Steampunk versus the 1970s

Here's an interesting answer to the question "Why steampunk?":

Then there was Steampunk, surely the most peculiar of countercultural trends, a kind of ungainly Victorian futurism full of steam-powered computers and airships, top-hatted cyborgs, floating cities powered by Tesla coils, and an endless variety of technologies that had never actually emerged. I remember attending some academic conference on the subject and asking myself, “Okay, I get the steam part, that’s obvious, but . . . what exactly does this have to do with punk?” And then it dawned on me. No Future! The Victorian era was the last time when most people in this country genuinely believed in a technologically-driven future that was going to lead to a world not only more prosperous and equal, but actually more fun and exciting than their own. Then, of course, came the Great War, and we discovered what the twentieth century was really going to be like, with its monotonous alternation of terror and boredom in the trenches. Was not Steampunk a way of saying, can’t we just go back, write off the entire last century as a bad dream, and start over?

I don't agree that "The Victorian era was the last time when most people in this country genuinely believed in a technologically-driven future that was going to lead to a world not only more prosperous and equal, but actually more fun and exciting than their own." I grew up in the slipstream of Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology", having thrilled at the moon landings, Concorde, Thunderbirds and Star Trek, in a land that was less unequal than it had been in my parents' youth and which seemed to be continuing on the same egalitarian trajectory:

The fact that so many children had space hoppers, ludicrous as it may seem, is testament to the fact that even working-class families now had a solid disposable income and could afford toys for their younger members.

Even Star Wars, which first went on general release in Britain in early 1978, would never have become such a phenomenon had not so many children had the pocket money for all those Palitoy figures.

The truth is that behind all those terrible economic and political headlines, most ordinary families in 1970s Britain were better off than ever.

Dominic Sandbrook

OK, there were flies in the ointment, like the the looming threat of nuclear apocalypse, sexism, racism, homophobia and the ubiquity of child molesters on prime-time TV (not that we had a clue at the time). But there was still the feeling that, if we didn't blow ourselves up, things would keep on getting better for everybody.

So maybe we could just go back, write off the last forty years as a bad dream (at least the political economy bit) and start over? Or maybe it's something about 1970s aesthetics* which stops us reimagining the '70s as a liberated time, ripe with ideas of hope and change and only allows that decade to return in the creepy guise of Scarfolk, or the latest interpretation of a Ballardian dystopia. 

I suppose that, in the end, it doesn't really matter if dreams of a different world involve cheesecloth, flares and Concorde, or top hats, paddle steamers and airships, so long as we can continue to imagine different worlds. So here, to feed your daydreaming imagination, are some real, but steampunky, machines from the age that set H G Wells and Jules Verne a-dreaming:

1852 Giffard steam-powered dirigible.

1886 Nordenfelt-class  steam submarine Abdül Hamid, of the Ottoman navy.

De Dion, Bouton & Trépardoux steam tractor, 1894.

Brunel's leviathan, the Great Eastern.

Crampton locomotive, Folkstone , at the Great Exhibition, 1851.

The Imperial Russian Navy monitor, Novgorod, launched in 1873.

Steam shovel helping to dig the Western Pacific Railroad, 1906.

All images courtesy of Wikipedia (public domain), except for the monitor Novgorod, which came from an eBay listing of a print.

*Afterthought - maybe times within the living memory of many inhabit a historical Uncanny Valley, where the similarities seem unsettling, while the Age of Steam with its crinolines and steamers is sufficiently other to free the imagination. Or maybe it's just the normal boring old propaganda that paints the world before Thatcher-Reagan as a dysfunctional hellhole.