An Ideal Husband Part 3, or "A happy ending after all"

You may recall that the movie version of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" is a terrible adaptation, apart from the costumes. Not satisfied, and trying to get the taste out my mouth, I found an old tape of the 1947 version at a marvelous video store that has that sort of thing (tapes, I mean). Even with the poor image quality, muddy sound, and occasional suspenseful moments where it looked like the tape might break, it was a much better viewing experience, because it was a much better movie.

Basically, it was the play. They moved a few scenes and greatly condensed most of the ending, but it held up well. Lord Goring was charming, Mrs. Cheveley was slimy, and the other characters were quite good as well. I liked Miss Mabel, and unlike in the other version, they left her a funny, clever, and minor character. I hate when screenwriters feel the need to make minor female characters show up all over the story and take over (Arwen). But I digress.

I only had a couple of problems with it. There are spoilers in here, so go read the play. I've turned them a parchmenty yellow color, so you can highlight them and read if you want. First, the tremendous condensation of the ending left almost no time for the charming scenes between Lord Goring and Mabel. Her impatience to get Goring to propose to her, and her scolding of him, is so funny in the play, and it was largely left out. I suppose that's minor, but still...

The other problem is also pretty minor, but I find it annoying. Here's a bunch of spoilers. In the play, Lady Chiltern sends Goring a letter asking his help, which Mrs. Cheveley finds, and being a bad person herself, assumes meant she was having an affair with him. After Goring makes Mrs. Cheveley give him the other letter she has, she reveals she has pocketed Lady Chiltern's letter, and runs off. The ending is rather suspenseful because just when Sir Chiltern decides to stick to his guns, and Lord Goring has succeeded in keeping his past a secret, Mrs. Cheveley is scheming away to ruin the Chilterns' marriage again. In both movies, they have Mrs. Cheveley keep Lady Chiltern's letter a secret, and tell Lord Goring she has it after they all go to watch Sir Chiltern give his speech to Parliament (not in the play). While this is a more simple "good guys think they're safe but then the villain has one last trick" twist, I like the extra suspense of knowing her scheme the whole time, and hoping their success won't be ruined, and wondering how they'll get out of it. It works OK either way, but I like the play better. Also, showing the speech in Parliament is boring! It works fine in the play where it cuts to them back at home talking about what a great speech it was, while the audience knows the trouble that the letter could still bring.

Overall, though, it's a pretty good adaptation, and a pretty good movie.

"Steam Airships (Real Ones)" or "They said it couldn't be done!"

So, while I'm writing a steampunk story, I've been getting all these gloomy nay-sayers telling me you couldn't really have steam-powered airships. Now, obviously, the water tank would be pretty heavy, and you'd have to have a really good condenser so you don't boil all your water out into the atmosphere, but those are just details. What is even cooler, as this page shows, is that you can actually use steam as your lift gas!

This eliminates the danger of running a coal fire under a giant bag of hydrogen (anyone who's ever ridden on a steam train can tell you about the burning cinders blowing around). Also, it is a much cheaper option for pirate crews and the like. Your balloon and its boiler could be their own closed system, with the steam trap pipes dumping the condensed steam back into the boiler. A pressure valve would turn the steam off to prevent the balloon from bursting, and turn it back on as you gain altitude and the temperature drop condenses the steam at a faster rate. You could combine steam and other lift gases perhaps, in separate envelopes, since you would need a pretty big balloon to displace the weight of the boiler, the water tank, the coal or oil, your crew, and all your weapons, and a bigger steam balloon would necessitate a bigger water tank and more weight.

The next question I would try to answer is whether you ought to use normal steam or "dry" or superheated steam. Dry steam can perform an enormous amount of work, but is it lighter? It's hotter, so it's probably less dense. You just need to send the steam back through a separate section of the boiler to get it hotter. Jay Leno explains a bit about a compact version of this technology in his video about the amazing Doble Steam car. If you were going to use steam power to run your propellers as well, you certain would like to have a superheater.

So, I would just like to say, "They said it couldn't be done! But I'll show them all! Mwahahahaaaa!" (fires lightning cannon from airship)

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!