Raising water by fire, or: Wake up and smell the cordite

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of going to the Kew Bridge Steam Museum with monochrome_girl and a crowd of truly excellent people. At intervals we crowded into small, sunlit rooms and craned our necks to watch as the enormous machines which once supplied all of London with water were fired up. If you look that way you see the controls: brass handles, dials, knobs; the sighing exhalation of steam as the pressure is released and the long pistons begin their inexorable slide--
it was not about sex.

Look that way and you see the pump itself: there's a rumble, a groan, as mechanism rises and the giant shaft, 90 inches in diameter, is exposed, glistening with moisture, then the machine sighs as it sinks home--
it was not about sex.

Look up and you see the great balance itself: two stories above your head, long enough to fill a room, two enormous cast-iron brackets are bolted together on a central fulcrum. The pressure of the steam draws one end of the giant device down; when the pressure is released with a hissing sigh, the balance slowly tilts the other way. What you get is this enormous sense of power, of weight, as the balance descends and the lubricated pistons slide and the huge pump--
it was not about sex.

I will confine myself to remarking that among the geishas of Kyoto, the loss-of-virginity rite of passage was known by the term Mizu-age, which translates as "raising water." Kyoto is on a river; they'd have had a lot of experience with pumping...

The other amazing machine I've seen this week was at an exhibition on sleeping and dreaming at the Wellcome Collection with the ever-lovely fracture242. The exhibition itself is a bit scattershot, but in a cabinet full of alarm clocks and waking-up devices I found this: an alarm clock which greets the morning by lighting a candle with a flintlock. Yes, it's a black powder alarm clock. I don't know how many of these were made, or how regularly they were used, but you've got to hand it to those Age of Enlightenment types: only an Enlightenment genius could invent something as monumentally stupid as an alarm clock that can set your bed on fire.

Raising water by fire, or: Wake up and smell the cordite

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of going to the Kew Bridge Steam Museum with monochrome_girl and a crowd of truly excellent people. At intervals we crowded into small, sunlit rooms and craned our necks to watch as the enormous machines which once supplied all of London with water were fired up. If you look that way you see the controls: brass handles, dials, knobs; the sighing exhalation of steam as the pressure is released and the long pistons begin their inexorable slide--
it was not about sex.

Look that way and you see the pump itself: there's a rumble, a groan, as mechanism rises and the giant shaft, 90 inches in diameter, is exposed, glistening with moisture, then the machine sighs as it sinks home--
it was not about sex.

Look up and you see the great balance itself: two stories above your head, long enough to fill a room, two enormous cast-iron brackets are bolted together on a central fulcrum. The pressure of the steam draws one end of the giant device down; when the pressure is released with a hissing sigh, the balance slowly tilts the other way. What you get is this enormous sense of power, of weight, as the balance descends and the lubricated pistons slide and the huge pump--
it was not about sex.

I will confine myself to remarking that among the geishas of Kyoto, the loss-of-virginity rite of passage was known by the term Mizu-age, which translates as "raising water." Kyoto is on a river; they'd have had a lot of experience with pumping...

The other amazing machine I've seen this week was at an exhibition on sleeping and dreaming at the Wellcome Collection with the ever-lovely fracture242. The exhibition itself is a bit scattershot, but in a cabinet full of alarm clocks and waking-up devices I found this: an alarm clock which greets the morning by lighting a candle with a flintlock. Yes, it's a black powder alarm clock. I don't know how many of these were made, or how regularly they were used, but you've got to hand it to those Age of Enlightenment types: only an Enlightenment genius could invent something as monumentally stupid as an alarm clock that can set your bed on fire.