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This kind of styled technology may include such fictional machines found in the works of H. G. Wells, an English author from the late 18th to the early 19th best known for the classic science fiction stories The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.
H G wells’ novels were influenced by his political view and used mostly in his early career as a writer. He sought a better way to organize society, and wrote a number of books known as ‘Utopian novels’ were he imaged all sorts of different worlds similar to our own but with different outcomes and technologies.
In the 1960’s film adaptation of ‘The Time machine’, the equipment and look of the time machine matched much of what I was looking for to use in the design of the windmill. The use of copper, leather, polished wood, colorful lights, lack of protection to the passenger and lack of any real energy source powerful enough to achieve time travel does now seem to take away any emersions we might hold towards a similar story today. But to H. G. Wells this is what he had imaged it to look like. A completely different form from modem day ideas of time; because of his lack of understanding time, space and light, he had given us a completely new style to any other pop culture time machine alongside the likes of the Delorean (Back to the Future) or the Tardis (Doctor Who).
image was taken from movies.ign.com
We can also find early Steampunk in the works of Jules Verne (a French author who helped pioneer the science-fiction genre) Some of his best known novels are A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–1870) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)
‘20 thousand leagues under the sea’ features The Nautilus, a submarine. This was something that really hadn’t been technologically explored before, and having the vessel disguised as a monster just made the idea even more intimidating.
There are a many different versions of ‘20 thousand leagues’, with just as many interpretations of the Nautilus and its captain, Nemo. The Description of the submarine Verne envisioned is given to us in the novel by Nemo himself:
“Here, M. Aronnax, are the several dimensions of the boat you are in. It is an elongated cylinder with conical ends. It is very like a cigar in shape, a shape already adopted in London in several constructions of the same sort. The length of this cylinder, from stem to stern, is exactly 70 meters, and its maximum breadth is eight meters. It is not built on a ratio of ten to one like your long-voyage steamers, but its lines are sufficiently long, and its curves prolonged enough, to allow the water to slide off easily, and oppose no obstacle to its passage. These two dimensions enable you to obtain by a simple calculation the surface and cubic contents of the Nautilus. Its area measures 1011.45 square meters; and its contents 1,500.2 cubic meters; that is to say, when completely immersed it displaces 1500.2 cubic meters of water, or 1500.2 metric tons.”
With such a clear description of how the Nautilus looks and works it’s still interesting to see other peoples takes on it. Some one of my favorite versions has to be the Nautilus from ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ both the book and the movie version.
I don’t recommend reading the novel but the design for the Nautilus is easily more interesting then the movies incorporating a giant working squid over the body.
image taken from gleeson0.demon.co.uk
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