Follwing on from my recent post about the unofficial Steampunk anthem:
Just Glue Some Gears On It and Call it Steampunk
Here is an interesting web comic from Real Life  by Greg Dean.

  

This came from an interesting discussion by The Steampunk Scholar back in June of 2010.  The Steampunk Scholar is Mike Pershon, who holds a PhD in Steampunk Literature (!?! yup really!) and teaches at Grant MacEwan University.  In his post he talks about the elements of Steampunk technology and how while it is non-functional it is still interesting.

If all one had for research was the internet, you'd certainly be lead to think steampunk is just science fiction, focused as much of the art is on technology. Yet without an understanding of steampunk's regular dalliances with technofantasy, the joke of "but it doesn't really do anything" is all too appropriate.
Steampunk technology, on the whole, doesn't do anything, especially in its literary manifestation. That is to say, if you were to bring the technology of steampunk out of a book and into our world, it wouldn't work very well once it ran out of phlogiston or aether, or when you tried to invoke whatever arcane powers it runs on. It's very easy to assume that since the aesthetic device of technofantasy is pointless in terms of physical reality, it is likewise meaningless in its thematic content. Yet consider the relevance of the municipal Darwinism in Reeve's Mortal Engines, the underlying social contract theory of the living airship in Leviathan, and the complexity of constructing gender identities in The Alchemy of Stone. 

We play with technology as art, it doesn't have to do anything as long as it looks cool in the process.

I highly recommend you keep The Steampunk Scholar blog in your favourites, he has lots of great reviews and discussions there.

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

KJ

The last remaining ship of her class in the world!
Built in England and sailed to Australia where she remains to this day.
Lots of great info at the website below.
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Friends of the Cerberus Inc. which consists of enthusiasts, works hand in hand with Heritage Victoria and the National Trust of Victoria. Our sole aim is to preserve HMVS Cerberus for future generations.
HMS Cerberus 1868

Significance of HMS Cerberus

• Launched in 1868 Cerberus is the only remaining breastwork monitor class warship left in the world. Cerberus not only has its hull but also its gun turrets and its guns.
  
• Cerberus was the first of the modern battleships.
• Preceding HMS Devastation by almost three years, Cerberus was the first British warship to dispense completely with sail power and to incorporate the shallow draft.
• Cerberus was the first, and is the only remaining example, of a Monitor having a central superstructure.
• The design for the Cerberus was the first in the world to incorporate the combination of a central superstructure with fore and aft gun turrets.
• Cerberus is the only substantially intact surviving warship of any of Australia's pre-Federation colonial navies.
• Cerberus is the oldest as well as the only surviving inaugural warship, to have served in the Royal Australian Navy.
• Cerberus represented Cutting Edge Technology from the 1860's.
• Cerberus was the flagship and most powerful warship of the Victorian Navy. In addition it was the most powerful warship of any of the Australian Colonial Navies.
• Cerberus incorporated the latest developments in metallurgy, steam power, gun turrets and the use of low freeboard.
• Cerberus was the first armoured warship built for Australia.

Looking a little care worn at the moment:

This is a photo of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,  who was instrumental in helping pass a law allowing women to own their own property. The law was passed in New York in 1848.

From Wikipedia
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 – October 26, 1902) was an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman's movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the first women's rights convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized woman's rights and woman's suffrage movements in the United States.^[1]
Before Stanton narrowed her political focus almost exclusively to women's rights, she was an active abolitionist together with her husband, Henry Brewster Stanton and cousin, Gerrit Smith. Unlike many of those involved in the woman's rights movement, Stanton addressed various issues pertaining to women beyond voting rights. Her concerns included women's parental and custody rights, property rights, employment and income rights, divorce, the economic health of the family, and birth control.^[2] She was also an outspoken supporter of the 19th-century temperance movement.
After the American Civil War, Stanton's commitment to female suffrage caused a schism in the woman's rights movement when she, together with Susan B. Anthony, declined to support passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. She opposed giving added legal protection and voting rights to African American men while women, black and white, were denied those same rights. Her position on this issue, together with her thoughts on organized Christianity and women's issues beyond voting rights, led to the formation of two separate women's rights organizations that were finally rejoined, with Stanton as president of the joint organization, approximately twenty years after her break from the original women's suffrage movement.
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Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Retronaut is always a fun place to spend some quality online time.
Found this section on The Banner Women of the 1890s.

Using women on billboards for advertizing is nothing new, although they are nowhere near as elegant these days.
I've posted a few examples below, check out the link above for more.
Enjoy
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Found this blog this morning whilst whiling away a few hours out on the Aether Webs.
An Extraordinary Incident  is a collection of odd reports from Victorian newspapers, many of which are very entertaining indeed!
Alas it does not appear that the author is currently updating the blog, as its last entry is in January of this year.
Check it out.
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ 

For example from The Leicester Chronicle, Saturday 30 September 1837

 She exhibited a pair of pistols

ROMANCE IN REAL LIFE

This day fortnight an event took place in the shop of a respectable watchmaker in this town which had nearly been attended with a tragical result. The sister of a young lady who once made some stir in this town, respecting a certain hymeneal disappointment, had, it appears, for a long period received visits from the gentleman in question. She either had, or concluded she had reason for believing that the consummation would be matrimony. Suddenly, however, and, as the lady avers, without any reason assigned, the gentleman discontinued his visits. She repeatedly called at his shop and requested to see him, but either by accident or design her wishes in this respect were frustrated. If the shop-boy may be believed she more than once betrayed signs of violent agitation, and exhibited a pair of pistols.

Last Monday week she called at the shop, where she found the gentleman. She asked him if he intended to call at her house. He said no, he did not intend to call any more. At that moment she placed her hand in her pocket, and he heard the click of a pistol-lock. The sound was that of placing the weapon on full cock. She drew the pistol from her pocket, and he rushed towards her and seized it with the intention of disarming her. A struggle ensued, during which the pistol went off. The ball entered the young man’s leg just above the knee, and shattered the bone in a most dreadful manner. She immediately threw away another pistol and rushed from the shop.

The young man took up the pistol which she had thrown away, and, on examining it, found it to be loaded with ball. An application was made to the magistrates last week for a summons against the lady, and the case was heard on Friday. The young man is in a precarious state, and was so ill from the effects of his wound that it was found expedient to have the case heard in the office of the magistrates’ clerks. The above facts were stated, and the young woman was bound over to keep the peace for twelve months.—Liverpool Albion.

A great book, compiling most of the information on Airship development as of 1917.
There is also an index of every airship used in the Great War, their technical specifications and career/fate.
From the preface:

An International Register of Airships with a Compendium of Airship's Elementary Mechanics

The present volume is the result of a methodical investigation extending over a period of four years in the course of which many hundreds of English, French, Italian, German and Spanish publications and periodicals dealing with the present status as well as with the early history of airships have carefully been consulted and digested. It has thus become possible to gather under the cover of a handy reference-book a large amount of hitherto widely scattered information which, having mostly been published in, foreign languages, was not immediately available to the English speaking public.

The information thus gathered is herewith presented in two parts; one being a compendium of the elementary principles underlying the construction and operation of airships, the other constituting an exhaustive, but tersely worded register of the world's airshipping which furnishes, whenever available, complete data for every airship of 500 cubic meters and over, that has been laid down since 1834. Smaller airships are listed only if they embody unusual features.

It has been attempted to furnish here the most up-to-date information regarding the gigantic fleet of airships built by Germany since the beginning of the Great War, a feature which may, in a certain measure, repay the reader for the utter lack of data on the Allies' recent airship constructions, which had to be withheld for military reasons. A revised and enlarged edition of D'Orcy's Airship Manual, in which all the airships built during the Great War will be listed and their features duly discussed, will be issued upon the termination of the war.

Ladislas d'Orcy, New York City (U. S. A.)

Available online here:
D'Orcy'S Airship Manual 1917
There is also a PDF file scanned from a copy of the book deposited at the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY under the reference YC 68298.
Download the pdf version of the D'Orcy's Airship Manual.

Lots of detailed illustrations and period photos included.

Highly recommended if you are an airship buff (and who isn't).

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

From Chriss Cornish, of the more Vikings book blog.
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Steampunk Comics: A Reading List

Does your comic book reading need a hefty does of retro-futurism? Could your graphic novel collection use a dash of far future etherpunk western? Are your webcomic choices woefully bereft of Victorian scientists toting ray guns and having adventures?

Boy-howdy are you in luck, then!

There's quite a bit of steampunk fiction available in the good 'ol sequential media these days (as I found when last I assembled a steampunk reading list); from webcomics full of moody engineers in goggles to steampunk manga westerns set on alien planets.

Steampunk Comics Recommended Reading List
Here find a list of 20 highly recommended comics of various and sundry sort all disporting in that delightful retro-furturist speculative fiction genre we like to call...STEAMPUNK.

presented for your amusement & edification by moreVikings.
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There follows a massive list of awesome Steampunk linkage.

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