Some great Steampunk inspiration

[OB10]

I stumbled upon a really cool magazine that is really, really old. Work: The Weekly Illustrated Journal for Mechanics was a weekly magazine that started publication in 1889, and seems to be roughly the equivalent of Make magazine today, and Popular Mechanics and Popular Science back in the 1930's and 1940's, as far as making things goes. Some (most?) of the materials and techniques would be considered very dangerous today, but there are still some awesome illustrations and great reference material inside. And awesomely, some people have scanned, cleaned up the scans, and made them available as PDFs, effectively republishing them 123 years from the day of their original release.
The Work Magazine Reprint Project

The Museum Of Technology also has some great inspiration, some of it much more in the Dieselpunk area:
The Museum of Technology, the Great War and WWII"

 

[OB10]

So I guess I'm the only one who found the magazine and pictures interesting. The story of my life. :wacko

 

[Blaxmyth]

Not at all! This looks like pure gold! Thanks so much for posting!

Now - zip across to internet Archive and check out the Meccano Magazine uploads there!

Again - thanks for posting. :thumbsup

So I guess I'm the only one who found the magazine and pictures interesting. The story of my life. :wacko

 

[dmachinist]

I like the pic of the V&A technical staff, I have to get a suit like that!

 

[LadyStormblood]

This is fantastic! I'm sure more people appreciated this then it looks like....half of the time people link to something that is pure gold and then I get too caught up in the link and forget to go back to comment.

This adds an even more historically *accurate* backing too creating new steampunk goodies. XD

 

[OB10]

Now - zip across to internet Archive and check out the Meccano Magazine uploads there!
Again - thanks for posting. :thumbsup

Yeah yeah yeah! I just stumbled across those a few weeks ago! https://archive.org/search.php?query=meccano I always loved my Erector sets, but I never knew there was a magazine for them on the other side of the pond! I've downloaded a few of them, and need to download more. (I found instructions on building a Meccano planimeter, of all things! I'd just seen a used "real" planimeter for sale for over $400 a few weeks before.) I prefer the older copies of Meccano magazine; they seem to be more useful for my purposes, just like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. I think those were the best in the 1930's and 1940's. They told you how to build things and do things. Thankfully, Google Books has uploaded almost every issue (Popular Mechanics - Google Books and Popular Science - Google Books). Sadly, they're not meant to be downloaded, but there are some work-arounds... Besides learning how to do things, they're pretty good visual inspiration, too. They didn't have as many pictures back in the Steampunk era, but for Dieslepunk and Decopunk, they have a decent selection of reference pictures.

I've found awesome stuff before on archive.org, but I was kinda blown away by what they have there now, even just as far as magazines: Starlog, Omni, Heavy Metal, Red Dwarf Smegazine, Servo, Vampirella, Scale Aviation Modeller, some Famous Monsters, Creepy, and more.