Lamplight News April&May/2013

April/May 2013

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Volume 2: Issue 4 & 5

Special Announcements.............. Page 2 Texas Steampunk Societies.........Page 2 In Memory................................... Page 2-3 Shout Outs................................... Page 3

Did you know: In 1804, Richard Trevithick, an English mining engineer, developed the first steam-

Saving Tesla................................. Page 3-4

powered locomotive. Unfortunately, the

Cousins (Pt 2).............................. Page 4-5

machine was too heavy and broke the very

Convergence.................................Page 5-6

rails it was traveling on. Of course, with the

Bombs Away..................................Page 6-7

aid of his assistant John Thorswall, a coal

Calendar of Events.......................Page 7 Newsletter Info............................ Page 7

mine blacksmith and ten months' of labor, George Stephenson's locomotive, called "Blucher" was completed and tested on the

Flyer Invites................................. Page 8-10

Cillingwood Railway on July 25, 1814. The

Steampunk Businesses................Page 11-13

track was an uphill trek of four hundred and

Featured Photos...........................Page 14

fifty feet.

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SIS is on a summer break from meetings. We'll start the meetings back up again in September. Until then, we will have outings, events, and conventions to attend and see one another. We appreciate everyone who has been a special part of SIS, near and far. We don't just see D/FW members as the only people out there to support us. We know there are Steampunks out in New York, Tennessee, Iowa, Illinois, Oklahoma, and many more places, all of who write in and letting us know they appreciate us. We want to say to you, we appreciate you too!

Memorial Day weekend, SIS will be at Comicpalooza in Houston, Tx. We'll have a fan table there with information to pick up and take with you and we'll be running a panel on Saturday, from noon to 1pm on the third floor in panel room 3. We hope, that if you're in the area, you will consider stopping by to say hello!

Akon 24 will be in Dallas the weekend after Memorial Day weekend. There will be some Steampunk themed events there, all of which you can find out about on their website.

On June 5th SIS will be headed out to Half Price Book Stores on Northwest Highway in Dallas for a Steampunk night hosted by Half Price Books, Dr. Rev Scott Ward of Seadog Slam, Rob Scott, Amber Collis, and more wonderful people. It is described as a living gazette of: poetry and literature, fashion, fine arts, gears and gadgets, music, manners, and more...celebrating the culture of Steampunk. Check out the flier at the end of this newsletter or just visit this link.

June 15th is our Dallas World Aquarium Day and picnic. We hope you will be able to join us.

If so, be sure to bring a brown bag lunch with you. At some point in the day, we'll take a break and all go out to sit and have lunch together. That'll be going on from 10am to 2pm.

Check out our website for the schedule to come, or visit our Facebook page if you'd like. You can also find a schedule of Steampunk conventions around the nation on our forum. Click HERE to check it out.

If you'd like to contribute to this newsletter, please send an email to contact@steampunkis.org.

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Current & Active in Texas: Territories of Houston Steampunk San Antonio Neo-Victorian Society Tech Steampunk Society Steampunk Illumination Society Austin Steampunk Society Red River Regional Steampunk Expeditionary Society Lubbock Steampunk Society Amarillo Steampunk Society

Kathy Morgan was a valued and much loved member of Steampunk Illumination Society. She was often seen with a smile to greet most everyone she met, and had the most loving spirit you could ever meet. She was quiet when she spoke, but she spoke with loud words that touched the hearts of many.

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She had many loves in life, but among those many, one such person that was invaluable and true was her husband and best friend, Jonathan Morgan. It wasn't hard to see the love between the two of them, if you just sat quietly and watched. They were the simplest and purest definition of love, without a doubt. It was not easy, as a friend or as a loved one to have watched Kathy dwindle away, becoming weaker and more frail as the months passed. It was most definitely apparent that the battle she held was one that was winning, but if there's anything any of us could say, it's that her spirit never weakened. On April 16th 2013, Kathy's spirit finally departed this world to enter her new journey, but she made sure she touched as many hearts as she could before she left us all.

Kathy, you will always be missed, but your words of wisdom, your poetry, short stories, paintings, memories, and love will always live on in our hearts and minds. Thank you for the wonderful time we knew you. May your ship sail to the most amazing places in the aether of our universe and beyond, dear friend. To Kathy's most loving and supportive family and her close friends, may peace and blessings be with you all.

Photo courtesy of: JD Morgan Photography

A very Happy Birthday to ALL April and May birthdays from SIS. May you all have a wonderful day full of all the people you love and memories you will cherish!

SIS sends a special shout out to R3SEC for their successful Expo held May 4th. It was great fun, and we hope they are proud of themselves for all their hard work!

SIS sends their deepest sympathy to Jon Morgan, widow of Kathy Morgan, as well as to the rest of her family & all of her friends of. She will be deeply missed, but never forgotten.

Some of these facts, you may or may not have known about Tesla, though in my opinion he's great enough that I'll risk repeating some information. If not for the sake of deserved reverence, then how about for the sake of teaching our kids something we know they're not being taught in public school!

Did you know that Tesla constructed a 142 foot high metal mast in Colorado Springs. From this, he could shoot out bolts of man-made lightning over 100 feet long.

Tesla created the first remote control by using it on a toy boat.

Demonstrated in 1898, if was considered largely useless.

In his later years, Tesla became increasingly eccentric.

He began 'communicating' with pigeons, ate only boiled food & was obsessed with the number 3. Thomas Edison tried to discredit Tesla's invention of the alternating current. Edison electrocuted animals that included an elephant, using AC to try and prove his point at how dangerous AC was. However, Tesla went on to invent the first hydroelectric power plant. It was first used in 1896 to convert power from the Niagara Falls into electricity for New York City.At the 1893 Columbian Exposition, Tesla used twelve 1000 horsepower AC generators which were used to power 100,000 incandescent lights.

Despite all of his great inventions, Tesla died in poverty at the age of 86 years old. Two days after he died, all of his belongings were seized by the U.S. government. In his life, he had hoped that his 187 foot Wardenclyffe Tower would supply the world with free wireless electricity. The only problem? It was never completed, and ended up being demolished in 1917. By the time of his death, he had over 250 patents registered to him. Such items included the spark plus, the radio, and the Tesla coil. During his life, he had revealed plans for a particule death-beam weapon in the middle of Page 3

WWII. After secret U.S. military tests, Tesla's papers disappeared without a trace. I guess this means it worked?

nonprofit group, had managed to purchase the property for $850,000. His announcement also managed to crash the group's website, which failed to upload Thursday afternoon after seemingly receiving large amounts of traffic from The Oatmeal's readers.

Donors helped in not only meeting the goal, but surpassing it by collecting a whopping $1.4 million, all in effort to save the laboratory (formerly known as Wardenclyffe Tower) from destruction. The campaigne began last August and took place through Indiegogo and ended up with a final total of $1,370,511 collected from more than 14,000 funders from more than 100 countries. It took less than one week to achieve that goal, working out to about $100 per minute, $6,000 per hour, and $145,000 per day. It is no doubt that Tesla's posthumous rise to fame could be accredited to the Steampunk communities, nerds, and scientists around the world, and their interest in stories of lightning machines, government conspiracies, and Telsa's own eccentric personality.

It's about time Tesla got more than a little memorial here and there in the US. Now, he has a full on museum, which he once worked in himself. What does "The Oatmeal" plan on doing with the rest of the money they raised? Their reply, "Mega-yacht covered in Tesla coils".

Road trip anyone?

Source: *content gathered from various places on the inter webs.

Cousins – Part 2 Written & Submitted by Larry Amyett

Even with Tesla being the quintessential underdog scientist, in more recent years he has become rather popular. Today he is renowned enough that a crowd-funded effort led by Matthew Inman, the artist behind The Oatmeal, helped to save the laboratory of Tesla. Matthew put up a comic strip announcing the purchase to his readers on Thursday, saying Tesla's former laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., had been successfully saved. He said the Tesla Science Center, a

In part one of this series I mentioned that the personalities of US Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D Roosevelt, who were distant cousins, serve to represent the cousin genres of Steampunk and Dieselpunk. Previously I focused on Teddy and here in part two I’m going to focus on Franklin.

FDR was born on January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, New York. As a child, he attended the Massachusetts Episcopal boarding school of Groton in which majority of the students are blue-blooded American aristocracy from families on the social register. According to FDR, the school headmaster Page 4

Endicott Peabody greatly influenced him. An interesting detail about Peabody is that he taught his students that it was the obligation of Christians to help the poor and urged them to consider public service.

FDR was very impressed by distant cousin Teddy’s Presidency and considered him a role model. In mid-1902, FDR was formally introduced to his future wife Eleanor Roosevelt who was his fifth cousin, once removed. On March 17, 1905, they married in spite of strong opposition by FDR’s mother.

Together, FDR and Eleanor had six children.

In 1921, he was stricken with polio, which was something that he hid from the public throughout his life. He was on vacation at Campobello Island in Canada when he came down with the illness.

FDR’s career of public service redefined the role of the government in society. Early after his election to the New York State Senate, he took on the infamous Tammany Hall and began a reform movement of the Democratic Party. During his second term, he became chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee in which his farm and labor bills provided a preview of his New Deal policies as President. FDR also served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I. In some ways, FDR being born with a proverbial silver spoon in his mouth anticipated the opulence that would later dominate the 1920s. This opulence is what some say is the ‘deco’ side of dieselpunk. Early in childhood, he became fluent in both German and French due to regular vacations to Europe. He lived the life of the leisure class by learning to ride, sailing, playing polo, golf and lawn tennis. In addition, his attendance of schools limited to the upper class, such as Groton and Harvard along with later Columbia Law School, represented the extreme class division. Even the promiscuity that is so identified with the 1920s is found

in his life with his ongoing affair with Lucy Mercer, which nearly destroyed his marriage.

However, Dieselpunk isn’t all ‘deco’ for there is the dark, hard side of dieselpunk and FDR’s defiance in the face of adversity in many ways reflects that.

During his 1932 Presidential acceptance speech his famous statement that the American people had “nothing to fear but fear itself,” his declaration that the New Deal was “more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms" echo the realism of dieselpunk that acknowledges the truth of the darkness while refusing to surrender to it.

In conclusion, FDR’s life and public service captures dieselpunk as a genre. His life of wealth and privilege is representative of the dieselpunks love of the extravagance of the Roaring Twenties while his determination to overcome adversity stirs the souls of dieselpunks as we remember the Dirty Thirties and both the horrors and the heroism of World War II.

Written & Submitted by Larry Amyett As both Steampunk and Dieselpunk grow, music of the various genres more and more seem to be coming together.

The iconic Steampunk band Abney Park has made several Dieselpunk songs such as “Until the Day You Die.” The Steampunk band Frenchy and the Punk contacted me about their recent CD “Hey, Hey, Cabaret!” requesting a review because several songs were Dieselpunk themed. The Steampunk band The Clockwork Dolls released a Dieselpunk CD about World War 2 named “When Banners Fall” and have redesigned their web site into a Dieselpunk look along with joining the online Dieselpunk community. On May 3, 2013, at the San Diego Ballroom at the Town & Country Hotel, the Steampunk band The Steam Powered Giraffes performed a concert with the Dieselpunk band Lee Presson and the Nails. In addition, two of the three characters are both Dieselpunk. The Spine has been described in the past as “dieselpunk” in some of their promotion with his fedora and ‘Futuristic’ Page 5

story while their newest character, Hatchworth, is described at their web site as being an ‘Art Deco’ robot.

What should we make of these Steampunk bands recording Dieselpunk music, incorporating Dieselpunk elements within their presentation or completely rebranding themselves into Dieselpunk bands? In my opinion, it’s reasonable to assume that this counter-cultural element endemic to genre-punk would bring the different cousins together into a form of convergence of styles and formats. By its nature, genre-punk, especially anachronistic genrepunk such as Steampunk and Dieselpunk, encourages creativity and pushing the limits so it’s natural for a band to explore different avenues of artistic expression and to not be limited by one specific genre.

A rare, antique torpedo that was last fired almost 120 years ago has been uncovered at the bottom of the ocean - by a dolphin working for the US Navy.

The bottlenose, named Ten, found the brass relic, known as the Howell torpedo, during a routine patrol and reconnaissance training mission off the coast of California.

the ocean bed since 1895.

Military marvel: In its heyday, the 11-foot Howell torpedo was considered a masterpiece of innovation and one of the most technologically-advanced pieces of military hardware in the US Navy's arsenal.

'We've never found anything like this,' Mike Rothe, who heads the dolphin search programme, told the Los Angeles Times. 'Never.'

In its heyday, the 11-foot Howell torpedo was considered a masterpiece of innovation and one of the most technologically-advanced pieces of military hardware in the US Navy's arsenal.

Fired from above water or through submerged torpedo tubes, it could cut silently through the water at speeds of 25 knots and sink an unsuspecting enemy warship from up to 700 yards away.

Clever boy: US Navy sailors with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific Marine Mammal Team pose with a specially trained Atlantic bottlenosed dolphin who found the torpedo.

Antique warfare: Torpedo boat USS Stiletto firing a Howell torpedo in 1895.

Only fifty were ever built by a Rhode Island company between 1870 and 1899, before it was outdated by another prototype made by a rival firm.

The US Navy employs dolphins - and some sea lions to scour the depths for mines, shipwrecks and enemy divers.

'Considering it was made before electricity was provided to US households, it was pretty sophisticated for its time,' Christian Harris, operations supervisor for the biosciences division at the Systems Center Pacific, told the LA Times.

But 19th century naval weaponry is a particularly rare find, especially one that has lain undisturbed on

It is perhaps ironic that something seen at the time as an embodiment of technological advancement was discovered more than a century later by trained Page 6

Until now, it was believed there was just one left in existence - on display at the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, Washington.

mammals and not state-of-the-art computers.

But the US Navy is increasingly turning to dolphins to search the ocean beds, because their on-board scanning systems remain unmatched by any man-made sonar.

Currently there are 80 bottlenosed dolphins and 50 sealions being trained at Point Loma facility for mine detection, mine clearing and swimmer protection.

Indeed, during the 2003 Iraq invasion, dolphins were dispatched to the Persian Gulf to hunt for mines and enemy divers. They are also used to guard submarines in Georgia and Washington State.

Experts say they are swifter and more accurate at detecting undersea objects than even the most sophisticated technology thanks to a keen eyesight and mysteriously-complex bio-sonar system.

'Dolphins naturally possess the most sophisticated sonar known to man,' Braden Duryee, an official at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, told the LA Times.

To train them, sea wildlife experts drop objects of different shapes and sizes into the sea in areas of poor visibility.

MAY • • •

05/04/13: Aeolo Expo & Anniversary Gala in Marshall, Tx

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05/10/13 – 05/12/13: Louisianime: Steampunk Soiree in Lafayette, LA

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05/11/13 – 05/12/13: Watch City Festival - City wide Steampunk Festival in Waltham, MA

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05/17/13 – 05/19/13: The Steampunk Worlds Fair in Piscataway, NJ

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05/24/13 – 05/26/13: Comicpalooza in Houston, Tx

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05/31/13 – 06/02/13: Akon 24 in Dallas, TX

05/04/13: Arcadian Clockwork in Austin, Tx 05/03/13 – 05/05/13: Gaslight III: The Expedition in San Diego, CA

05/24/13 – 05/26/13: Up In The Aether: The Convention in Detroit/Dearborn, MI

JUNE • •

06/23/13: Steam On Queen in Toronto, ON 06/21/13 -06/23/13: Ancient City Con in Jacksonville, FL

If they find something they return to the surface and tap their snout on the front of the boat.

If they find nothing they tap their snout on the stern.

Their first clue was when Ten the dolphin returned from a shallow dive and tapped the boat's bow. His handlers thought nothing of it. But when Ten's colleague Spetz did the exact same thing suspicions were aroused.

Navy divers dove to investigate the mysterious object, broken in two pieces, and found a stamp on one section that read: 'USN No. 24'.

It was carefully hauled to the surface and taken to the Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington to be cleaned up.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/nab8g5n

Mailing Address: SteampunkIS P.O. Box 202664 Arlington, Tx 76006 Editor Email: contact@steampunkis.org

Website: www.steampunkis.org Submission Deadline: 7th of each month

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