New Scientist have just published a series of a dozen “bizarre devices from medicine’s dark past”. Like the late Victorian male chastity belt pictured, they’re fascinating and scary in equal measure.

The redoubtable journal also recounts that an 1886 method for guessing a person’s height based on parental heights, age and sex is apparently ten times as accurate as our best current genetics technology—but of course that says more about the state of genetics than it does about the state of Victorian medicine.

Jess Nevins‘ “The Nineteenth Century Roots of Steampunk” (a version of which introduced the VanderMeers’ Steampunk) is a cover story in the January 2009 issue of NYRSF. It discusses the dime novel fad for “Boy Inventor Conquers the Redskins” style colonialist fiction towards the turn of the previous century, which matured into the less morally reprehensible “Adult Inventor” stories typified by Verne and Wells and “Juvenile Inventor” stories typified by the Tom Swift novels (the second series of which includes “Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron”, my personal favourite if only for its title).

Nevin suggests that “first-generation” modern Steampunk was consciously opposed to the “white boys using advanced technology to kill nonwhite men and loot their treasure” ideals of stories like “Frank Reade and his Steam Man of the Plains” (”Steampunk is well aware of the Boy Inventor,” he says, “and kills him, as villains must be killed, by the end of the story”). But, Nevin claims, “much or most second-generation steampunk is not true steampunk”; the subgenre has abandoned ideology and “returned to its roots” he feels, paralleling Cyberpunk’s slide from “dystopic critique of multinational capitalism” to “fashion statement and literary cliché”.

I would argue that the effect is more dilutory than transformatory. Diversity of viewpoint is an inevitable consequence of popularisation. While Steampunk remains what Nevins calls “an excellent mirror for the modern period”, it’s likely to remain an equally fertile medium for social commentary and political critique.

The November, 1907 issue of The Connoisseur: a magazine for collectors, illustrated features an article by Guy Oswald Smith entitled “Silver Nutmeg Graters or Spice Boxes”. Before reading same, I was wholly ignorant of the 19^th Century habit of carrying a small nutmeg grater about one’s person for purposes of spicing food and drink, and (according to L. F. Newman’s Folklore) as “a carminative to relieve flatulence and dyspepsia”. My personal experience with the noxious nut, and the similarity these fascinating gewgaws have to snuff boxen, leads me to suspect it served other ends. In any case, it’s a habit which could bear revival, if only for the pleasure to be taken in the equipage.

Aeolus

Further to the always excellent topic of unusual airships, currently doing the rounds of every environmentally-oriented blog and many more besides (including the venerable William Gibson) is this wonderful creation of Christopher Ottersbach, Aeolus, for his diploma project at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Art) in Braunschweig, Germany. A unique and stunningly organic airship design, the Aeolus is powered by two to four passengers who can guide the direction and travel for up to two weeks on one load of helium, treading lightly upon the environment.

With determined ferretting I’ve managed to find the nominal website for the project here, and some CAD designs and some 3D foam imaging created for the Aeolus I’ve not seen linked anywhere. Looks like we don’t have this beautiful creature in our skies just yet, but Germany is the home of airship technology, so perhaps it’s not too far off the horizon.

More of the lovely concept  images sourced from Tuvie below.

Following the Camberwell Markets outing on the 11th, Mlle Millais and I spent some hours fossicking through The Camberwell Antique Centre, just across the road from the Station. It’s a veritable fair in a building, selling antiques and collectibles on behalf of dozens of other merchants.

While there we collected an armful of flyers for other Victorian Antique and Collectible events occurring in the next few months, and I’ve posted images below the cut.

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Via Cory Doctorow’s bouncy little journal, and apropos a conversation at the Carpark Cafe in Campberwell on Sunday,^* Molly Wright Steenson’s “Postal services and pneumatic tubes” provides some fascinating factlets about the pneumatic tube postal system built under Paris in the 1850s. And the comments are almost as interesting.

Apparently, there was a pneumatic postal service operating in Prague until 2007.

[^* Given RFC 1149, I was disappointed to discover that there is apparently no Internet Standard for IP over pneumatic tubes. Yet.]

First conceived in 1670, the notion of dirigibles made of metal has given rise to a number of curious failures over the last three centuries. This New Scientist article details a number of them, including the uniquely successful example: the US Navy’s “Tin Bubble”, an aluminium-plated airship capable of making 110km/h and lifting 5 tonnes, which flew for 2,250 hours over ten years of active service before being scrapped in 1941.

And indeed, a lady should  be rather flattered to have a bustle named after her good self. Alas, I fear it eclipses my poor effort at our Year’s End Ball in such extreme degree, I shall be forced to hide from society for simply an age, lest I endure ridicule and taunts. My bustle cannot compare with such a magnificent specimen as this!

For who can deny the very wise words of the noble poet Admiral Squidingtoe, with his charming translation from the original Latin?

“Ode to the Bustle (or, My Darling’s Buttocks are Pleasingly Round)”
(Original work by Patrician Mixus Alotus)

The courtiers like big bustles and they cannot lie.
No gentleman doth deny.
When a fair maiden strolls in with a diminutive waist
And a bustle in your face

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Well, our annual new members’ welcome event, hosted this year by that inimitable knight of the realm Frederick Chook (and ably assisted by the lovely Lady Sha), has passed with some measure of success. We were particularly pleased to hear Flecker’s “Golden Journey” and Swinburne’s “Time and Life” read so masterfully by our esteemed guests from Sydney, the Gill-Chambers. Following a lecture and magic lantern show on the aesthetic movement, liquid refreshments and a range of hors d’œuvre were served, and good conversation enjoyed by all.

The welcome event was followed by our annual revel “Euchronia”, which featured a variety of musical, prestidigitational and terpsichorean performances, and carried on into the small hours. A number of electrocalotypes depicting the events and the attendees are available.