the neck, the shoulders, the breast, the back, and the hips, may be said to be glued to the body, and to weigh nothing at all. ”

“ We had, let us say, always seen heavy bodies sink when their support was taken away; we had also seen, perhaps, that the sinking of heavier bodies forced lighter bodies upwards. But now we see a lever in action, and we are suddenly struck with the fact that a lighter body is lifting another of much greater weight. ”

“ I weigh one hundred and sixty pounds, set down in black and white, and it is a tragedy! I don't believe that man at the weighing machine is so very reliable in his weights, though he had a very pleasant smile while he was weighing me. ”

“ If, for example, the balance is attached two inches from the fulcrum and the weight twelve inches, the pull on the balance is found to be six times greater than the weight that is being lifted. If other positions are tried, it is found that the power exerted in each case is as many times greater than the weight as the weight-arm is times longer than the power-arm. ”

“ A man takes on a heap of weight when he lays off, but at the end of seven months I had the Kid down to one hundred and thirty-four, and I knew that if he was matched up for a weigh-in six hours before the battle, I could steam out at least two pounds. ”

“ What it comes to is this, that if you have a ten-pound weight and a one-pound weight and you drop them together, the ten-pound weight will fall ten times as quickly. The magnitude of the weight settles how quickly it shall fall. That seems to us so astonishing that we can hardly imagine that any one believed it. ”

“ In the same way, there is a great difference in the response of the fingers to weight—a great difference in the ability to distinguish the difference of the weight of objects. It has been found that some people can distinguish differences in weight down to very small fractions of an ounce. ”

“ Obviously, then, if you are lifting a pound weight, the actual equivalent of energy expended by the contracting biceps must be twelve pounds. But, in the meantime, when the pound weight in your hand moves through the space of one inch, the muscle has contracted by one-twelfth of an inch; and you may sweep the weight through a distance of two feet by utilizing the two-inch contraction, which represents about the capacity of the muscle. ”

“ Where we see a body raised in a scale, we are sure that there is in the opposite scale, however concealed from sight, some counterpoising weight equal to it; but it is still allowed to doubt, whether that weight be an aggregate of several distinct bodies, or one uniform united mass. ”

“ For instance, if we drop a pound weight a foot on to a scale balance, the work it does is equal to one foot-pound. But if we place it on the scale gently, it will just balance one pound on the other side. ”

“ April 26, 1816. [Obsolete.]
Chap. XCV.—An Act to increase the compensation now allowed by law to inspectors, measures, weighers and gaugers, employed in the collection of the customs. [1] Increase of inspectors’ compensation. ”

“ If the weight be equal, whether they are carrying the ark of the temple or a calf, a nugget of gold or a stone, they will be subject to the law of the weight and their expression can indicate nothing but that weight. ”

“ When, for example, we speak of a pound weight on the long end of a lever balancing a ten-pound weight on the short end, it is equally appropriate to speak of the ten-pound weight as balancing the one-pound weight. ”

“ My father was not a large man, his weight being only about one hundred and sixty pounds and height five feet, ten inches, but my mother, while only of medium height for a woman, was of large frame and weighed about one hundred and eighty pounds. ”

“ Because of his huge weight! He is so heavy that if the bones under his feet were not covered with a thick pad, he would jar the bones every time he put his foot down, even if the ground were not very hard. ”

“ The man who rests upon his feet, either bears the weight of his body upon them equally, or unequally. If equally, it will be with some accidental weight, or simply with his own; if it be with an additional weight, the opposite extremities of his members will not be equally distant from the perpendicular of his feet. ”