While we’re on the topic of electricity, Mr Rice wrote to point out the beautiful Wimshurst Machine recently displayed at Bristol Dorkbot by Mr Low.  Wimshurst Machines are a type of electrostatic generator, developed sometime in the 1880′s by the inventor of the same name.

Why so interesting?  Well, they combine a few of my loves and interests in Steampunk – it features beautiful but relatively simple technology (two disks rotating close to each other), was a big step forwards in understanding at the time (the Victorian era) and last but definitely not least – it can generate big purple sparks!

There’s a very indepth page here all about the technical side of the Wimshurst Machines, and of particular interest is the tutorial aspect to it – make your own!  The links page is utterly amazing too – pictures of 2m (6.7′) diameter machines that create so much voltage, that leyden jars can’t handle it and giant copper spheres were used instead!  Lovely stuff.

Tesla’s been getting a lot more publicity recently, and that makes me smile.  A wonderful, unappreciated inventor of so many things, and inadvertantly probably the greatest force in ending the steam-centric age and ushering in electricity!  A world treasure, and just an all round facinating character – Fortean Times did an article on him only recently, though as I’m not a subscriber I cannot see much more than the first of 5 pages.  However, if you’d like something a bit more moving-picture based, there’s a half hour, 80′s documentary on Tesla over at the Internet Archive.  (There seems to be some conspiracy theory tags on it – it’s not related to that, as far as I can see.  You may ignore as you wish.) Were it not for Tesla, we’d not have so many of the linchpins of the modern world – but also of the richness of our fictional world.  Mad scientists with giant tesla coils have become such a mainstay, that we can barely imagine an over-the-top scientific genius without one.  Thanks to reader Charles to give me another excuse to post about the master of electricity.

When I was at Futurismic blog today, imagine my surprise when I saw a little picture of an airship blinking at me from the sidebar. I couldn’t help but click. It was the cover of a novel by Mr Tobias Buckell, called Crystal Rain (Amazon.co.uk hardback, paperback apparently out soon too).  Set in a devolved non-earth world cut off after a wormhole collapse, the two cultures have an uneasy truce.  More interest to me, however, is the fact that the technology level has reverted to rifles, airships and steamships!  There’s even a snowtank.  Sounds like skewed Steampunk flavour to me!

“Cautious, they followed the destruction inward. To walk over the hot ground, they bound their feet with aloe and arm-sized leaves. They choked from the smoke. When they could walk into the destruction no longer, they turned around and found a weary-looking man sitting on a steaming metal boulder. He wore a top hat, a long trench coat, and black boots. His eyes were gray, his dreadlocks black, and his face ashen. It was as if this man had not seen sun in all his life, but was born brown once. He spoke gibberish to them, then touched his throat several times until the hunters understood his words. “Where am I?”"

The authors site is here, and you can download the first 1/3 of the book to read right there.  There’s a review over at the Scifi channel, and an interview at the Speculist, but I’m sure there are more out there.

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Mr Huang (Crabfu) very kindly pointed out this video on YouTube for the game Wachenröder, a Japanese language RPG/strategy game for the Sega Saturn. This is a video of the introduction to the game (a little meandering) showing some beautiful Steampunk backdrops – murky steamtrain stations, peculiar airship-variants, and silly-sized artillery. The game itself (there’s a little ingame footage at the end) looks like a turn based, grid based combat RPG, with an isometric view and cutting to a closeup, almost cell shaded, sequence for the individual hits. The combat apparently has a nice tweak to it where you can charge up your weapons to attack more powerfully, but you run the risk of a boiler explosion!

There’s some lovely concept art here, and apparently should you manage to find the game for your Saturn, you can find a translation into English over at GameFAQs. It’s spoken of quite highly, and it’s a shame it’s not been picked up for a sequel on one of the more recent machines.

A very shiny, peculiar, motorised tricycle with absurd amounts of copper plating – so terribly shiny!  Mr Suba pointed it out, unsure of it’s Steampunk qualities, and to be honest, it’s borderline.  I do however like the very steamengine inspired colour scheme, as well as the general low-level absurdity.  The fact that it’s actually rather large (a 27″ front wheel) confuses my expectations of a tricycle too.  More photographs and technical information at The Kneeslider, and QDM blog (one of the photographs has a lady who’s likely to catch cold in that barn!)  If they could just oversize that front wheel by 200% or so…

Isn’t he delightful! Kropserkel have been at it again, not content to just make marvelously ornate metal ‘lightsword’ handles as if owned by Nemo himself, or satisfied by making some of the most Steampunk rayguns I have ever laid eyes on – they have created two of the most characterful stop motion Steampunk robots that I imagine could ever be made! Created from mostly found parts, and articulate down to the finest joints, they were made by Mr Nelson Costa, and should all go well, they’ll be used at some point to make a stop motion animation by the generous gentleman who informed me of them, Mr S Wickett.

Oh, how I’d love to see the results! What mischief could the 150 year old artificial human, and his companion, Henry Ford’s first robot, get up to I wonder?
Look out too for the ‘working sprung clock‘ that looks like it’s broken, but isn’t, and the ‘Steampunk Star Doll‘ that lacks limbs but makes up for it in cuteness. Thank you so much, Mr Wickett – I hope you get to animate these sooner rather than later, and please convey my admiration to your friend!

Mr Anderson was apparently inspired, and created a big lovely pile of cog and cable brushes for use with the Adobe Illustrator package.  Better still, he’s released the bunch of them as a freebie!  For those of you with a more illustrative Steampunk bent, these will most likely be a bundle of ::coggy joy::!

Thank you so much, Mr Anderson – your site is well named.

Oh my. The above clock, is the 250th anniversary masterpiece from the Vacheron Constantin Swiss Watchmakers company. It’s called L’Esprit des Cabinotiers, and it’s craftmanship is beyond telling. It starts out as a beautifully engraved rose-golden sphere, and only at the urging of the owner (s/he who knows the secret) it delicately unfolds its lotus-like petals to reveal a mindblowingly ornate clockwork timepiece shielded by a previously-unheard of sized sapphire crystal. It’s almost magical in its elegant mechanical ballet, but it’s like a Steampunk artifact come to life. It’s one of a kind, and it sold in auction for nearly two million dollars. That’s a very big number. Read more at Watchisimo Times, or at Network54. It’s just stunning.  [edited for silly apostrophe misuse.]

Were my jaw able to drop any further, then I’d be watching my lower mandible make it’s very own Journey to the Centre of the Earth – goodness gracious me, if the Steampunk Treehouse isn’t a simply marvelous sounding project!

“The Steampunk Tree House is representative of a mutually beneficial relationship between people and nature: humans living in harmony with the planet and its natural elements. The House component itself is built of recycled wood, styled after the Victorian age of architecture, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, combined with the organic elements of nature. It’s a house of mystery, a surreal otherworldly décor that invites its inhabitants to leave behind personal items, figurative pieces of themselves, memories of their childhood innocence, and invites them to release their thoughts and messages to be scribbled on the walls.”

A 30′ (9.2m) tall metal tree with steam instead of sap flowing through it’s channels and a wood and metal house nestled within it.  A roving veritable steam gardener, in the form of the Kinetic Steam Works will provide regular applications of steam, so that the tree’s pipes puff with fluffy white scald.  Inside, they claim a veritable treasure trove of gimcracks, trinkets and tiny ephemera tucked into shelves and drawers, as well as surreal paintings adorning the walls.

Odd but more lovely than I could hope to imagine.  I wish this project all the luck in the world and my spirit, if not my body, will be with it on the playa.  Thank you so much, Mr Payphone.

I love science kits, I really do – I can’t help it.  It saddens me a little when the cog kits I get are in dayglo orange, however and emblazoned with assurances that it’s not suitable for under 6 months.  However, there seems to be a range of science kits in Japan that suit me right down to the ground – Gakken Adult Science Kits and magazine feature the above Edison style phonograph kit, a Stirling engine kit and a steam car kit.  All three I approve of highly in principle.  The phonograph uses cheap plastic cups as your recording cylinder, ready for playback with a little weight modification.  As you can imagine, I doubt that the sound will be up to Dolby 5.1, but I adore it for the Steampunk hands-on nature of it.  It seems you can buy these things in the US from Very Cool Things, but I’m unsure if other places do them cheaper (there was one ebay auction I saw, but I doubt it’ll last).

And lastly – it greatly appeals to me to be hosting a party, complete with cheap plastic cups, only to tell my guests later that their cups actually contain recorded messages!  Silly, I realise, but fun.  *chuckles*  Oh, if anyone can read Japanese, and finds out anything more about this item, then I’d love to know – it seems to be a film projector kit?