The origin of steampunk

The steampunk genre of science fiction has had an enormous, but largely unknown, effect upon everything from styles of clothing to tastes in cinema

In January 2018 a company chaired by British businessman Sir Richard Branson proposed building passenger-carrying tubes to link London’s three airports; Heathrow, Gatwick and Stanstead. It would, it was announced, take just five minutes to get from Heathrow to Gatwick by this means, the carriages travelling at an estimated 670 miles per hour; approximately the speed of sound. This was a scaled down version of a scheme proposed the previous year by American entrepreneur Elon Musk, pioneer of privately funded space travel, who claimed to have been given permission to build a tunnel stretching 200 miles, from New York to Washington DC. Trains would be propelled at 700 miles per hour along this so-called 'Hyperloop', by creating a vacuum and so assuring that there would be no air pressure to slow down the train. Newspaper reports in July 2017 described the scheme as being 'futuristic' and 'space-age'. Accompanying the press release were artists' impressions of what this new railway might look like, were it to be built. The whole enterprise sounded very up-to-date and modern; an exciting innovation in travel for the twenty-first century.

There was though something curiously familiar about these supposedly new ideas for high speed travel. We see above a drawing published in 1829. This seems to be an early version of something which looks uncannily like the Hyperloop, labelled on the side, 'Grand Vacuum Tube Company, Direct to Bengal'. In other words, rather than running for a mere 200 miles between two cities, this was a proposed intercontinental vacuum railway, one which would carry passengers from Britain all the way to the region comprising present-day Bangladesh, a distance of 5,000 miles or so. It must be said that this casts Elon Musk's suggested rapid transit system into the shade! In 1895, almost 70 years after the drawing of the intercontinental vacuum tube transit system appeared, The Strand Magazine in London published a fictional account of a transatlantic tunnel, linking Liverpool and the American city of Boston. Passengers would travel along this vacuum tube at over 1000 miles per hour; crossing the Atlantic in just two and three-quarter hours.

Surely though, all this is just Victorian fantasy? There could not have been any real possibility of a vacuum railway in the nineteenth century, could there?

Above though, we see this very thing in operation; a vacuum railway tube operating in London's Crystal Palace Park in 1867. It ran for just 600 yards, but those prepared to part with 6d, a little under 3p in decimal currency, could be drawn along a tunnel in the same way that the New York to Washington Hyperloop might one day operate. Nor was this the first railway system to exploit vacuums and air pressure to draw trains along without their being pulled by locomotives. As early as 1847, trains working on this principle were running between the English towns of Exeter and Newton Abbot. The journey time of 20 minutes was faster than the electric trains running on this route today! And in 1870, an atmospheric or pneumatic transport system began operating in a tube beneath New York.

Both the Crystal Palace, South Devon and New York pneumatic railways were powered by stationary steam engines, which meant that passengers were not troubled with all the smoke, steam, dirt and noise which were inescapable features of travel by steam trains at that time. The nineteenth century was, after all, the age of steam and it was used for every conceivable purpose; powering printing presses and factories, as well as transport on land and at sea. Vacuum railways sometimes feature in novels and short stories belonging to a genre of science fiction called ‘steampunk’. Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, first published in 1972, tells the story of a vacuum railway being constructed in a tube which lays on the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean and will connect Britain and America.

The word ‘steampunk’ may require a little explanation. The Oxford English Dictionary says that ‘steampunk’ is; ‘a genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology’. This is a very rough and ready definition and enthusiasts for steampunk often have their own, more idiosyncratic ideas on what constitutes true steampunk. For some purists, the narrative must be set in the nineteenth century and preferably resemble the world of H. G. Wells or Jules Verne. No sooner had the OED included ‘steampunk’ in their dictionary, than complaints were heard that the word ‘Victorian’ should have been used in the definition. There are those though who reject the need for ‘steampunk’ and ‘Victorian’ to be inextricably linked. They are inclined to include in the steampunk canon books set in the modern day, which depict an alternative world which has evolved following some point of divergence in history; the Confederates winning the American Civil War, or the failure of the American Revolution, for example. Such worlds are, almost invariably, more backward than our own, at least from a purely technological perspective. In the present book, we shall adopt the most catholic, all-embracing and elastic definition of steampunk; drawing upon the widest possible variety of sources.

The first recorded use of the word ‘steampunk’ dates back to 1987 and 30 years later, steampunk has expanded to include not only literature, but also computer games, graphic novels, art, clothing, various accessories such as walking sticks, fob-watches and glasses and even music. The word refers now not merely to a type of science fiction, but to an entire style of fashion.

Although the expression ‘steampunk’ was coined only a little over 30 years ago, the concept itself has been around for a good deal longer than that. Early instances of science fiction or fantasy tales which feature anachronistic technology, steam-powered aeroplanes say, are sometimes referred to as being ‘proto-steampunk’. Queen Victoria’s Bomb, by Ronald Clark, was published in 1968 and is often cited as being a ‘proto-steampunk’ work. The plot concerns the development and testing of a nuclear bomb in the nineteenth century and its proposed use to bring a decisive end to the Crimean War fought between 1853 and 1856. Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore, was first published in 1953 and is another book which is reckoned by many to belong to the category of ‘proto-steampunk’. Set in 1950s America, the petrol engine has not been developed and steam powered ‘minibiles’ are the only self-powered road vehicles. Heavier than air flight is also unknown and steam engines drive the balloons which sail overhead.

In A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! Set in an alternative 1973, there are aeroplanes, but there is a neat twist. Instead of being powered by kerosene, as in our world, the fuel which they use is pulverised coal dust. While the tunnel of the title is being created, these coal-fired aeroplanes fly overhead, belching smoke into the sky. Steam aircraft are commonly to be found in the world of steam punk. This can surely be only a preposterous fantasy? There may have been vacuum trains in the real world, but it can hardly be the case that steam planes were flying across the skies of Victorian England? We turn though to the 21 September 1894 edition of that respected American journal, Scientific American, and read, to our surprise;

On Tuesday, July 31, for the first time in the history of the world, a flying

machine actually left the ground, fully equipped with engines, boiler, fuel,

water, and a crew of three persons.

Nine years before the first flight of the Wright brothers and we are reading an account of a steam powered aeroplane taking to the air in the English county of Kent. This was, by the way, no flimsy construction of wood and canvas, such as the Wright brothers were later to experiment with. The aeroplane described in the Scientific American was made of steel, weighed three and a half tons and had a wingspan of 125 feet. It may be seen in Illustration 13. By way of comparison, a well-known modern airliner, the Airbus 320, has a wingspan of only 117 feet. In Illustration 3 we can see a drawing from half a century earlier than the aircraft described in the Scientific American. This fantastic contraption, which might very easily be supposed to have escaped from the pages of a steampunk novel, was intended to be the backbone of the world’s first international airline.

The fact is that the real Victorian world so frequently resembled that depicted and referenced in modern steampunk, that it is often hard to distinguish between the two. Imagine, for a moment, electric jewellery; brooches, tie-pins and hair clips which are battery powered, so that they light up and move. A miniature skull which can be worn attached to a shirt and whose eyes flash, while the jaw clatters up and down. It is precisely the sort of novelty which one might find today if you were to go on Amazon and search for ‘steampunk’!

In 1885, electric jewellery, including such items as glowing owls to pin one’s shawl and an illuminated, electric walking stick, were to be found in the brochure produced by Gustave Trouve in Paris. The battery was kept in the pocket or handbag and when required, could be connected up, so that a butterfly in a woman’s hair could light up and flap its wings, for instance. One feels sure that there must be a market for mechanical insects and skulls of this sort among today’s aficionados of steampunk!

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 with which we are familiar. 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 century, inserting the image of their 12 inch-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 the protagonists, metal men. They freely adapted original illustrations from such books and incorporated them first into their website and later into fictious histories of Victorian robots, which they later 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 cannibalising Victorian fiction to enhance his own fictious 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 a behind him a carriage. 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 seven feet nine

inches 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 authorised 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 3000 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 1000 miles per hour.

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 the cartoon at the beginning of this article 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 of Britain! 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 as makes no odds. The telephonoscope enables each party to see the other during a conversation which takes place at some distance. Although he was perfectly capable of visualising 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 recognisable, but the people behave in quaint and outdated ways. This is precisely 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 century, 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 below 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 see which of them would have the glory of hosting the launching pad for missions into orbit and to the moon. Florida won the prize of having the base where the spaceships took off from, Cape Canaveral, but Texas was awarded the honour of hosting the base for mission control, which was to be in Houston.

In 1969 the spaceship Columbia, with a crew of three astronauts, took off from the Florida coast and headed for the moon. It took four days and six hours to reach the moon, travelling at a speed of 24,000 miles per hour. A hundred years earlier, a spaceship was launched from a giant gun called Columbiad, also from the Florida coast. It too had a crew of three and it took four days and one hour to reach the moon, travelling at 25,000 miles per hour. Both Columbia and the spaceship fired from the Columbiad splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on returning to Earth and the crews of both spaceships were picked up by naval vessels.

The Columbiad was of course a wholly fictional creation of Jules Verne’s and appears in From the Earth to the Moon, published in 1865. It is set in what was then the modern day. It is books such as this which originally inspired the whole idea of steampunk. The plainly Victorian men and women who may be seen in the illustrations to Jules Verne’s books are pictured with all manner of advanced technological gadgetry and could have stepped straight out of a modern steampunk novel. A little-known work of Jules Verne’s, which although written in the 1860s, was not published until 1994, provides us with a good example of the second kind of steampunk story; that set in a version of the modern world which is eerily different from the one which we know.

Modern steampunk novels of the alternative universe type show a strangely altered and distorted modern world, with unfamiliar technology and people who often behave as thought they more properly belonged in the nineteenth century. A novel written in 1863, called Paris in the Twentieth Century, could easily pass as belonging to this genre. When Jules Verne submitted it for publication, there were not yet such things as internal combustion engines, telephones, gramophones or tube trains; yet all appear in the book, which portrays life in France in the year 1960. There is even a version of the internet; a global communication network, accessed via electro-mechanical terminals. Magnetically powered trains also make an appearance, traveling at great speed along sealed tubes. This is perhaps the earliest incarnation in written fiction of the ‘hyperlink’ schemes suggested in recent years by Elon Musk and Richard Branson.

The fascinating things about Paris in the Twentieth Century, and the aspect which makes it so similar to certain modern steampunk novels, is that although the action takes place in the mid-twentieth century, it is peopled by men and women who talk and act like Victorians, even down to their preoccupation with the dichotomy between art and science. In 1863, there was a great deal of debate about whether science and technology would smother literature and creative art; rendering them irrelevant to most ordinary people. We see echoes of this controversy in the works of William Morris and Charles Dickens; it is a central theme, for example, in Hard Times, published in 1854. Jules Verne wrote his futuristic fantasy at the height of this ideological struggle. Although by 1960, the year in which Paris in the Twentieth Century is set, this was no longer anything which concerned people, Verne’s characters, and indeed the entire plot of the novel, involves little else.

The novels mentioned above are all either proto-steampunk, books written before the expression ‘steampunk’ had been coined, or speculative fiction written when Victoria was still on the throne. In The Difference Engine, written by William Gibson and Bruce Sperling, first published in 1990 and widely regarded as the first real steampunk novel, we have exactly the same atmosphere as is to be found in the earlier works. It is a world of computer programmers, racing-car drivers and khaki-clad British soldiers who are armed with automatic rifles. The twist is that this is all during the 1850s and that regardless of the startling developments in various fields, the characters conduct themselves and speak as one would expect Victorian Londoners of that time to do. This is fair enough; that in a book set in the middle of the nineteenth century, the language used by those operating astonishingly modern devices should be typical of the time. What is interesting though is that precisely the same thing occurs in alternative universes, versions of the modern world where some point of divergence has caused the world to develop along different, and usually more backwards, lines.

We saw earlier how Harry Harrison’s A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! Probably had its origins in a short story published towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. An unkind person might even say that the 1972 novel had copied its central premise from Michel Verne’s story. Looking a little closer though at Harry Harrison’s book reveals something curious; that it may well contain the germ of the idea which formed the basis for The Difference Engine. Here is a case of a real-life event inspiring one steampunk or proto-steampunk novel, which in turn led to the development of another novel; one which kicked off the modern steampunk movement.

The Difference Engine shows an alternative universe, one where mechanical, steam-driven computers bring about an information revolution in Victorian Britain. The idea for this novel comes of course from the calculating machines designed and partially built by Charles Babbage. In A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, set in 1973, Charles Babbage’s difference engines also feature. Just as in the original machines planned by Babbage, the computers in this book consist of spinning metal shafts and cog wheels; they are entirely mechanical. However, unlike those in The Difference Engine, the driving shafts are turned not by steam but by electricity. Bizarrely, the spelling of Babbage’s name has been altered slightly, so that we read of a ‘Brabbage engine’. Here is a description of the thing in operation;

He opened a door with a flourish to disclose serried ranks of slowly turning

silver discs, all of them perforated with large numbers of small holes. Metal

fingers riding on rods brushed the surfaces of the discs, bobbing and clicking

when they encountered the openings.

This is a calculating machine with brass cam shafts which need to be oiled regularly. It is in fact a modified version of a Babbage engine.

There is no reason to suppose that Bruce Sperling and William Gibson copied the idea of working Babbage engines from Harry Harrison, it is more that both writers engage in the same looting of the past to provide the material for their imaginary worlds. This looting consists, as we have seen in the case of both the robots and the underwater railway tunnel, in part of taking obscure inventions from the past and changing them subtly, and also by lifting anything useful from other stories; both those published in the Victorian period and more recent works.

The visual images of steampunk work in just this way, by taking whatever might be needed from the historical past and then tinkering with it. This is how Boilerplate was created, by looking at the illustration from The Steam Man of the Prairies, examining patent applications from the 1860s and then altering and adapting them, before melding everything together into a believable whole.

Stories such as that of the launching of a spaceship called Columbiad, which travels around the moon before splashing down in the Pacific are intriguing because they might not have merely foretold the future, but actually helped to shape it. This could be less a case of art imitating life, in the form of a book, and more life imitating art! This will require a little explanation.

Many of the ingenious devices upon which we rely today, especially those relating to transport and telecommunications, had their origins in the Victorian period. It was a time of frantic innovation and creativity, with men such as Thomas Edison, Hiram Maxim, Clement Ader and Valdemar Poulsen, of whom we will be learning more later in this book, turning out many of the gadgets which we today take for granted. Among these were record players, telephone answering machines, tape recorders, electric light, mains electricity, aeroplanes, and silencers for car engines; to name but a few. These men were of course a product of their own age, they did not work and invent in a vacuum.

Some inventions and innovations which emerged in the late nineteenth century had been around as ideas for many years. Sometimes, things such as heavier-than-air flying machines, to give one example, were discussed in learned journals. More often, they entered the public consciousness via the fiction of writers like Jules Verne. Some people, of course, read articles called, ‘On Aerial Navigation’, published in The Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts decades before an aeroplane existed in real life. Many, many more read The Clipper of the Clouds by Jules Verne! Similarly, there were those who kept up to date, via scientific publications, with the work of Paul Gottlieb Nipkow and the implications of this for what was described as ‘seeing by electricity’. Those people were vastly outnumbered though by the readers of Punch magazine who, in 1878, saw a cartoon by Daphne du Maurier’s grandfather, which showed parents skyping, on a wall-mounted screen, with their daughter in Sri Lankar.

In short, the public knew, through fictional works, both literature and cartoons, that things such as television, aeroplanes and even spaceships might one day be possible. Inventors working at that time hoped to make their fortunes by providing people with what they wanted and did not yet have. If speculative fiction had caused people to consider the possibility of television or aeroplanes and persuaded them that such devices would be desirable, then there was an incentive for men such as Edison and Ader to set to work to make these dreams come true. At times, the link between the fiction of the nineteenth century and the real world of the twentieth and twenty-first is easy to understand. Jules Verne described a marvellous submarine called the Nautilus in his 1870 book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It was hardly surprising that this name should be chosen for an American submarine the following century. In the same way, Verne’s use of the name for his spaceship, the Columbiad, referencing as it did the famous explorer Christopher Columbus, was also a natural choice for the Americans in 1969, when they wanted a name for their own spaceship which was going to the moon.