Word: sink
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...Vagabond, dozing in his favorite armchair, and pulling peacefully on his favorite briar, watched a bookcase full of forbidding volumes slowly sink into a summer sea, precisely the same sea, in fact, on which the Vagabond had stemmed his way hither and yon in the breezes of August. A scene fished upon his inner eye,--the scene of two vessels, well out to sea, one a stately yacht, glistening with brass and pearly canvas, the other a grim, gray cutter of the revenue fleet. At the same moment a puff of white smoke escaped the muzzle of the signal...
Precisely why did the Promethée sink? Before this could possibly be known rumors grew that some clumsy seaman had opened the diving valves by accident. Another rumor had Lieut, du Mesnil commit suicide after he was picked up with six lucky survivors by a fishing smack. Actually the Lieutenant announced himself at the disposal of the usual naval board of inquiry. "Before realizing what had happened," he told reporters, "I was swimming for my life...
...ripped apart by the rushing waters. They expressed a professional opinion that it will be impossible to raise the Promethée, said that they found her hatches open, conjectured that an explosion may have ripped open the Promethée's stern, thus causing her to sink stern first. "The public has a right," observed long-mustached French Naval Minister Georges Leygues, "to know the truth...
...Considering the circumstances-that is, a submarine operating on the surface, with her hatches open, and her commander, and others, on deck, and showing no intention of submerging-the most probable cause of sinking is an internal explosion. All submarines give off an odorless gas, hydrogen, when charging batteries, and this gas, when mixed even in small proportions with air, forms an extremely powerful explosive mixture, which might be ignited from a number of causes inside the boat. The resulting explosion might easily have so damaged the hull as to sink the submersible immediately. In our own Navy there have...
...particles of ultramicroscopic size (from 1 to 100 millionths of a millimetre) when dispersed in another medium. Pulverized coal when added to oil will settle out almost immediately. It was known that in an extremely viscous oil coal pulverized as small as 1/10,000 of a mm. would sink with less speed. Also surface energies on the particles would tend to keep the mixture more stable. With coal ground so fine that it would pass through a sieve of 80 meshes to the cm. the sinking would be at a rate of a few centimetres...