The Real World of Victorian Steampunk

Steam Planes & Radiophones

Simon Webb

• Editorial: Pen & Sword History
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526732866
• Categoría: Technology & Engineering
• Categoría: Technology & Engineering Research & Skills

A look at the surprising nineteenth-century technology that inspires this literary and cultural movement: "I was very impressed by this book." — SF Crowsnest In recent decades, steampunk has grown from a rather obscure subgenre of science fiction into a striking and distinctive style of fashion, art, design, and even music. It is in the written word, however, that steampunk has its roots—and in this book Simon Webb explores and examines the real inventions that underpin the fantasy. In doing so, he reveals a world unknown to most people today. Webb reveals the Victorian era as a surprising place: one of steam-powered airplanes, fax machines linking Moscow and St Petersburg, steam cars traveling at over 100 mph, electric taxis, and wireless telephones. It is, in short, the nineteenth century as you've never before seen it—a steampunk extravaganza of anachronistic technology and unfamiliar gadgets. Imagine Europe spanned by a mechanical internet, a telecommunication system of clattering semaphore towers capable of transmitting information across the continent in a matter of minutes. Consider too, the fact that a steam plane the size of a modern airliner took off in England in 1894. Drawing entirely on contemporary sources, we see how little-known developments in technology have been used as the basis for so many steampunk narratives. From seminal novels such as The Difference Engine to the steampunk fantasy of Terry Pratchett's later works, this book shows that steampunk is at least as much solid fact as it is whimsical fiction.

Chapter 1

Dreams of the Future, Visions of the Past

The enchantment of steampunk fiction lies in the juxtaposition of either weirdly modern inventions being used by men and women from the Victorian Era or old-fashioned items such as airships and semaphore towers still being used in the twentieth or twenty-first century. The first of these may be called ‘classic’ steampunk; a perfect example being William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s seminal novel The Difference Engine. The computers and cars in a High Victorian setting found in the book are oddly unsettling and create a fantastic world similar to, but distinctly different from, that which we know from history books. Little wonder that The Difference Engine is seen as a perfect example of Victorian steampunk literature. Keith Roberts’ Pavane, first published in 1968, is of the second type of steampunk, where the modern world is restricted to technologically-inferior methods of communication and travel; semaphore towers are still the fastest form of communication in the early twenty-first century and steam vehicles rule the roads. Most novels of this second kind are alternative universes, where some point of divergence in the past from the history with which we are familiar has led the development of a strangely altered version of the world we actually live in. In Pavane, this point was the assassination of Elizabeth I in 1588 and the subsequent invasion of Britain by Spanish forces, securing the worldwide power of the Catholic Church for the next 400 years.

Images from what may be called ‘classic steampunk’, that which is set during the nineteenth century and is reminiscent of H.G. Wells or Jules Verne, are indistinguishable at times from those which actually date from that period. For many aficionados of steampunk, the closer that a work resembles the world of Verne or Wells, the better and more authentic is it likely to be. For some enthusiasts, the word ‘Victorian’ should invariably precede the word ‘steampunk’. For them, alternative present worlds which are dependent upon nineteenth-century technology do not really count as steampunk.

Although the expression ‘science fiction’ itself dates only from the twentieth century, the concept is much older than that. In 1666 Margaret Cavendish wrote The Blazing World, which has been described by some as the first science fiction story. It tells of an invasion of part of the earth by the inhabitants of another planet, who use submarines and aerial warfare to subdue their enemies on earth. It was in the mid-nineteenth century though that this form of literature really came into its own and it is there that the roots of steampunk are to be found. Writers such as Jules Verne created worlds peopled by Victorian gentlemen like Captain Nemo, who gallivanted around in futuristic submarines. Some flew to the moon in spaceships which were astonishingly similar to the one which actually took American astronauts round the moon in the 1960s.

Just as writers of steampunk today look back to the Victorian era and refashion it by combining strange and sometimes anachronistic technology with the clothes and styles of that time, so too did some nineteenth-century authors try to look forward and imagine a future filled with wonders which were unknown to their own time. The results of such speculative fiction are uncannily similar to some of today’s steampunk, in that we see Victorian men and women engaging with spaceships, robots, aeroplanes and death rays, while at the same time operating steam-powered or clockwork machinery. Both types of fiction are based upon little-known incidents and inventions of the real world. Sometimes the connections between real events in the world, speculative fiction of the late nineteenth century which references this and also a modern steampunk story, are so close that the joins cannot be seen. A classic case of this is Boilerplate, a supposedly Victorian robot which has been described as ‘the gateway drug to steampunk’.

In 2000 husband and wife team Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett had it in mind to create a steampunk graphic novel featuring a robot. Instead, they made a website and began to create doctored photographs of real people and scenes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inserting the image of their 12in-high model robot, Boilerplate. They played this with completely straight faces, crafting a back-story for Boilerplate which involves an inventor called Archibald Campion, who first displayed his robot in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The inspiration for Boilerplate came from American dime novels, published between 1868 and 1900; some of which feature metal men who are eerily similar in appearance to Boilerplate. The Steam Man of the Prairies, written by Edward S. Ellis and published in 1868, told the story of a steam-powered metal robot and the adventures which he had with his young creator. Other authors picked up on the idea of the metal men and there was a succession of cheap novels published which had as plot devices robots powered by steam or electricity. These provide us with some of the earliest examples of American science fiction. None of them, of course, actually mentioned ‘robots’, this word only being coined in 1920.

It is plain that Paul Guinan and his wife drew extensively upon the images and plots of the nineteenth-century fiction which had as its protagonists metal men. They freely adapted original illustrations from such books and incorporated them first into their website and later into fictitious histories of Victorian robots, which they then published in book form. Guinan estimated that approximately a third of the visitors to his website found the material there so convincing that they left believing Boilerplate to have been a real invention.

So far, we see a modern author of steampunk cannibalizing Victorian fiction to enhance his own fictitious work, but both the dime novels and Guinan’s own writing and illustrations are connected with genuine inventions. In The Steam Man of the Prairies, a steam-powered, humanoid robot runs along, pulling behind him a carriage. This may be seen in Illustration 6. There are unmistakable similarities between this image and Boilerplate. However, both have a common origin in the real world.

A report in the New York Express of 21 March 1868 includes an account of an invention which was on display in New York and without doubt formed the basis for firstly the steam man in Edward Ellis’ story and also Boilerplate, the twenty-first century steampunk robot. After saying a few words about Zadoc Dederick, the inventor of the Steam Man, the article continues as follows;

Mr. Steam Man is a person of commanding presence, standing 7ft 9in in his stocking vamps, weighs 500 pounds, measures 200 inches round the waist, and decidedly bucolic in general appearance. At this early hour in the morning he was rather in dishabille, and minus his pants. This circumstance, though detracting rather from his comeliness, was yet more than counterbalanced by the greater facilities it gave for the study of human anatomy, and was eagerly availed of for that purpose. The legs are made of iron cranks, screws, springs ad infinitum, not quite as attractive in exterior as those we see in the weekly pictorials, but evidently of greater durability and strength. The motion of the legs is almost facsimile to that of the human extremities, and the manner in which they are set agoing strikingly calls to mind the philosophic apostrophe of the human donkey to his namesake, ‘How fearfully and wonderfully we are made.’ The abdominal region is occupied by a good-sized furnace, which was in full blast. The steam man’s boiler is delicately concealed from the profanity of the public gaze, but is presumed to be somewhere above the furnace. This complex piece of machinery once got out of order, but was happily restored after a careful investigation of the cause and the application of the appropriate remedy. The steam whistle is fixed in his mouth, the gauge at the back of the head, and the safety valve in an appropriate position. He wears a large stove-pipe hat — stove-pipe literally, for it is through the cranium the funnel passes. His hands are gloved, a good moustache ornaments his face, and in outward garb he is rather good-looking than otherwise.

The photograph which accompanied this piece showed a stout metal figure, dressed like man, who was attached to the front of a cart and apparently ready to pull it along. According to the inventor, this metal man could not only pull a wagon along at 60 miles per hour, he was also quite capable of stepping over obstructions. It has to be said that despite the fact that the inventor was promising to market these remarkable machines at just $300 each, he and his robot soon vanished from sight. It seems highly likely that the whole thing was a confidence trick of some kind.

There can be little doubt that the steam man was the prototype in the first instance for the eponymous ‘Steam Man of the Prairies’ and then, by extension for Boilerplate. The cover of The Steam Man of the Prairies shows a steam-powered metal man pulling a cart, just as in Zadoc Dederick’s invention. Since the newspaper reports appeared in March 1868 and the dime novel in August of that same year, it is not difficult to see who copied whom. We thus see a perfect instance of how nineteenth-century speculative fiction, combined with a genuine invention from the same period, have mingled together and been transmuted into present-day steampunk.

Another example of the process by which steampunk has evolved should make this even clearer. This is the idea of a railway tunnel across the Atlantic Ocean, along which trains travelling through a vacuum will move at tremendous speed. At first sight, this is an absurd notion, but it also happens to be one with its roots in both historical fact and also Victorian fiction. Just like Boilerplate, the two have been ingeniously combined to produce a steampunk novel.

In 1865 construction began in London of a pneumatic or air-powered railway which would ferry passengers under the River Thames, from Waterloo Station on the south bank to Whitehall, propelling the carriages by air pressure alone. An Act of Parliament had been passed which authorized the building of this line, whose trains would travel along huge iron tubes laid on the riverbed. A banking crisis caused the collapse of the company undertaking the construction of this tube link, but for a while there was great excitement about the possibilities of such a mode of travel, especially since it was to pass under water. It was suggested that a similar link might be constructed, in the same way, between England and France. Extremely fast trains would then travel across the Channel as regularly as rail services to Manchester or Birmingham.

The idea of a metal tube carrying passengers under the water at great speed was an intriguing one and it appeared as the central theme of a story published 30 years later. The Strand Magazine came out every month and was well known in Victorian Britain for the fiction which appeared in it. It was in The Strand Magazine that Sherlock Holmes made his debut and it was in the November 1895 issue that a short story by Michel Verne, son of the more famous Jules, was published. This was called An Express of the Future and described a journey through a 3,000 mile-long vacuum tube laid across the Atlantic. Like Richard Branson and Elon Muske’s recent proposals, trains travelled through the tunnel which Michel Verne described at astonishing speed, something over 1,000mph.

The idea of an intercontinental vacuum tunnel had of course been around for almost 70 years when Michel Verne used it as the basis for his story in The Strand. We turn again to Illustration 1 to see that this idea had already been mooted, albeit in satirical form, as early as 1829. Following the thread which leads from fiction to fact, back to fiction and then to fact, culminating in the projects which people like Richard Branson are now proposing, is not always easy.

So far, so good. We have seen a genuine project in Victorian Britain used as the inspiration for a science fiction-type story by the son of Jules Verne. How does this tie in directly with the modern genre of steampunk? Harry Harrison’s A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, which first appeared in 1972, is often cited as a good example of the proto-steampunk genre. It describes an alternative universe where the Americans lost the War of Independence and Britain continues to rule the entire North American continent. In this world, in 1973, it is decided that a railway should be built across the Atlantic Ocean, to connect Britain and America. The coal-burning aeroplanes which are the fastest form of transport in this alternative universe are not really sophisticated enough to link the various parts of the world effectively.

The railway which is discussed in A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! is to run through a sealed tube which will be laid across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. This is a massive engineering project, which is discussed in some detail. The technical details are almost identical to those described in the story by Michel Verne. In fact, An Express of the Future and A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! are astonishingly similar in various ways. One of these similarities is a common theme in modern steampunk and is worth remarking upon here.

In An Express of the Future, the characters talk and behave like Victorians. This is scarcely surprising, since it was written and published when Victoria was queen. However, the characters in A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! also talk and act like Victorians, although the narrative is actually set in 1973. Travel in London is still by Hansom cabs, although these are now electrical rather than horse-drawn, and the conversations between driver and passenger sound as though they could be taking place in the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. The protagonist of the novel, Captain Augustus Washington, is engaged to a young woman, with whose father he falls out. As a consequence, his fiancé’s father forbids him the house and unilaterally breaks off the engagement between the two young people. One might readily imagine such high-handed action being taken by a Victorian father, but hardly by one in 1973, the year in which the story is set. This kind of approach, where a story set in the modern world features people who speak as though they have escaped from a book by Jules Verne or H.G. Wells is quite a common conceit in steampunk novels. In other words, the strange dissonance, which is the very essence of steampunk, when a character is seen to be engaging with modern technology, is also extended to the manners and general behaviour of the people in the story. This odd sense of modern technology combined with Victorian mores and behaviour is also a notable feature of the early science fiction novels which were so popular from the 1860s onwards. In Le Vingtième siècle; La vie électrique (The Twentieth Century; The Electric Life) by Albert Robida, for example, published in 1890, we have such scenes as a father discussing his daughter’s dowry; an exceedingly nineteenth-century topic of conversation. The twist is that the conversation takes place via Skyping or something as similar. The telephonoscope enables each party to see the other during a conversation which takes place at some distance. Although he was perfectly capable of visualizing a future filled with various marvellous inventions, Robida was unable to imagine any corresponding social changes.

Writing in the nineteenth century, Robida shows us his idea of the modern world, with many aspects of information and communication technology which are recognizable, but the people behave in quaint and outdated ways. This is similar to the effect of steampunk alternative universes. Keith Roberts’ Pavane was published in 1968 and set in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but the feudal system has survived and Latin and Middle English are still spoken in England. In Bring the Jubilee, we see an alternative version of the United States in the 1940s, in a world where the Confederates won the American Civil War. The protagonist attends a political rally in New York for the Whig party. The atmosphere of Bring the Jubilee very much suggests the late nineteenth century, rather than the 1940s. One final example is Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air, set in the 1970s but redolent of the height of the British Empire at about the time of the Edwardians.

The genres of modern steampunk and nineteenth-century speculative fiction blur into each other, until it is impossible to tell one from the other. An illustration for one of Robida’s novels shows a family watching a flat-screen television which is bringing them live coverage of a war in a distant country. The hairstyle and clothes, combined with the décor of the home, tell us at once that we are firmly in the Victorian age. The television relaying the news however throws us a little, because it does not accord with what we would expect to see at this time. We have the same feeling when looking at Illustration 18, which shows a spaceship splashing down on the Pacific Ocean, after having flown around the moon. This is a very curious image indeed, because it is associated with some of the most accurate forecasting of scientific developments imaginable. It illustrates a novel in which Victorian gentlemen fly to the moon.

Victorian spaceships are precisely the sort of thing which we might expect to come across in a steampunk narrative. The one shown in Illustration 18 is a remarkable example of such a thing, because it is not the product of some modern writer who has attempted to transpose the American Apollo programme to the mid-nineteenth century, but was rather produced by a man living a century or more before the events which he described.

The first mission to the moon, which did not land on the surface but merely orbited the moon and returned to earth to splash down in the ocean, took place in 1968. Years before this flight, there was a stiff competition between the American states of Texas and Florida to se...