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Updated: May 12, 2025
In treading the mazes of this crevassed section I had frequently to cross bridges that were only knife-edges for twenty or thirty feet, cutting off the sharp tops and leaving them flat so that little Stickeen could follow me. These I had to straddle, cutting off the top as I progressed and hitching gradually ahead like a boy riding a rail fence.
When the balance is not in use the beam must be supported by this device since, otherwise, the constant jarring to which a balance is inevitably subjected, will soon dull the knife-edges, and lessen the sensitiveness of the balance. The center of gravity must lie very slightly below the level of the agate plates to secure the desired sensitiveness of the balance.
Points should rest in cup-shaped depressions in a metal plate; knife-edges in V-shaped grooves in a metal ring. Screws turned or filed to a sharp end make convenient points, as they can be quickly adjusted so that a line joining the points lies exactly at right angles to the pendulum. The cups to take the points should not be drilled until the points have been thus adjusted.
Our little excesses with liquor were due far more to conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the instructive knife-edges of life.
Before the final determination of an exact weight the beam should always be lifted from the knife-edges and again lowered into place, as it frequently happens that the scale pans are, in spite of the pan-arrests, slightly twisted by the impact of the weights, the beam being thereby virtually lengthened or shortened. Lifting the beam restores the proper alignment.
The balance beam, extending to the right and left, is graduated along its upper edge, usually on both sides, and has at its extremities two agate or steel knife-edges from which are suspended stirrups. Each of these stirrups has an agate plate which, when the balance is in action, rests upon the corresponding knife-edge of the beam. The balance pans are suspended from the stirrups.
In all this the power of voluntarily attending is the point of the whole procedure. Just as a balance turns on its knife-edges, so on it our moral destiny turns. You remember that, when we were talking of the subject of attention, we discovered how much more intermittent and brief our acts of voluntary attention are than is commonly supposed.
Every substance which could attack the metal of the balance pan should be weighed upon a watch-glass, and all objects must be dry and cold. A warm body gives rise to air currents which vitiate the accuracy of the weighing. After a weight has been placed upon the pan the beam should be lowered upon its knife-edges, and, if necessary, the pan-arrests depressed.
We woke on board the launch the next morning to find ice formed all around us and ice running in the river. The thermometer had gone to zero in the night. A very brief attempt to make our way against the running ice showed the danger of doing so, for the thin cakes had knife-edges and cut the planking of the boat so that she began to leak.
The rain erodes it into the oddest of forms, leaving projecting ridges almost as sharp as knife-edges, with irregular hollows pitting the surface, so that it forms a most insecure and unpleasant foot-hold for the animals. Not only so, but the surface, rough as it is, is frequently as polished as glass, and, whether wet or dry, is slippery to the tread.
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