Victorian technology


Victorian Technology

(Specific to the Victorious)

 


 

Transportation

Airships

Dirigibles like the Albion and other firm airships, and even things like orithocopters and DaVinci flying machines.

 

Trains

The London Underground has more than trains in it, but the vast network of rail that sprawls over the city is it's nervous system and it's pulsing life.

 

The Skyrail

The Skyrail has not nearly as many lines as the ground train system, but enjoys a fair amount of use all the same. It's lines are all named after metals, using mostly Alchemical names for them. Most of the lines are on the West End (reflecting the Skyrail's somewhat higher-class ridership) but a few; the Cobalt and Ferrous lines, for instance, venture almost to the edge of Whitechapel.

 

Engines

The Difference Engine

Created by Charles Babbage, this machine is a complex machinery of gears with a set of levers that is used to make tables of algorithms.

More specifically, a difference engine is a special-purpose mechanical calculator, designed to tabulate polynomial functions. Since logarithmic and trigonometric functions can be approximated by polynomials, such a machine is more general than it appears at first.

That Analytical Engines

Almost never was! Built two years before Babbage's death from his notes. There are somewhere between 5 and 9 Analytical Engines in existence, and some can be programmed for more functions than others. The smallest, owned by the Hanover estate, is little more than a glorified Difference engine. It's rumoured that the most effective Engine is owned not by the Queen herself (although she does have one, kept at the Crystal Palace) but by either Oxford University or Her Majesty's Academy of Modern Science and Medicine. The Analytical Engine has still not been built to be fully programmed, but there is constant work on achieving this. There is a legend, in fact, of another set of secret plans that would fix the problem of making a fully programmable Engine. However, this is likely just a story.

 

Improvement Projects

 

 

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