Britannia Manor Tour from 1UP

As promised, I've found some more Britannia Manor for you.

One of the best is a tour of Britannia Manor by Emily Balistrieri on the 1UP blog.




Gadgets and science and automata, oh my! Also included: an authentic antique Vampire hunting kit to make AlexCF weep.

Go see the whole tour.

Lord British's Steampunk Home -- Britannia Manor

Lord British, aka Richard Garriot, is one of my hometown's techno-celeb, and game producer extraordinaire. His home, Britannia Manor, is a place of legend (and the location of famous Halloween parties). What a surprise it was, then, when reading through November's Fast Company, to discover an article about Garriot which included pictures of his home.



In front of Garriot is a brass model of the galaxy. The left hand side objects are not very clear -- upon consultation with various family members who know old electronics we think there's a test kit on the bottom shelf and perhaps an old Bang * Olfsen equipment on the middle shelf. On the upper right there's an hourglass and a metronome, on the lower right shelf is a anniversary clock (also known as a 400 day clock) and a collection of old cameras. I can't quite tell what's on the middle right shelf -- perhaps a stereoscopic viewer? A slide carousel? A balance scale?



Glass eyes, and something neat that even my power engineering father-in-law couldn't identify -- it has alligator clips, one of those little rotating turbine type things (you've probably seen glass globes that you set in the sunlight that have the same sort of thing inside).



Ok, so the shrunken head is a bit grotesque for my taste, but the cylinder on the right is a Curta mechanical calculator and the camera on the left is probably a technical field camera. Random chemistry equipment on the upper right, and the glass eyes again in the lower right.

There's some more material on the house online, so I'll try to do another post soon with the best of it.

Old Scientific Americans

Ben has turned me on to old Scientific Americans -- as he says:

I've fallen in love with the Project Gutenberg editions of Scientific American Supplement. Festooned with illustrations of lovely contraptions, it records daft ideas alongside real advances. Perhaps the best part, however, is the prose.

From "The Pitcher Plant" (September 26, 1885):

It is of no use to liberate any of the smaller insects; every fly, removed from the leaf upon which it had been feeding, returned immediately it was at liberty to do so, and walked down the fatal cup as though drawn to it by a species of irresistible fascination.

It is not alone that flies and other small insects are overpowered by the fluid which exudes from the cord in question. Even large insects succumb to it, although of course not so quickly. Mrs. Treat says: "A large cockroach was feeding on the secretion of a fresh leaf, which had caught but little or no prey. After feeding a short time the insect went down the tube so tight that I could not dislodge it, even when turning the leaf upside down and knocking it quite hard. It was late in the evening when I observed it enter; the next morning I cut the tube open; the cockroach was still alive, but it was covered with a secretion produced from the inner surface of the tube, and its legs fell off as I extricated it. From all appearance the terrible Sarracenia was eating its victim alive. And yet, perhaps, I should not say 'terrible,' for the plant seems to supply its victims with a Lethe-like draught before devouring them."

That Mrs. Treat -- she has a fascination with this carnivorous plant that borders on the obscene. Definitely not a strait laced Victorian.

What I'm browsing the SciAms for is diagrams and images to repurpose into all sorts of home things -- posters, decoupage plates, to iron onto table linens, etc.

This, for instance, is a "Plan for a New Style of Submarine Telegraph".

The Project Gutenberg site is a bit complicated to use, but if you search for "Scientific American" you should get everything they have. For a shorter list, try "Scientific American Supplement" Don't follow the "read online" link (this forces you to page through each page, it's harder to use). Instead scroll down to the "formats available for download" section and see if there is an uncompressed HTML version (some have one, some don't). This will let you navigate either by scrolling or by using the table of contents within one large file. (It's also relatively easy to URL hack to get just a directory of images to look through. Of course, you'd miss the scientific romanticism that way...)

Finding some electrical diagrams, similar to the one shown on the Brown (a shop) post, was amazingly easy:


Remember, almost everything on Project Gutenberg is out of copyright or free, which means you can use anything you find for your personal or commercial projects.

Brown (a shop)

So I read about this shop called Brown in Domino magazine, and I thought "Hmm, it sounds like it could be steampunk." Since I was in Houston recently, I stopped by (twice, actually, since they didn't have hours on their website).

Their website describes their stock as lighting, furniture, industrial, didactic, and curiosities. There was a lot of lighting. It was very nice and very expensive, and not "raw" enough for me. There was not much industrial and the "didactic" (vintage teaching posters, mostly) leaned strong towards the biological.

That being said, there was one very steampunk find:



A French teaching poster with a voltage graph. I'd guess from around the 1930s?

Ben pointed out that for it's price of more than a thousand dollars, you could print many large format posters from images in old Scientific Americans. (More about that shortly.)

So -- if you happen to be in Houston Brown might be a good shop to stop by, but expect a store that has a little bit of steampunk tucked away in the corners instead of anything more substantial.

Adjustable Height Mechanical Table

OK, so I've been spending way to much time on eBay lately. Sigh.

Ran across this table base that I thought you all would enjoy. It's described as "Industrial chrome and iron mechanical table with central wheel controlling height of top circa 1930. "



That big wheel in the center? Turn it and the table height goes up and down. Start with a sideboard. Turn -- and you've got a tall desk. Turn again -- dinner for two. Turn again -- side table.

Unfortunately, it's part of a "live auction" that is eBay enhanced. That means you can place an absentee bid via eBay. (I'm unclear on whether you can bid via eBay during the actual auction or not). If you were to win it, you'd have to arrange shipping as well. Seems a bit complicated to me, but I just liked the picture. Then again, you might just live in Philadelphia and can go to the actual auction.

More pictures at the eBay listing.

The Klockwerks Newsletter

We've talked about Klockwerks before, but you may not realize that Roger Wood, the artist behind Klockwerks, sends out a newsletter via email a couple times a week. Sometimes it's clocks he's built, sometimes it's finds from a fleamarket, sometimes it's something random. My favorite is when you see one week's "finds" in the next week's creations.

Today's newsletter was a coffee cupboard:



Isn't it charming?

All of Roger's clocks are fun. If you need a daily dose of steampunk whimsy in your mailbox, you should sign up for his newsletter (subscription form at the bottom of his webpage).

You may find yourself yearning after one of the clocks you see in the newsletter -- I know I have -- and yet never see it on his website. When I asked Roger about this, he said:

You're not the only one to mention that issue. Sometimes they are a commission, an order or just made on spec. Sometimes they actually do make it to the web site and other times they get snapped up quickly - yesterday's clock-on-wheels was snapped up by a gallery in Maine as soon as they saw the newsletter.
If you see something that you like, let me know and if it is taken, I'll let you know if I can make one similar. My orders are almost all filled now so there should be some fun stuff happening this fall.

More Foundry Pieces on Ebay

King Cotton has posted more of their antique industrial pieces from the 1895 foundry in Georgia on Ebay.



I don't think these are quite a neat as the first set, but still worth a browse.


Glover Machine Works Listings on Ebay.
The original post.