A Christmas tree for you all!
With a little help from Nikola Tesla

May your holidays be merry and your new years be safe and joyous!
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

This wonderful volume by Anthony J. Whiten is filled with 276 pages of practical information and techniques for repairing clockwork of all sizes from wristwatches to grandfather clocks and, by extension, clocks worthy of Hugo Cabret!

Well illustrated with clear line drawings which help to make the practical text very clear. These illustrations are a wonderful source of gear and tool illustrations for other things too

One of the most interesting parts of this book for me, was how simple the tools are! Most of them can be made very easily and the instructions for doing so are included in the text.

If you ever wanted to take a clockwork mechanism apart (pretty much all of us I bet!) and THEN PUT IT BACK TOGETHER AGAIN and get it to actually WORK(!?!), this is the book for you.

It also brings the skill and craftsmanship of the watchmaker and designer of yore into perspective with our modern mass produced gadgets.

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

Title
Repairing Old Clocks and Watches

Author
Anthony J. Whiten

Publisher
Van Nostrand Reinhold Company

Date
1979

ISBN
0-442-24730-3

Examples
From the introduction:
"You can buy watches today on which the time is displayed redly, as seen through the eyes of an overhung (sic) wrestler; or you can buy clocks on which the figures march past on horizontal display with relentless precision. These devices are probably manufactured for the use of those who, for reasons known only to themselves, want to know the exact time. The watches and clocks described in this book, were made for such people in their day. Now, however, they provide a leisure time interest, and will still tell us the time as near as most of us want to know it."

An example of the clear warnings in the text:
"All these specimens, of which you are looking at just one, have a mainspring. This may be wound up. Any attempt to dismantle without doing something about this will be either hilarious, disappointing, crippling or even fatal. The timepiece may be harmed, and so may you. Therefore let down the power of the mainspring now." Followed by clear instructions on just how to go about that safely.

The Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg

Written in the 1985 by Harold G. Dick and Douglas H. Robinson, this book is a real gem.

Harold Dick was an American engineer assigned as a technical liaison to the Zeppelin Company in Germany. Harold worked for the Goodyear-Zeppelin Company in Akron Ohio. His 5 years working in Germany during the turbulent 30s saw the rise of the greatest of all airships, the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg. Despite the rising militarism and despotism of the NAZIs he had access to every aspect of the Zeppelin operation and flew on nearly every flight of the great airships. Keeping meticulous records of every aspect of their operation.

This book is a goldmine of information on how these vast machines were designed, maintained and actually operated.

Narrowly missing the fateful last flight of the Hindenburg, he describes the reaction to this tragedy technically as well as socially and politically. He also describes the changes made to the successor to the Hindenburg, the Graf Zeppelin II, which unfortunately was never flown commercially and was broken up to be turned into fighters during the war.

The book is illustrated with lots of photographs and diagrams, many taken by the author himself and never before published. There are also translations of original documents, maps and diagram aplenty.

While not really being Steampunk this book does give the reader a real taste for what might have been in the best tradition of our favourite "what ifs".

I've tagged this post "Flight Engineer" because it has lots of good information useful as reference for the design.

Title
The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships
Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg
Author
Harold G. Dick
Douglas H. Robinson
Publisher
Smithsonian Institute Press
Washington
Date
1985

ISBN:0-87474-364-8

Keep your sight glass full and your firebox trimmed.
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

I love the richness of the language here!
Check out the whole book available online at:
Dictionary of Victorian London

Enjoy
Keep your sightglass full and your firebox trimmed
KJ

Twice Round the Clock, or The Hours of the Day and Night in London,
by George Augustus Sala, 1859

FIVE O'CLOCK P.M.-THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS' VAN.

THE English are the only "Clubable" people on the face of the earth. Considering the vast number of clubs which are more or less understood to flourish all over the Continent, and in the other hemisphere, it is within possibility that I shall be accused of having uttered something like a paradox; but I adhere to my dictum, and will approve it Truth. Not but that, concerning paradoxes themselves, I may be of the opinion of Don Basilio in the "Barber of Seville," expressed with regard to calumny. "Calumniate, calumniate," says that learned casuist; "calumniate, and still calumniate, something will always come of it." So, in a long course of paradoxes, it is hard but that you shall find a refreshing admixture of veracity.

Do you think you can call the French a "clubable nation," because in their revolutions of '89 and '48 they burst into a mushroom crop of clubs? Do you think that the gentleman whom a late complication of political events brought into connection with a committee of Taste, consisting of twelve honest men assembled in a jury-box, and whom, the penny-a-liners were kind enough to inform us, was in his own country known as "Bernard le Clubbiste," could be by any means considered as what we called a "club-man?" Could he be compared with Jawkins or Borekins, Sir Thomas de Boots, Major Pendennis, or any of the Pall Mall and St. James's Street bow-window loungers, whom the great master of club life has so inimitably delineated? No more than we could parallelise the dingy, garlic- reeking, revolutionary club-room on a three-pair back at the bottom of a Paris court-yard, with its "tribune," and its quarrelsome patriots, to the palatial Polyanthus, the Podasokus or the Poluphlosboion. French clubs ever have been - and will be again, I suppose, when the next political smash affords an opportunity for the re-establishment of such institutions - mere screeching, yelling, vapouring "pig-and-whistle" symposia; full of rodomontading stump orators, splitting the silly groundlings' ears with denunciations of the infamous oppressors of society ...

In Imperial Paris there are yet clubs of another sort existing, though jealously watched by a police that would be Argus-eyed if its members were not endowed with a centuple power of squinting. There are clubs - the "Jockey," the "Chemin de Fer," and establishments with great gilded saloons, and many servitors in plush and silk stockings; but they are no more like our frank English clubs than I am like Antinous. Mere gambling shops and arenas for foolish wagers; mere lounging-places for spendthrifts, sham gentlemen, gilt-fustian senators, and Imperialist patricians, with dubious titles, who [-202-] haunt club-rooms, sit up late, and intoxicate themselves with alcoholic mixtures -so aping the hardy sons of Britain, when they would be ten times more at home in their own pleasant, frivolous Boulevard cafés, with a box of dominoes, a glass of sugar-and-water, and Alphonso the garçon to bring it to them. Such pseudo-aristocratic clubs you may find, too, at Berlin and Vienna, scattered up and down north Italy, and in Russia, even, at Petersburg and Moscow, where they have "English" clubs, into which Englishmen are seldom, if ever, admitted. Some English secretaries of legation and long-legged attachés, have indeed an ex-officio entry to these continental clubs, or "cercles," where they come to lounge and yawn in the true Pall Mall fashion; but they soon grow tired of the hybrid places; and the foreigners who come to stare and wonder at them, go away more tired still, and, with droll shrugs, say, "Que c'est triste!." The proper club for a Frenchman in his café; for, without a woman to admire him or to admire, your Monsieur cannot exist; and in the slowest provincial town in France there is a dame de comptoir to ogle or be ogled. The Russian has more of the clubable element in him; but clubs will never flourish in Muscovy till a man can be morally certain that the anecdote he is telling his neighbour will not be carried, with notes and emendations, in half an hour, to the Grand Master of Police. As for the German, put him in a beer-shop, and give him a long pipe with his mawkish draught, and - be he prince, professor, or peasant - he will desire no better club; save, indeed, on high convivial occasions, when you had best prepare him a cellar, where he and his blond-bearded, spectacled fellows may sit round a wine-cask, and play cards on the top thereof.

I don't exactly know how far the English club-shoot has been grafted on the trunk of American society, but I can't believe that the club-proper flourishes there to any great extent. I like the Americans much, recognising in them many noble, generous, upright, manly qualities; but I am afraid they are too fond of asking questions - too ignorant or unmindful of the great art of sitting half an hour in the company of a man whom you know intimately, without saying a word to him, to be completely clubable. Moreover, they are a people who drink standing, delighting much to "liquor up" in crowded barrooms, and seldom sitting down to their potations - a most unclubable characteristic. All sorts of convivial and political reunions exist, I am aware, in the United States, to a high degree of organisation; and I have heard glowing accounts of the comfortable, club-[-203-]like guard-rooms and stations of the New York volunteers and firemen; but I can't exactly consider these in the light of clubs. They are not exclusive enough - not concrete enough-not subject to the rigid but salutary discipline of that Imperium in Imperio, or rather, Rempublicam in Republica, the committee of a club.



I daresay that you would very much like to know the name of the particular club, the tableau of which adorns this sheet, and would feel obliged if I would point out the portraits of individual members you would be very much pleased to be told whether it is the Carlton, the Reform, the Travellers', the Athenaeum, the Union, the United Service Senior or Junior, the Guards, the Oriental, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Parthenon, the Erectheum, the Wyndham, Whyte's, Boodle's, or the Army and Navy. No, Fatima; no, Sister Anne. You shall not be told. Clubbism is a great mystery, and its adepts must be cautious how they explain its shibboleth to the outer barbarians. Men have been expelled from clubs ere now for talking or writing about another member's whiskers, about the cut of his coat, and the manner in which he eats asparagus. I have no desire for [-214-] such club-ostracism; for though, Heaven help me, I am not of Pall Mall or St. James's, I, too, have a club whose institutes I revere. "Non me tua fercida terrent, dicta, Ferox :" I fear not Jawkins, nor all the Borekins in Borekindom; but "Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis:" I fear the awful committee that, with a dread complacency, can unclub a man for a few idle words inadvertently spoken, and blast his social position for an act of harmless indiscretion.

During the reign of her Imperial British Majesty Queen Victoria... Huzzah!
A series of entries for every year.

The Victorian Era at angelpig.net

Some examples...

1850
27 January - Birth - Edward Smith, Captain of the Titanic (d. 1912)
23 April - Death - William Wordsworth, poet (b. 1770)
1 May - Birth - Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, member of the Royal Family (d. 1942)
2 July - Death - Robert Peel, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1788)
13 November - Birth - Robert Louis Stevenson, writer (d. 1894)
-- In Memoriam AHH published: Tennyson's long poem cycle, inspired by premature grief at the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. Tennyson went on to become Poet Laureate and one of the central literary figures of the age. He was photographed on numerous occasions by his friend, Julia Margaret Cameron.
-- First bowler hat worn: Invented for James Coke, the bowler hat was midway between the formality of a top hat and the soft felt hat worn by the lower middle classes. The hat was hard, to protect the head. It became the traditional accessory of every City gent and only went out of everyday use in the 1960s.
-- Publication - Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes her sonnet cycle, Sonnets From The Portuguese. A celebration of the love between herself and fellow poet Robert Browning, it contains this famous poem, often read at weddings; which begins "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." The true-life story of their secret love, elopement and happy marriage in Italy is as romantic as the poems themselves.

1854
28 March - United Kingdom declares war on Russia - Crimean War begins.
01 August - Cholera outbreak in Broad Street Some 500 people died in only ten days from drinking infected water from the Broad Street pump in London - but nobody knew it was the drinking water that was spreading the disease until Dr John Snow began to investigate and realised it was a water- rather than an air-born infection. He had the pump sealed up and the deaths ceased. This was a break-through in medicine and was influential on later Public Health legislation; and forming the starting point for epidemiology. 2,000 people died during one week of the cholera epidemic.

6 October - The great fire of Newcastle and Gateshead is ignited by a spectacular explosion.
16 October - Birth - Oscar Wilde, writer (d. 1900)
21 October - Florence Nightingale leaves for Crimea with 38 other nurses.
04 Nov - Ms Nightingale arrives in Scutari: Florence Nightingale takes over the running of the military hospital at Scutari and transforms the conditions there. Her pioneering attitude to hygiene and dedication to nursing transformed the profession.
-- Publication - Alfred Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade
-- Publication - Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times
-- Publication - William Makepeace Thackeray's novel The Rose and the Ring

Lots more at the link.

Keep your sight glass full and your firebox trimmed.

KJ

Wow!
Found this delightful collection of  "beauty tips" at Mental Floss.
And you thought corsets were a tough fashion requirement!
You can find the original chapter of Burroughs book here:
HOW TO BE HANDSOME, 39
 
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

 How to Be Handsome: 11 Really Terrible 19th-Century Beauty Tips 
  A lot of things have changed since the 19th century. When Barkham Burroughs wrote his Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information in 1889, he devoted a full chapter to the “secrets of beauty,” and for good reason. To quote Burroughs, “If women are to govern, control, manage, influence and retain the adoration of husbands, fathers, brothers, lovers or even cousins, they must look their prettiest at all times.” Here are 11 of his tips for doing just that.

1. Bathe often(ish)…

At least once a week, but if possible, a lady should “take a plunge or sponge bath three times a week.”

2. … in a household cleaning solution.

What’s better than soap? Ammonia. “Any lady who has once learned its value will never be without it.” Just a capful or so in the bath works as well as soap and cleans the pores “as well as a bleach will do.”

3. Wash your eyes…

Nothing is as attractive as a sparkling eye. The best way to achieve this is by “dashing soapsuds into them.” If that’s not your style, perfume dropped into the eyes is a reasonable alternative. For the same bright-eyed look without the burn, “half a dozen drops of whisky and the same quantity of Eau de Cologne, eaten on a lump of sugar, is quite as effective.”

4. … but don’t wash your hair.

Water is “injurious” to the hair. Instead, wipe “the dust of the previous day” away on a towel. You can also brush your hair during any long, idle breaks in the day. 30 minutes is a good hair-brushing session.

5. And never, ever wash your face.

Simply rub the skin with “an ointment of glycerine” and “dry with a chamois-skin or cotton flannel.” One “beautiful lady” is admired who had “not washed her face for three years, yet it is always clean, rosy, sweet and kissable.”

6. And try not to wash your hands, either.

A well kept hand is soft, pale, and really, really dirty. Red hands can be relieved “by soaking the feet in hot water as often as possible,” but don’t dare touch water with your hands. As with the face, a regimen of ointment and cotton flannel should be used, and gloves worn for bathing. (Burroughs notes here that “dozens of women” with gorgeous hands “do not put them in water once a month.”)

7. Hang out naked by the window every day.

This is also called vapor-bathing, which is a different kind of vapor than the aforementioned ammonia soak, and one more likely to bring the attention of unwanted suitors. To take a proper vapor bath, “the lady denudes herself, takes a seat near the window, and takes in the warm rays of the sun.” If you’re a lady of the restless sort, dancing is advised. A good vapor bath is at least an hour long.

8. Go heavy-metal on the eyes.

Nothing says “handsome lady” like a lined lid. The proper solution is “two drachms of nitric oxid of mercury mixed with one of leaf lard.” Lacking these components, a woman may just as easily produce a nice effect with “a hairpin steeped in lampblack.”

9. Say goodbye to that fringe.

In your great-grandmother’s day, lashes had a tendency to become “unruly.” They were therefore “slightly trimmed every other day” with sharp, tiny scissors, because who wants eyelashes, anyway.

10. Suction!

Nice lips are essential to a woman’s prettiness. As early as possible, a girl should begin thinking about the shape of her lips and how it might be improved. Thin lips “are easily modified by suction,” which “draws the blood to the surfaces” and over time provides a “permanent inflation.” Thick lips “may be reduced by compression.” There are no instructions for this procedure.

11. And try not to be single.

The author’s female acquaintance, after disclosing to her favorite suitor that she had gone those three long years without using soap, found herself back on the market. A note from the gentleman read, “I can not reconcile my heart and my manhood to a woman who can get along without washing her face.”
So remember, ladies: Whatever methods are used, “it would be just as well to keep the knowledge of it from the gentlemen.” Because being married is better than ammonia-water for the complexion.