Adventures in Victorian Steampunkland (London)

Merry Christmas (it counts until tomorrow!) and Happy New Year, everyone. As my first post this year, I will relate something I did last year. Three weeks before Christmas I went with my aunt to England, and Paris, via the Chunnel. We ran all over and did touristy things, but explored a lot too. We became hopelessly lost on Hampstead Heath, in the rain, and I got trenchfoot because the soles of my old boots wore through. A tragedy - they will be missed. (My boots, not my feet). Going off the name (since changed) of a street in a book we both read and enjoyed (Ghost Map) we wandered the narrow streets behind Picadilly Circus until we found the site of a pump responsible for London's worst ever cholera epidemic. The pub far in the background is the John Snow, named for the man who used data collected from the incident to prove that cholera is a water-borne disease.

So I guess that's touristy. I'm sure I needn't tell you how thrilled I was to be in the middle of so much history, particularly Victorian history. Even the tube station near our hostel (Palmer's Lodge, a former Victorian mansion) was steampunk. It was built in 1863 as one of the the first underground

stations, and it looks just as it did then, but grungier and with new advertisements on the walls. Even the fire extinguishers are inside fancy wood and glass cabinets.

The station's entrance had this war monument with an artillery shell from the first World War. All over London, and Paris, there are war monuments, mostly from WWI, and also WWII. The ones in Paris really got to me, since you almost can't walk down a street without seeing a plaque telling about someone who died on that spot, and what they were doing for the war. I'll have more on war monuments later.

First, more about steampunk! The highlight of the scientific expedition portion of the trip for me was, of course, the London Science Museum. I wanted to go there because I knew they had a difference engine, Charles Babbage's amazing steam-powered clockwork calculation machine. I believe at one time they had an exhibit of a modern analytical engine based on his design, but not when I went. Here I am standing next to Babbage's Difference Engine no. 1.

And on the right is the engine itself. You can see the numbered gears and the columns of other gears that somehow perform calculations. Honestly, it might as well be magic. I only understand it a tiny bit, but this is the little guy that kicked off steampunk as a literary genre.

The difference engine was in a room called "The making of the modern world." It was a huge jumble of wonderful things like dynamos and cars, a penny farthing bike, lenses, telephone, an Avro (One of Britain's WWI biplanes) an AC motor built by Tesla himself, and a box containing cross sections of different kinds of undersea telegraph cables. The museum also had rooms and rooms devoted to history of flight, with some really old planes, and models of even more planes, and airships. They had a flight suit from 1909, and even a real autogyro!