Author: Brittany Ackerman Publisher: ISBN: 9781597096911 Category : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Languages : en Pages : 152
Book Description
Inspired by a brother's high school science project--a perpetual motion machine that could save the world-- The Perpetual Motion Machine is a memoir in essays that attempts to save a sibling by depicting the visceral pain that accompanies longing for some past impossibility. The collection has been a science project in its study of memory, in the calculation and plotting of the moments that make up a childhood. The preparation has been "in the field" in that it is built upon the gathering of lived experience; the evidence is photo albums, family interviews, and anecdotes from friends. The project has been one giant experiment--to see if they can all make it out alive.
Author: Paul Scheerbart Publisher: ISBN: 9780984115549 Category : Perpetual motion Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In the last days of 1907, the German novelist and exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart embarked upon an attempt to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half years he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his laundry-room-cum-laboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct his models while spinning out a series of imagined futures that his invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable blend of diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and reverie: a document of what poet and translator Andrew Joron calls a "two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination." Shifting ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart's unique amalgamation of visionary humor and optimistic failure ultimately proves to be a more literary invention than scientific: a perpetual motion of a fevered imagination that reads as if Robert Walser had tried his hand at science fiction. With "toiling wheels" inextricably embedded in his head, Scheerbart's visions of rising globalization, ecological devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible end of literature soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machine is an ode to the fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis.
Author: Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press ISBN: 9781931882514 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
The deceptively simple task of making a mechanism which would turn forever has fascinated many famous men and physicists throughout the centuries. In fact, the basic tenets of engineering grew from the failures of these perpetual motion machine designers. This work offers an illustrated overview of perpetual motion machines and their inventors.
Author: Graeme Gibson Publisher: New Canadian Library ISBN: 0771093993 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
Set in southern Ontario in the late nineteenth century, at a time when the machine age was coming into its own, Perpetual Motion chronicles the fortunes of settler Robert Fraser, a man obsessed with power and control. Driven by the idea of inventing a perpetual motion machine which will utilize natural energy, he neglects and destroys not only the nature around him but his own family too, as his overbearing rationality becomes a kind of tragic lunacy. First published in 1982, Perpetual Motion is Graeme Gibson’s superb evocation of a time when faith in material progress is still challenged by superstition and a lingering belief in magic. It is an ironic yet compassionate examination of the painful consequences of human folly.
Author: Dexter Palmer Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 1429959177 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
Imprisoned for life aboard a zeppelin that floats high above a fantastic metropolis, greeting-card writer Harold Winslow pens his memoirs. His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father, Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane. As Harold heads toward a last desperate confrontation with Prospero to save Miranda's life, he finds himself an unwitting participant in the creation of the greatest invention of them all: the perpetual motion machine. Beautifully written, stunningly imagined, and wickedly funny, Dexter Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a heartfelt meditation on the place of love in a world dominated by technology.
Author: Derek J. de Solla Price Publisher: DigiCat ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 69
Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass" by Derek J. de Solla Price. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Author: Brittany Ackerman Publisher: Red Hen Press ISBN: 1597096334 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 116
Book Description
A memoir exploring a young woman’s troubled childhood, her bond with her older brother, and the toll of drugs and alcohol on their lives. Inspired by a brother’s high school science project—a perpetual motion machine that could save the world—The Perpetual Motion Machine is a memoir in essays that attempts to save a sibling by depicting the visceral pain that accompanies longing for some past impossibility. The collection has been a science project in its study of memory, in the calculation and plotting of the moments that make up a childhood. The preparation has been “in the field” in that it is built upon the gathering of lived experience; the evidence is photo albums, family interviews, and anecdotes from friends. The project has been one giant experiment—to see if they can all make it out alive. “Full of hard-won wisdom, beautifully written and deeply moving . . . an exquisite chronicle of family and trauma and hope and longing, and announces Brittany Ackerman as an exciting new voice in letters.” —Alan Heathcock, author of VOLT and 40 “[An] instantly engaging and wildly engrossing memoir. . . . Her prose is accessible and affecting, and her family story is exquisite in its luminous detail and intimacy, full of heartbreak and humor.” ―Davy Rothbart, author of My Heart is an Idiot, creator of FOUND Magazine, and contributor to This American Life “Told in simple, spare language, Ackerman’s story is powerful not only for the story it tells, but also for the eloquent silences and chronological ruptures that symbolize the painfully fractured nature of her life and that of her brother. A brief but poignant memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews
Author: Brittany Ackerman Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0593311736 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Bursting with bittersweet nostalgia, a funny, poignant, perfectly voiced debut that captures what it's like to be a teenage girl—“full of brilliantly-rendered awkwardness and the hilarious minor horrors of a privileged adolescence, The Brittanys shimmers with the everyday incandescence of youth” (Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light). They're not the most popular freshmen at their Florida prep school, but at least everyone knows their name(s). The Brittanys. Brittany Rosenberg: drives her golf cart around her subdivision to meet boys. Brittany Gottlieb: insists you can't lose your virginity if you haven't gotten your period. (She heard it somewhere!) Brittany Tomassi: is from New York. Brittany Jensen: once threw her tampon into a stranger's swimming pool. A brash, bold, unapologetic tomboy. And the greatest person in the whole wide world. At least as far as the fifth Brittany--our narrator--is concerned. Even within their friend group, she and Jensen are a duo: with their matching JanSport backpacks, Tiffany chokers, and Victoria's Secret push-up bras, they are unstoppable. And now that they're finally growing up, they're going to do everything: dye their hair, attend no-parent parties, try pot . . . maybe even lose their virginities. 2004 is totally going to be their year! Except Jensen's interests may be diverging from her friends'. And within our narrator's own family--in the lives of her exhausted mother and beloved, genius older brother--life-changing events may be taking shape. Events that only years later, looking back, she has the perspective to see. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL
Author: Percy Verance Publisher: Library of Alexandria ISBN: 1465522409 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 367
Book Description
Perpetual Motion as used in this book is to be taken in its conventional, and not in its strict literal sense. The strict literal analysis of the two words implies unceasing motion. Of this we have many illustrations—the tides, the waves of the ocean, the course of the earth around the sun, and in the movements of all heavenly and astronomical bodies. In fact, it is difficult to conceive in a strictly scientific sense of any substance having an entire absence of motion. Perpetual Motion as used in this book means what it is usually understood to mean—Self-Motive Power—a machine that furnishes the power to keep its parts going as a machine. In this sense Perpetual Motion has always engaged the minds of many, many people—and what is more natural? As soon as a boy begins to take an interest in moving parts of machinery, vehicles, locomotives, and what not, he perceives that the application of power results in the motion of bodies, and again that bodies in motion are productive of power. A wheel moved by muscular, or other mechanical power, is made by machinery to elevate water, and elevated water can be made in descending to run machinery. The windlass, or other wheel, turned by applied force, lifts buckets from wells—raises stone, and elevates heavy bodies, if desired. Heavy bodies descending can be, and are used through means of machinery to make machinery run. A great many similar illustrations could be given. What, then, is more natural than that a boy with an active mind who is at all mechanically turned, as most boys are, begins to wonder why, if wheels lift stones, and if stones descending make wheels run, cannot a machine be made that will lift stones, or other weights, and in turn be run by the descent of the lifted stones, or other weights? Why, if the turning of wheels lift water, and if descending water makes wheels go, should not an adaptation be made by which the same machine will elevate water, and be run by the descent of the elevated water? That it cannot be done is now the consensus of opinion of all technically trained mechanics, but, that it can not be done, and why it can not be done, is sure not to occur to the boy, nor to the man who has only a strong natural mechanical sense to guide him, and has not the advantage of technical training. Again, it is well known that many, many men have spent considerable sums of money and given hours and hours, and days, and months, and years of close and careful thought, and experiment to the production of a machine that will accomplish Perpetual Motion, and that many have announced to the world that they had succeeded in its accomplishment, but that all their devices so far have turned out failures. It is to no purpose to tell the Perpetual Motion worker that he is seeking to attain the impossible; that the attainment of self-motive power has been demonstrated to be an impossibility. He will answer, or, at least, he will reason to himself that many things once pronounced impossibilities and claimed to be so demonstrated, have since been attained. The Perpetual Motion worker is usually a person of active intelligence, and being enamoured of mechanical projects is likely to read extensively along mechanical lines, and knows as every well-informed person knows, that there are many instances in the history of the discovery and development of the most important mechanical inventions and scientific discoveries where the persistent efforts of so-called enthusiastic dreamers and cranks finally triumphed over the settled and conventional "impossibilities" of dignified scientists.
Author: Brittany Ackerman
Author: 
Author: Paul Scheerbart
Author: Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume
Author: Graeme Gibson
Author: Dexter Palmer
Author: Derek J. de Solla Price
Author: Brittany Ackerman
Author: Brittany Ackerman
Author: Percy Verance