Everybody likes electrostatic machines!
No  Steampunk scientific laboratory should be without one.
Jake von Slatt's amazing Steampunk Workshop has a 5 part series of posts with detailed instructions for making a classic Wimshurst Machine like this one:

Using common materials, he details all the steps to create one of these archetypal machines to amaze your visitors and shock your family members.

Invented in 1880 by James Wimshurst these machines were used:

by scientists and experimenters investigating electrostatics but also, and more significantly, by the medical profession. Wimshurst machines with multiple sets of disks were employed to excite X-ray tubes used in early medical imaging. Smaller Wimshurst machines were also employed to apply electric shocks directly to the patient. While it is unlikely that these shock treatments actually helped the patients of the day, once you get a chance to play with your own Wimshurst machine you will surely understand how a patient might believe that the machine must be doing something!

Check it out.

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

Jake's Wimshurst Machine and How to Build It!

Part 1 - Overview, Materials, and Tools

When assembling a laboratory, the gentleman or lady experimenter should be sure to include a Wimshurst electrostatic generating machine. Not only will this device serve tirelessly for investigations in the field of natural philosophy, interesting parlor games such as the electric kiss are also possible! Herein we will demonstrate the construction of such a Wimshurst machine with materials easily acquired from your local home center and hardware store.

Introduction:

Electrostatic machines have always seemed a little like magic to me. I've worked and played with electronics since I was about 6 years old, so I have a thorough understanding of induction and electromagnetism. However, electrostatics are a different thing entirely. These machines that create high voltage charges don't have the familiar coils of copper wire, permanent magnets, and commutators of conventional generators. They are made from brass, glass, and wood, and look more mechanical then electrical. But the coolest thing about electrostatic machines is that you can feel them working. As you begin to crank a Wimshurst machine you will hear it start to crackle and hiss with energy, you will smell the sharp scent of ozone produced and you'll feel the hair on your arm stand up as the Leyden jars charge.

Functional Overview:

The main components of a Wimshurst Influence machine are a pair of counter rotating disks with metal strips or sectors, a pair of charge collecting combs, and a pair of neutralizing bars with conductive brushes that contact the sectors. We're all familiar with the static shocks we receive after getting up from our seat and touching a door knob when the weather is dry. That act of separating your posterior from your chair causes a charge imbalance; a Wimshurst machine is essentially an idealized series of posteriors and chairs endlessly sitting and standing with a pair of collecting comb to gather the charge produced so that something useful may be done with it.
Our machine will be built from materials readily available at your local home center and hardware store and can be assembled using common hand tools. The most complicated operations will include some soldering but you will soon discover that attaching brass balls and rods in this manner is much easier then soldering integrated circuits or working with surface mount devices. However, it will require a somewhat larger iron and perhaps a small torch.

Continued at the link...

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 is the text of a short speech that I gave as part of the open house for the new Protospace here in Calgary  yesterday.  Along with Monica Willard of SASS we were invited to give talks on Steampunk.  It was well received and seems to have got a lot of "wheels turning".
You can see more about Protospace at their website and Facebook pages.
http://www.protospace.ca/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/43079798204/

The speech I gave is based on a my musings from last Sunday.

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

Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is an honour to be able to join in the festivities to mark the opening of this new home for Protospace.
It's also great to see so many Steampunks in the room today.

I can tell you that many of us are really looking forward to getting our hands on the fantastic equipment Protospace has to offer.  Oh the possibilities! 

Now the more I wear my Steampunk clothes out in public, after the obligatory "Why are you dressed like that?", the more I get asked "What is Steampunk anyway?"

I've given a variety of answers. Things like; it is neo-victorian, or quasi-victorian, or an alternate history, or techno-fantasy.

Or... It is like the Wild-Wild-West and Sherlock Holmes movies, or the stories of Jules Verne or H.G.Wells etc.

While these are all reasonable catch phrases to use to describe Steampunk, they are just that, "catch phrases", and not really  a very informative description or explanation. When I get a request for more information, I usually fall back on the traditional "What If" comments...

"What if Babbage's mechanical computer had worked."
or
"What if the technological development had stopped with Steam?" or things like that.

This difficulty with explaining Steampunk, is not an uncommon problem. Anyone who has ever looked up "What is Steampunk?" on Google will turn up many pages worth of different descriptions and explanations.

So why is it so difficult to distill Steampunk down to a neat and tidy explanation?

It should be easy to explain, the "What ifs" and Neo-Victorian costuming should be enough but it doesn't feel right, it is too simplistic.

I think it's because the Steampunk scene is actually a "World" in the big sense of that word. It is not only a costume style, or an alternative music scene, or a design aesthetic. Steampunk encompasses all of these, as well as the diversity and complexity of the social Goth and Punk movements. It is also 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, or a basement tinkerer's thing.

There is vastly more here that should be explained. Steampunk is of surprising interest 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, or watching Youtube videos of old steam engines, airships and early motor cars, and becoming intimately acquainted with the smell of brasso, leather,steam heated oil, and coal smoke.

I've noticed an interesting pattern, when there is one Steampunk there will shortly be more!
The same can be said about cockroaches of course, but hey...

Once people see 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.

My own reasons for being active in the Steampunk Scene are probably not the same as anyone elses, and like most things in life, our motivations are idiosyncratic, 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 everyday lives, and perhaps, just as futile.

A better way, is to contrast the Steampunk Worlds with our everyday world. I'm going to do that through two of the great pillars of invention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Thomas Alva Edison and Nicola Tesla were men of outstanding genius and creativity, but, they were radically different in how they worked and how they saw progress and invention.

Here is a fine collection of pages.
Most of the works of Jules Verne are here translated into English and several other languages.
There is also a ton of information and links to Jules Verne information, studies and academic papers.
Check it out!

Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection 


This page has all 118 of the original illustrations from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.
There is a similar page for every Verne tale!

The Illustrated Jules Verne Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1866-69)

Definitely worth a few hours of perusal.

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

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:
----
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