Chilly night here.
Hoping for lots of kids tonight.

May all your treats be sweet and your tricks fun.
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

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:
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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.
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 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

This video is a section of a movie called The Secret of Nikola Tesla
Produced in 1980 and directed by Krsto Papic, it stars Petar Bozovic as Nikola Tesla, Dennis Patrick as Thomas Edison and Orson Welles as J.P. Morgan.
In this scene Morgan holds a meeting between Tesla and Edison in an attempt to decide what form the new electrical systems will take.
A fascinating recreation of one of the turning points in technological history.




You can watch the entire film at YouTube here.
It is a reasonably accurate biography of Tesla from what I can see.
Keep your 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

This looks like a very interesting concept production.
Found an article about this film over at Steampunk Costume
Animator Tim Ollive and Terry Gilliam have joined forces to create a film combining puppetry, CGI, animation and old photos. The movie is basically a Steampunk Spy Story of a sort.
Here is the trailer for your viewing pleasure:



This trailer is as much a proof of concept as anything else, but it still looks very interesting indeed.
Here is a  short animation test piece for the film.

From the website of Peculiar Pictures :

A story of outstanding heroism in the face of deception, subterfuge and treachery. Conjuring up the belief that it was made forty years before film was even invented, 1884: Yesterdays Future tells of a future that might have been but never was. Directed by Tim Ollive, the film is a mix of animation, puppetry and two dimensional and three dimensional computer generated imagery (CGI) set against backgrounds created using stunning artwork, model sets and period photographs from the Hulton Picture Library division of Getty Images. Combine these idiosyncratic production techniques with a script of mind boggling ingenuity and you have a hilarious comedy film the like of which you will not have seen before. So, put your tongue firmly in your cheek, stiffen your upper lip and prepare to be shaken and stirred by 1884: Yesterdays Future.

Here is a still from the film, I would love to take a stroll down the streets of that version of  London.

Definitely going to keep an eye out for this one!
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

With my mug of hot, dark and strong, coffee in hand on this chilly Sunday morning, it is time to ponder...

The more I wear my Steampunk clothes out in public,the first question, after the obligatory "Why are you dressed like that?", is usually "What is Steampunk anyway?"

I've given a variety of answers, depending on the context. Things like; it is neo-victorian, or quasi-victorian, or an alternate history, or techno-fantasy, or like the Wild-Wild-West, Sherlock Holmes ( the movie), or the stories of Jules Verne or H.G.Wells (and others I can't recall at the moment). 

While these are all reasonable catch phrases to use to describe Steampunk, they are just that, "catch phrases", and not really a description or explanation. Consequently, I usually get a request for more information, which is where I usually fall back on the traditional comments about: "What if Babbage's engine, mechanical computer etc, had worked." or "What if the technological development had stopped with Steam?" or any of a half dozen other "What ifs".

A difficulty with explaining Steampunk, is not an uncommon problem. Looking up "What is Steampunk?" in Google will turn up many pages worth of different descriptions and explanations, long and short, most of which can be traced to elaborations on the comments above.

So why is it so difficult to distill Steampunk down to a sound bite, or even to a nice socially digestible paragraph or two?

I think it is because the Steampunk world is actually a "World" in the big sense of that word. It is not simply a costume style, alternative music scene, design aesthetic, or social subculture. Steampunk encompasses all of these, in many ways it is more diverse and complex than the Goth and Punk movements, with which it shares many costuming and social components. Not having been a member of either the Goth or Punk scenes I have not had to describe them to others, but I suspect it is just as difficult to do.

At first it seems that Steampunk should be relatively easy to put in a soundbite box, the "What ifs" and Neo-Victorian costuming are probably sufficient for most people. On further reflection it becomes apparent to me that there is vastly more here that should be explained, if only to promote our interests to others. Steampunk is surprisingly attractive to many people. People that one would not at first expect to be interested at all, are donning a corset and goggles, or a top hat and cravat, and heading out for tea at the nearest fancy hotel or quaffing a pint at an English style pub. People who would never think of taking their car apart for fun, are tearing apart old clocks and gluing and sewing their gears to their hats and delving into the arcane mysteries of Babbage's Difference Engine and watching in fascination the Youtube videos of old steam engines, airships and early motor cars.

I've noticed an interesting pattern, when there is one Steampunk there will shortly be more!
(Heh. No comments from the wags about cockroaches! )

Once people perceive that it is OK to dress up and pursue their interests, in the way the Steampunk scene allows them to do, it doesn't take long before they start to do just that.

But what is it about Steampunk that is so attractive to so many people?  It is not simply a matter of being "Goths who discovered brown" as a friend once snidely remarked. Nor is it strictly speaking a "Geek" thing or an "historical re-creation gone bad" thing, although that is part of it I think.

Why is it so hard to pick a few common elements to use in a description? My own reasons for being active in the Steampunk World aren't the same as yours or anyone elses, and like most things in life, our motivations are idiosyncratic and the result of our own history and experiences. So trying to distill "Steampunk" down to a soundbite is just as hard as doing that for our real life, and perhaps, just as futile. However the process of trying to do this may give us some insights that are otherwise lost in the complexity, and there may be some common elements that would be interesting to identify.

In future posts I'm going to describe some of my ways of looking at Steampunk that might be useful, or at least interesting.

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