Gadget!
Woo.



Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

I so want one of these!

Created in 2006 to be the runabout for the Neverwas Haul, this little tri-wheeler would be just the thing for heading off to the chemists wot!

Double acting slide valve steam engine, powered by a Lamont style boiler made from a steam cleaner, running at about 100psi. Boiler is propane fired.

This film was taken at the 2008 Maker Faire in San Mateo California.

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

A wonderful collection of Automata!

This video is shows some of the fantastic examples of complex clockwork mechanisms, toys, jewel boxes and other exotic automata in the Museum of Automata in York England.

The museum closed in 1996 and its collection now resides in Japan, but this promotional video captures the magic and wonder of the collection very well.

Enjoy!

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Fantastic early colour photos from 1910-11!

From Curious Eggs
======
Extremely Rare Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris

Although some of these images might look like a modern day photography and some of them like painted pictures, actually it is real colored photographies, taken at the beginning of the 20th century Paris (France). It is extremely astonishing to look at the world now long gone, the world which you are used to see in black & white images and often with poor quality. 

 

All the images shown below were taken using Autochrome Lumière technology. It's an early color photography process, patented in 1903 and invented by the famous French Auguste and Louis Lumière, populary known as Lumière Brothers. They were the earliest filmmakers in history. 

 

So, here it is! The city of love: the streets, the architecture, the people, interiors and grand events

========

Lots more at the link above.

 

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.

KJ

We take colour films for granted nowadays.

But there was a time when it was novel indeed.

This article at the BBC has a video showing the very first true colour films ever produced.  Made by pioneer Edward Raymond Turner from London who patented his colour process on 22 March 1899, these films used three different colour  filters and three cameras to film the same scene. Then a complicated projector displayed the three films through corresponding filters simultaneously giving the illusion of colour.  Prior to this colour films were created by painstakingly hand tinting each frame.



This is a similar system that was used for the original tests of Colour TV in the 50s.

Turner's process wasn't successful, not because the film didn't work as it obviously did, but because the mechanical projector system wasn't reliable enough

Hmmm...

Sounds like a great Steampunk tinkerers project to me

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

I love these machines.



Lots of construction pictures and details here:
Crabfu Steam Beetle

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

This will keep them moving!


From 1899.

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

The Antikythera mechanism as a watch!



Hublot painstakingly recreates a mysterious, 2,100-year-old clockwork relic

Hublot's miniature replica of the Antikythera mechanism

Awesome!

Keep your sightglass full and your firebox trimmed.
KJ

This is a record breaker!

From Wikipedia
In 1906 the Land Speed Record was broken by a Stanley steam car, piloted by Fred Marriott, which achieved 127 mph (204 km/h) at Ormond Beach, Florida.

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Found this while searching for images to add to my Pinterest board.



Love the uniforms and that patrol bike is a sweet bit of machinery.
I would love to take a trip through the Rockies on one!

So how does it work?
At first I thought the levers were brakes, but then if you blow up the picture you can see that the slot in the bottom of the lever the rider is holding, covers the whole potential range of the pedal cranks. Also there is what appears to be a pivot on the lever right next to his knee.

I think that the lever is used to add force to the pedals at the top and bottom of the crank turning. In the photo the pedals are level so the cranks are in the middle of the slot. That means, if my conjecture is correct, that the lever is as far back as it will go. As he pedals the lever rocks back and forth so that the driver can add force to the cranks at the positions where his legs cannot, ie the top and bottom of the crank path. The position of the handle and the distance between the pivot and the top of the slot, gives quite a bit of mechanical advantage. So the whole upper half of the crank movement would benefit.

That seems OK but a bit unbalanced being only on one side. If you look closely however, there is a lever on the other side too. The handle is just above the shoulder of the soldier standing beside the officer on the bike. If you line up the handle it points to about the same pivot point on the that side. This lever is at its maximum forward position which makes sense.

The third lever, with the offset handle is indeed a brake I think. The brake shoe is the block in front over the wheel.

I bet you got a pretty complete workout using this machine

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

From http://dvice.com/arch...



Wozniak's Conundrum — a fully functional Mac with a Remington typewriter keyboard from 1897 wired up to its brains and a mouse built from an old Morse Code telegraph key.

Steve La Riccia owns one special Mac. While Apple's been busy tooting its new thin and light MacBooks, iMacs and iPads, Steve bunkered down for over three months and built himself a steampunk Mac.

Parts used include a 1991 Mac running Mac OS 7.5, the 114-year-old Remington typewriter keyboard, the telegraph key mouse, a 56K modem built from old phone parts and a floppy drive.

Because typewriters didn't have a "return/enter" key, Steve had to use a workaround. Instead of a key button, Steve repurposed the typewriter's cartridge release lever (the part that lifts the ink off and lets you roll the paper up to go to the next line) into a "hard return/enter" button. Neato.

Steve's steampunk Mac is currently on display at The Mac Store in Eugene, Oregon. If you're around there, we'd say it's worth peep. Steampunk never gets old, if it's done right.
-----

Hear hear I say!

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Found this old book from the late 1890s as a PDF at the Internet Archive

AEtheric or Wireless Telegraphy
by ROBERT GORDON ELAINE, M.E.

An interesting look at the very early days of wireless.

These quotes are very interesting:

Scientific men are often accused of being too optimistic, of dreaming-dreams which are never likely to be realised. Some listeners, no doubt, characterised as of this nature Prof. Ayrton's memorable statement made in 1897 (when speaking of telephony):
"There is no doubt the day will come maybe when you and I are forgotten when copper wires, guttapercha coverings, and iron sheathings will be relegated to the museum of antiquities."
" ... In that day when a man wants to telegraph to a friend he knows not where, he will call in an electromagnetic voice which shall be heard loud by him who has the electro-magnetic ear, but will be silent to everyone else. He will call 'Where are you?' and the reply will come, 'I am at the bottom of a coalmine,' 'I am crossing the Andes,' 'I am in the middle of the Pacific,' or perhaps no reply will come, and he may conclude his friend is dead."

Indeed...

This one embodies all the hubris of empire!

"There is no doubt that many oriental and even some savage peoples are able to convey information for considerable distances, in some unknown way, with astonishing rapidity. Many stories regarding this are related by travellers and others. One is to the effect our officers in Afghanistan were greatly puzzled as to how the intended military movements of the British could be so clearly known to the enemy in distant places so shortly after they were determined upon.
Not the swiftest horses in the British lines could have covered half the distance in the given time, and a strict watch failed to detect any heliographic or beacon-light signals. The offer of bribes was ineffective, money could not purchase the secret, nor could the fear of death extort it, it remains in the possession of the natives till this day.

It is said that on the day on which that good man General Gordon was murdered in Khartoum the event was known in the bazaars of Cairo. This may not be true, for his murderers had probably few sympathisers in Cairo ; but, if true, it is a mystery how the news travelled so quickly, seeing that there was then no railway and no telegraph to Khartoum, and even had there been a railway, a train running at 60 miles an hour would have taken some- thing like 16 hours to accomplish the journey.

It may be that the sensitive oriental nervous organisation is susceptible to etheric influences which we cannot detect, and that in this way two similarly endowed persons are affected so as to be able to emit and receive impressions more or less tangible.

That this power of rapid communication is shared to some extent by the Kaffirs is shown by a recent writer (Mr. D. Blackburn on "Kaffir Telegraphy" in the Spectator], and the Matabele have often astonished our officers in the same way. These stories have really little interest for Us to-day, except to excite wonder and speculation, since modern science has furnished us with surer and swifter, if more expensive, methods. Messages have been transmitted without the intervention of a metallic conductor for a distance of over 2,500 miles, and greater wonders are said to be in store for us."

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your antenna tuned!
KJ

Ooooh!

Something to add to my holiday wish list!

Here is a project where a Moped, powered by a conventional two stroke gasoline engine, has been converted to run with steam.  The project not only converted the existing engine but also added a compact boiler and controls.
The engine was converted to a unaflow steam engine. 

A very cool project, lots of possible uses for similar conversions!

The Steam Car Club of Great Britain website has lots of good information on historic and modern steam powered vehicles.

Enjoy

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

The SteamPed in all her glory! 
 a Steam project by Roger Ulsky

My SteamPed started life as a Motobecane Moped which I obtained in a non running condition but with all the parts intact. I eventually want to build a steam car and decided this would be a good way to get my feet "dry" with steam land vehicles.
Continued at the link above...

I love watching engines run.
When they are made out of glass they are just so much more awesome!
From that font of all video wonders YouTube.


Glass steam engine made in 2008,named after the original made in the 1850s. The cylinder and valve housing are made of glass so you can see the action inside.


This Model of Stephenson's Steam Engine was made in 2008 by master glassblower Michal Zahradník.

Highlights:
* The crankshaft is glass.
* The piston is glass.
* The counterweight that makes the wheel spin evenly is glass.

* There are no sealants used. All is accomplished by a perfectly snug fit. The gap between the piston and its compartment is so small, that the water that condensates from the steam seals it shut!
* Notice the elaborate excessive steam exhaust system next to the piston.
* The piston is the most arduous part to make due to to extreme level of precision needed. Its parts have to be so accurate that no machinery is of use here. The piston and its cylinder must be hand sanded to perfection, and they are very likely to crack in the process! On average, three out of four crack.

Keep yous sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

The Case for Steam

In the previous part of this series I talked about some of the details concerning how an airship flies.  In this part I will discuss the pros and cons of using steam as the lifting gas for our airship.

You can get some of the technical details of why steam makes a good lifting gas at this website:
The Flying Kettle. They are actually working on a free balloon that uses steam and have dealt with a lot of the practical details, a fascinating site definitely worth a perusal.

There are lots of different gases that can be used for generating static lift for an airship. In the real world the best one is hydrogen, followed by helium then pure methane. Of these three, hydrogen and methane are explosive when mixed with air and helium, while being non-flammable, is expensive and relatively rare. Ordinary steam is a surprisingly good lift gas being between helium and methane in lift capacity, plus steam is easy to make, cheap, and non-flammable.

This table from Flying Kettle has the properties of various lift gasses.

GAS	M.W.	Temp. (‹C)	Density (kg/m3)	Lift (N/m3) in ISA	Safety	Cost	Ease of provision	Buoyancy control
H2	2	15‹	0.084	1.140 11.19	bad	fair	fair	no
He	4	15‹	0.169	1.056  10.36	good	very high	very bad	no
CH4	16	15‹	0.676	0.549  5.39	bad	low	fair	no
NH3	17	15‹	0.718	0.507  4.97	fair	low	fair	no
hot air	29 (avg)	110‹ (avg)	0.921 (avg)	2.980.327  2.2.98 (avg)	good	very low	good	yes
steam (H2O)	18	100‹	0.587	0.638  6.26	good	very low	good	yes

From the chart you can see that pure steam at sea level and 100C only has the ability to lift 6.26 N/m3 which is better than pure methane but only about 60% of the lift available from helium. My buddy Grant, who is an engineer in real life and also a member of our crew, has calculated that, given steam's lifting capability compared to hydrogen, an airship with the weight of the Hindenburg would need to be about 25% larger in volume to fly!  That is a significant difference and could easily kill the use of steam for any "practical" design on that basis alone.

Another big disadvantage of steam as a lifting gas is that it condenses when the temperature goes below that necessary to keep it as vapour. That temperature is just over 100C at sea level of course, but lower at higher altitudes. As time goes on during a flight the steam will condense back into liquid water, primarily due to heat loss through the envelope, which will reduce the volume available to generate lift. Essentially the airship will constantly be "leaking" lift gas by this condensation.

To maintain flight this condensate must be re-boiled and returned to steam constantly, plus any leakage through the envelope that contains the steam must be balanced somehow, just like a normal gas filled airship must balance against the leakage or venting of lift gas by the dropping of ballast. In a conventional airship the energy that would be necessary to re-boil the condensate must be supplied by fuel and boilers that take up payload capacity.

So why am I proposing the use of steam given these disadvantages?

What really tips the issue in favour of steam for our airship is the power source we are using. In part one I mentioned that the main fantastical element of our airship was this power source, the exotic core of Verne's Nautilus. I prefer to think of this source as being like a fission type reactor core and will treat it as such for this design. Part 4 and 5 of this series will deal with the design decisions that such a power system requires. For the purposes of this discussion here, the key elements we are concerned with are that such a reactor uses up no fuel with time, and it generates prodigous quantities of heat continuously with a very high power to weight ratio.

This power source neatly deals with the disadvantage of condensation as it can easily re-boil any condensate and return it to the envelope.  Liquid water can be boiled to make up any leakage through the envelope to the atmosphere as well.

I am a big fan of simple systems, especially mission critical ones. Since we have an almost unlimited supply of heat available with our power core, we do not need much complxity to generate large volumes of low pressure steam. Thermo syphoning through the core may be all that is required for lift gas production. I will look at some proposed details of how the core and steam production can be controlled in following articles.

Let us now look at the three constraints to airship flight duration I discussed in the last article.

The three constraints are: lifting gas supply, ballast supply, and fuel supply. These are constraints because as a flight continues, the need to balance the buoyancy by releasing ballast and venting gas to account for changing conditions, place a limit on flight duration. Venting gas to lower buoyancy must be balanced eventually by dropping ballast to increase it again. As fuel is consumed the airship gets lighter and gas must be vented to adjust for that as well. In the case of a conventional gas filled airship both of these actions, venting gas and dropping ballast, were irreversible. Once the ballast supply was used up no further adjustments were possible. Ditto once the volume of gas vented reduced the airships buoyancy below that necessary to maintain lift. At that point the voyage was over!

So how does steam as a lifting gas, with our power core, handle these constraints?

Contents and Prospectus

My fellow crew members suggested that I try to organize this series of posts so they would be able to identify the various sections they were interested in and would, hopefully, like to comment on.
Each entry below will be linked to the actual post (once I write and post them).  There is a lot of interesting stuff to cover and of course many of them overlap so the actual posts may not be quite so specific, but this is my plan so far:

• Part 1 Making the Fantastical Practical A brief introduction as to why I'm doing this and the introduction of the major fantastical element of this design, that being the mysterious ultra-powerful energy source used in the airship.
• Part 2 Contents and Prospectus  This post!
• Part 3a The Case for Steam (almost) A brief discussion of how a conventional airship flies.
• Part 3b The Case for Steam A discussion of the rationale, pros and cons, for the use of steam as the lifting gas for the airship. Much of the subsequent design discussions revolve around and depend on this design decision, as what allows an airship to fly is probably one of the most important elements to discuss.
• Part 4 To Fly Amongst the Clouds A proposal for the way our fantastical power core generates both lift gas and propulsion power.
• Part 5 Engines Tanks and Bulkheads Oh My! A discussion of one proposed layout for the "engine room" and the primary systems  including steam generators and propulsion systems.
• Part 5a More Engines Tanks and Bulkheads Oh My! After further reflection, here is a more detailed discussion of the high pressure steam system used to drive our main power plant.
• Part 5b Full Steam Ahead A summary of the design of our airship, and a description of the layout of the engine room.
• Part 5c A Self Mobile Cloud  A discussion of some of the lift control issues using steam as our lift gas.
  
• Part 6 Domestic Tranquility Systems Of course a globe trotting airship like ours is more than just an engine hanging from a balloon! The officers, crew and passengers need to be able to live aboard for extended periods of time. What's more some of the crew members are Ladies so we must include many creature comforts for them.
• Part 6a More Domestic Tranquility Systems. A document I prepared for our Role Play group summarizing the interior layout of our airship
• Part 7 Splendid She Must Be In conclusion, our Captain has ordered that she must, in addition to being one of the most technologically advanced airships of the age, be one of the most "Splendid"(tm) and this post will attempt to grant his wishes to the best of this poor flight engineer's ability.  

Additional posts as needed to discuss other aspects of the design like communications, weapons, control systems, role playing etc.

• Our Airship Presenting the HMAS Velvet Brush
• Airship Technology Speech  My character, as Engineering Officer , was ordered to give a presentation about the technical wonders of our fine ship. I decided to actually give the speech.
• An Analysis of a Real System "Steam Power Plants in Aircraft"  by  E.E. Wilson at the Bureau of Aeronautics, 1926

I hope you will follow along with me as we hash out these knotty issues and design our fantastical, yet practical, airship. To give you a taste for the kind of craft we are dealing with check out the fantastic Steampunk Art of *Voitv on Deviant Art.

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

By clicking on the tag "Flight Engineer". you can find lots more Airship information.

Click here for Part 3a of the Practical Airship Design series

Making the Fantastical Practical

Well, "Practical" may not be the right word.

I am a member of a Steampunk group that models itself as an Airship Crew.  Nothing really new about that, there are lots of Airship crews out there. What I particularly like about this group though, is that there are some members who are of a strong engineering bent. As part of the online Role Play we do, between going out to pubs in our uniform finery, there have been several intense discussions about the nature of our airship. Things like how big is it, how fast can it fly, what kind of lift system does it use, what is its power source, crew and cargo capacity etc.  To be honest, most of our shipmates are not really worried about the technical side, as long as it is consistent enough to make whatever role playing we do entertaining.  However, there is a lot of interesting and technically cool issues to grapple with, every bit as intriguing to me as what form the uniform will take and where we will be flying off to.

The Graf Zeppelin over the Great Pyramids

Now since the idea is to have an airship capable of doing an around the world voyage, like the Graf Zeppelin did, and to carry a reasonable crew and cargo, but at the same time be fantastical enough to be interesting, the design walks a fine line between technically feasible and outright fantasy.

I'm of a fairly technical bent myself and as such I am more interested in such a ship having as much of a real technical basis as possible.  To me, a Steampunk device is much more interesting if the fantastical (i.e. imaginary) elements are just sufficient to make it work. For example, in Kenneth Oppel's books they have a lift gas that has many times the lifting capacity of hydrogen. Nearly everything else is still normal. With only one big change to "Physics As We Know It"(tm), the reader doesn't have to decide if hanging onto a rope, while dangling off the tail fins of an airship, is risky, it certainly is since gravity still applies and crewmen don't sprout wings simply when needed.

For me therefore the design of our airship needs to keep the fantastical elements to a minimum, while still tipping our collective hats to the "What Ifs" of Steampunk. The kinds of things I talked about in last weekend's speech.

The role playing we are doing, to pass the time more than anything, consists of text messages back and forth, in character, concerning the various doings associated with being in an airship crew. It isn't really a game per se, it is more an unfolding storyline. One of the interesting things about this kind of evolving narrative is that statements made previously stick around, and become part of the story. It is considered a big Faux Pas to arbitrarily change the story without discussing it first.

And that, dear reader, is my opportunity to do some "Practical Airship Design"

One of the earliest design constraints made, almost by accident, was that we would have an energy source of unimaginable power, like the one in Disney's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, the "Power of the Universe" as Captain Nemo described it.  I have chosen to keep that as the main fantastical element and try to design a practical airship around it. That doesn't mean I will only include real Victorian technology. I am a big fan of "What Ifs" so Tesla's creations will figure prominently as will Babbage's computing capabilities.

Any design process is always a compromise, and since we have to include our fellow crewmembers as passengers on whatever our airship design ends up looking like, they have to ultimately agree to live within any technical constraints we give her.

In future posts I will be making my case for particular design elements. Consider them proposals really and they may not be adopted by the rest of the crew, but I will try to let you all know how it is going.

Thanks for reading.

Click here for Part 2 a table of contents for the whole design

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed, and your water iced.
KJ

P.S. I have collected a lot of interesting links about Airships and their design that are related.
You can see all of them by clicking on the tag "Flight Engineer".

This beautiful mechanical dulcimer player was built in 1772 Pierre Kintzing and David Roentgen for Marie Antoinette. At just eighteen inches tall, she plays eight different songs. She was restored in 1864 by Robert-Houdin and is now at the Musée des Arts et Métiers

The intricacy of the mechanism here is exquisite!

Take a look.




The following video is a look at the automaton that inspired the "The Invention of Hugo Cabret".



Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your mainspring wound up!
KJ

The ground beneath our feet sometimes holds some interesting history.
Case in point the this system described at Damn Interesting
 The Remarkable Pneumatic People-Mover of 1870
This system used a sealed brick tunnel in which a passenger car ran. The system was propelled by air pressure acting on the car, the end of the tunnel was fitted with a great steam powered blower that exhausted the air from the tunnel producing a vacuum. The difference in air pressure across the car propelled it along the tunnel.
A demonstration system was built underneath Broadway in New York and opened to the public in  Feb of 1870.

From the link above:
----
On the twenty-sixth of February 1870, Alfred Beach finally exposed his secret tunnel for the inspection of the public. The event was described by one silver-tongued newspaperman as a “Fashionable reception held in the bowels of the Earth.” Visitors entered the basement of Devlin’s clothing store by way of a vestibule which had special linked doors on either end; the inner door would not open until the outer door was closed, providing a rudimentary airlock for the pneumatic pressure. Therefrom they emerged into an ornate lobby encrusted with the stuff of high society, including wood trimmings; chandeliers; an ornate, goldfish-filled fountain; and a grand piano. Although electrical service was still a thing of the future, the underground lobby was brilliantly illuminated by a collection of new zircon oxygen/hydrogen gas lamps.

At the far end of the waiting area was the portal to America’s first subway, installed “for the purpose of temporarily illustrating, by an actual demonstration, the feasibility of placing a railway under Broadway.” The tunnel was framed in handsome brickwork, and two stately bronze effigies of Mercury stood alongside. On a placard above the tunnel hung the words, “Pneumatic / 1870 / Transit.” For a fare of two bits per passenger– all of which was donated to a charity for soldiers’ orphans– twenty guests at a time could take a ride on the pneumatic carriage.

 The custom-built, fifty-ton blower was situated in an adjacent chamber, separated from the waiting area by a long corridor. The Æolor blower was twenty-one feet high, sixteen feet long, and thirteen feet wide, and it contained two colossal lengthwise paddles which rotated to draw air in through the rear and thrust it out from the front. The magnificent blower was also outfitted with a special set of adjustable baffles which allowed her to switch from suck to blow without reversing rotation. By tapping a telegraph wire, the conductor signaled the boiler engineer to engage the 100 horsepower steam engine. Atmospheric pressure increased by “a few grains per inch,” pressing the carriage into the tunnel as the air rushed to escape through the vent at the far end.
----
 Here is how a visitor described a trip on this experimental wonder.

We took our seats in the pretty car, the gayest company of twenty that ever entered a vehicle; the conductor touched a telegraph wire on the wall of the tunnel; and before we knew it, so gentle was the start, we were in motion, moving from Warren street down Broadway. In a few moments the conductor opened the door, and called out, Murray street! with a business-like air that made us all shout with laughter.

The car came to a rest in the gentlest possible style, and immediately began to move back to Warren street, where it had no sooner arrived, than in the same gentle and mysterious manner it moved back again to Murray street [...] Our atmospheric ride was most delightful, and our party left the car satisfied by actual experience that the pneumatic system of traveling is one of the greatest improvements of the day.”

The system was not a commercial success however and was abandoned in 1873. The tube, cars, blower and digging machine, used to bore the tunnel, remained until around 1918 when they were destroyed by the building of the electric subway system.
An interesting system indeed.

Keep our sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

You gotta love Youtube!
This segment of Pete's Garage shows the details and workings of a steam powered motorcycle from 1896.
This is one sweet machine.
Would love to take spin, or two, or three!
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ