Word: steams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...dubbed it, requires a fifth of the capital investment that a standard, high-volume car plant needs, and only 20% of the space. "But you can't sell an idea, especially one this disruptive and radical. You must have a physical entity," he says. (See pictures of a steam-powered car setting a land-speed record...
...developed along the lines of Babbage's vision: brass and steel instead of silicon and plastic; clockwork instead of electronics. In fact, imagine if all the great technological revolutions of the past 100 years hadn't happened. Our world would run on Victorian tech--it would be a handmade, steam-powered world, finished in leather and mahogany. It's an elegant, romantic vision. And it has a name: steampunk...
Ever since then, steampunk has been bubbling under: in role-playing games and anime, video games like Myst and Thief and comic books like Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Look at the dirigibles and clockwork mechanisms in Philip Pullman's alt-Victorian The Golden Compass. Recall the steam-driven, Kenneth Branagh--piloted arachnid colossus in Will Smith's Wild Wild West...
Steampunk is like a snapshot from the last moment in human history when technology was intelligible to the layman. "The Internet is global and seemingly omniscient, while iPods and phones are all microscopic workings encased in plastic blobjects," Westerfeld says. "Compare that to a steam engine, where you can watch the pistons move and feel the heat of its boilers. I think we miss that visceral appeal of the machine...
...sorry Drew, Larry was a better dancer: see left, with the original caption) and Dean Thomas A. Dingman ’67, students entered a parallel universe of chocolate crepes, hot apple cider, and….a dance floor waiting to be thronged with freshmen letting off Reading Period steam...