This
thing was of prodigious strength, so that it erected or overthrew
the mightiest empires at a breath; but its powers were exercised
equally for evil and for good.'"
* Maelzel's Automaton Chess-player.
*(2) Babbage's Calculating Machine.
"Ridiculous!" said the king.
"'Among this nation of necromancers there was also one who had in
his veins the blood of the salamanders; for he made no scruple of
sitting down to smoke his chibouc in a red-hot oven until his dinner
was thoroughly roasted upon its floor.* Another had the faculty of
converting the common metals into gold, without even looking at them
during the process.*(2) Another had such a delicacy of touch that he
made a wire so fine as to be invisible.*(3) Another had such quickness
of perception that he counted all the separate motions of an elastic
body, while it was springing backward and forward at the rate of
nine hundred millions of times in a second.'"*(4)
* Chabert, and since him, a hundred others.
*(2) The Electrotype.
*(3) Wollaston made of platinum for the field of views in a
telescope a wire one eighteen-thousandth part of an inch in thickness.
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