Steampunk Saturday: OpTikap for your Hands-Free Aether Navigation Needs

I've seen my share of Steampunk concoctions, ray guns made from Nerf pistols, steam-powered still-suits, and a bevvy of bustiered airship pirates, but what interests me most is where fantasy actually overlaps history. Among history's oddities I've covered gas masks for horses and headgear with a reading lamp, and now I'm moving on to the fabulous and (apparently) short-lived OpTikap.

Essentially, OpTikap was a newsboy cap with an attached, flip-up, set of sunglasses. Yes, even though the picture appears to have clear lenses, the manufacturer promised that "OpTies" would protect the wearer from strong sunlight, headlight glare, and dust. I imagine they'd be just the thing for the hardworking airship mechanic, how else should you protect your eyes while clambering up the rigging to secure a loose spar?

For those wanting to build their own OpTies, check out the description from the 1919 issue of The Clothier and Furnisher below:

Steampunk Saturday - Attack by Airship!

If the commander of the air-ship desires to make his heaviest attack upon a steamship, he will turn the head of his ship earthward and glide just as does a volplaning aeroplane.

An image from the June, 1913 issue of Everybody's Magazine depicting an airship descending on a steamship for an attack in the style of Fritz Lang. Add a bit of Victoriana and you've got a steampunk scene worthy of H. G. Wells. A couple words in the caption stick out to me. Firstly "volplaning" and then the archaic spelling of "aeroplane".

At the time of this article, volplane would have drawn the derision of word-snobs in the same way their modern progeny shudder at trendy words of our era. It is an anglicized version of the French vol plané which translates to "gliding flight". A description of the movement of an airship in an era when airships were so new as not to have language to describe their behavior. Evidence of this comes from the fact that the first usage cited by Merriam-Webster was in 1909, just four years before this article ran.

Likewise, aeroplane is an archaic form of the modern English "airplane". It is an anglicized version of the French aéroplane. Its first cited usage was much earlier, in 1873. That makes perfect sense, you don't need words to describe the behavior of something that hasn't been invented yet!

Steampunk Saturday - Airships over Trains

"Gee, Bill! What desperate chances a feller must have took to beat them railroad  trains they used to have."

Life Magazine, July 28, 1904

A new turn on hitching a ride in a boxcar, this time steampunk style! Makes me wonder what the life of a steampunk hobo would be like!

Steampunk Saturday - A Flying Ocean Liner (1927)

In an era when the only way to travel across the Atlantic (or Pacific) was by ocean liner, the thought of intercontinental air travel seemed fantastic and far-off. In fact, the only thing designers could agree on was that air travel across the ocean would be facilitated by the ability to make a safe water landing. World War I had featured a few flying boats, showing that taking off and landing on water was a possibility and utilizing the ocean as a runway meant that the need for the construction of expensive infrastructure (like aerodromes, runways, roads, and so forth) could be avoided. Thus, the concept of trans-Atlantic tourism by flying ocean liner was born, but it was far from becoming a reality.

The first mock-ups looked a little like a cross between Nemo's Nautilus and a flying fish. The craft was a biplane (of sorts) with eight engines and two decks. The first real trial runs for trans-Atlantic flying boat service wouldn't take place until the 1930's when Pan AM and BOAC made runs between Newfoundland and Foynes and passenger service didn't start until the 40's.

The era of the flying boat was a short one, though. World War II stopped leisure travel almost as soon as the first successful passenger runs had been made. When the war came to an end and the mess it created had been cleared away, the availability of good air infrastructure meant there wasn't a big need for landing on water. The military had built runways and airports throughout continental Europe and the UK. Who wanted to take a flight to the coast, land offshore, take a tender to the port, and then catch a train to their final destination when you simply could fly there? We were entering the era of fast and air travel was fast. Ah, I guess there's no nostalgia when the thing you're nostalgic for hasn't been lost yet.

I know that this image from the January 1927 issue of Popular Science is more dieselpunk than steampunk, but it still gets my imagination going. It's got a real Hayao Miyazaki thing going, a style that makes me think of far-flung island kingdoms where diesel and feudalism coexist and adventure is on the air.

Steampunk Saturday - The California Tank

Behold the tank as imagined by designers in California back in 1917. The design steals from the British tanks present on the battlefields of World War I with one exception, a single front wheel and armor that would make it utterly useless on the battlefield. Even the article in Popular Mechanics stated that the California design would be hopeless in a landscape of shell craters, obstacles, and trenches. Still, it does look a little like the love-child of H. G. Wells and Leonardo Da Vinci. Worthy steampunk fodder, I'd say.

Steampunk Saturday - Perpetual Motion Machines

It's not surprising that perpetual motion machines have fascinated crackpot inventors since before Leonardo da Vinci. Mankind loves the idea of something for nothing. It's what drives us to cut coupons, buy two-for-one deals, and believe burning fossil fuels couldn't possibly impact the environment. Perpetual motion is the Fountain of Youth of the inventor's world, undying power - mechanical immortality, and it drew the attentions of notables such as Robert Boyle (of Boyle's Law fame) and Nikola Tesla. In the end, like the Fountain, perpetual motion proved to be nothing but a myth, a lovely idea that hucksters and hoaxers used to part suckers from their hard-earned cash.

A collection of perpetual motion machines as shown in the October 1920 issue of Popular Science

In 1920 Popular Science Magazine printed an article driving another stake in the heart of the mythological beast, but the beast that is perpetual motion survived. In 1977 Emil T. Hartman patented a magnetic system with the distinctly unromantic acronym of SMOT which purported to change magnetic energy into kinetic energy which exceeded the amount of required to power the magnets. It never has worked. And, less you see the fad of perpetual motion as dead and gone, as recent as 2006 Steorn Ltd. claimed to have created a magnetic device which would withstand scientific scrutiny, in 2009 the jury of scientists they solicited stated the device did not work.

The facts are interesting, but this is a Steampunk Saturday post and, as such, we should take a look at something that looks like it could have come from the mind of Jules Verne or H. G. Welles. Not to disappoint, I give you mass-transit done perpetual motion-style.

From the October 1920 issue of Popular Science Magazine, an outtake supposedly from the September issue of the Galaxy Illustrated Magazine

Though Popular Science didn't reveal the inventor's name a search showed that an article regarding perpetual motion and "self-moving carriages riding on conical wheels" appeared in the September 1871 issue of The Galaxy Illustrated Magazine and I even managed to find a line drawing of one of the carriage cars. Unfortunately, Google's repository of scanned ephemera doesn't contain the issue of interest. I'll keep looking, maybe it will appear eventually. Regardless, if you need a topic for your steampunk crackpot scientist to obsess over, perpetual motion just might do the trick!

From the September 1871 issue of the Galaxy Illustrated Magazine

Steampunk Saturday - Tide and Time

E. G. Fischer's Tide Calculating Machine No. 1

Fresh from one of Charles Babbage's dreams comes this mechanical beauty. In 1905 the US faced a problem. Its influence was spreading across the globe, exported to places like Venezuela and Panama, on the decks of dreadnoughts in what Teddy Roosevelt would call The Great White Fleet under the moniker of "gunboat diplomacy", but these seagoing behemoths became useless if they ran aground while coming into port. What was needed was an accurate and fast way of calculating the depth of a harbor at any certain point in time, and that is where E. G. Fischer's little thinking machine came into play.

The instrument, touted as "a most intricate and wonderful machine" was encoded with information obtained through human observations and allowed an operator to set 19 variables on its dials, then turn a crank to get predictions on tides at a specific point for which it had been programmed at any desired time. In 1905 when this article ran in Popular Mechanics an updated version of the tide calculator was being produced, a more accurate version which would take 39 variables into consideration when making calculations, be powered by clockwork rather than hand-crank, and print its readouts as curves on a paper tape.  This improvement, dubbed Tide Predicting Machine No. 2, would finally come to fruition in 1912, a more massive and industrial beast for the dawning age of mechanization that would come with World War I.

E. G. Fischer's Tide Calculating Machine No. 2

Either machine would be perfectly at home on Captain Nemo's Nautilus, a ticking brain to help plot his terrorist takeover of Earth's oceans. Right there in the wheel house, the first officer setting the dials and reading off the results so that his commanding officer could decide when best to make his move.

Steampunk Saturday - The Mother of Airplanes!

The article in Popular Mechanics dubbed this "The Mother of Airplanes", probably because they hadn't coined the word carrier back in October of 1925 when it ran. It reminds me of something I drew in grade school, complete with little biplanes and ships steaming toward some conflagration in  foreign land. Note the tail cannons mounted below the landing deck on the airship? Poised to blow the rudder right off the tail and send the blimp into a horrible uncontrolled circuit above the enemy battlefield that takes the ship through withering fire until someone gets lucky and sends her plummeting earthward.

Still, I love the idea. It appeals to my inner Jules Verne, I imagine the captain's quarters to be Victorian, filled with dark wood accents and a good silver service. The engines are powered by aether, of course. A process created and perfected by your good captain; harnessed for his plans to take over the world...

Steampunk Saturday - A Mask for the Dog and the Horse...

Yes, even man's best friend can be saved from gas attack with the right mask! I have to say that the top horse looks a little like some prehistoric creature, half horse and half elephant. Most of the time you think of airships and mechanical steeds, but these were pretty steampunk if you ask me.

Steampunk Saturday - Goggles, Goggles, Goggles!

July's Steampunk Saturday is all about the eye protection. Never board your airship without a good pair of goggles, my friends. These fine examples are from the 1905 Saks Automotive Supply catalog.

Steampunk Saturday - A Mask for All Occasions

It's the second Saturday of the month and that means Steampunk Saturday! Here's an image from the May 1921 issue of Popular Mechanics that would look right at home on the set of Iron Skies. Fresh from the hell of the World War I trenches, the American military had mustard gas on the brain and this little number was their answer to the horrors of chemical warfare. Me? I see this being worn by a mad scientist, probing the mysteries of the aether or a high-altitude airship raider.