Word: fludd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...from a bleak working-class future in England's industrial north, Philip has the good fortune to be discovered by two sympathetic boys, one of whom is the son of children's-book author Olive Wellwood. Soon our ceramist is apprenticed to Wellwood family friend Benedict Fludd, a master potter...
...Nesbit, author of The Railway Children and Five Children and It.) What could be more delightful than a mother who writes personalized fairy tales for each of her kids? Except, of course, that fairy tales can be the darkest kind there are, and in the case of Olive (and Fludd and most of the other creative types portrayed here), a life in the arts has psychic costs. Often it's the next generation that pays. Eventually the children, in particular Olive's daughter Dorothy, eclipse their parents in both the plot and our sympathies. This makes sense in a novel...
Physicists didn't figure this out until the 1800s, so at least the early advocates of perpetual motion had the excuse of ignorance. In 1618, for example, a London doctor named Robert Fludd invented a waterwheel that needed no river to drive it. Water poured into his system would, in theory, turn a wheel that would power a pump that would cause the water to flow back over the wheel that would power the pump, and so on. But the second law means that any friction created by wheel and pump would turn into heat and noise; reconverting that into...
Once thermodynamics was codified, it was clear that Fludd and the hundreds who followed him had been doomed to failure before they began. Yet if anything, learning that their task was impossible spurred perpetual-motion fanatics on to even greater efforts. So many hopefuls continued to apply for perpetual-motion patents that in 1911 the U.S. Patent Office decreed it would henceforth accept working models only--and they had to work for a year to qualify. No one has pulled...
| 1 |