Now, to be fair, that’s a cheap prop for a Halloween costume, so one can’t expect too much. It’s just some swimming goggles with cardboard gears glued on and spray-painted gold. It’s both poorly made and non-functional.
It’s definitely supposed to be Steampunk. Since there’s no official gatekeeper, I guess it is. To me, it seems more like conflating a “sexy nurse” costume with someone in the actual medical profession.
Even with the fake gears, there could have been some attempt to make them look useful, like for a rotating lens/filter mechanism. But these are just glued on randomly. The chain could also have served some purpose, like to retain a secondary magnifier system. But it’s also just there.
I’m with you. When I made my EtherGoggles, I tried to make it look like the plastic lenses mounted on needles could swivel into place in front of my eyes and do something.
Cool. And the fact that you used plastic lenses unavailable to the Victorians doesn’t bother me. It would have looked the same if the lenses had been glass or crystal. The important part (to me) is that there was a reasonable attempt to make a simulation of a functional artifact, and wasn’t just random junk thrown together.
Steampunk also has electricity available in its makeup, but it’s rudimentary. This is because the late 19th century was when it was first being utilised, for electric lights and the telegraph. So there can be some amount of flickery, orangey, crackly electricity in a Steampunk prop or whatever.
Here’s how I think of Steampunk, in a fictional context, such as if I wanted to write a story set in that genre. Imagine if the internal combustion engine was never invented. Then imagine if World War 1 was never instigated, and then neither was World War II. Now imagine it was the year 2022 after that. Certain technologies would still have developed, but not as rapidly, nor with the same momentum. Airplanes wouldn’t exist (hence Airships), ground vehicles would still be horse-drawn, steam powered, or electrified. Cultural norms would not have rapidly changed either, as communication devices would be of limited range, or big events that shifted society didn’t occur. Fashion, which would still be designed to cope with a smoky polluted city, would remain somewhat stagnant and slow to evolve.
So imagine stories set in a world like that.
Most Steampunk stories are actually set back in the late 19th or early 20th century (or an entirely fantasy location), but for me I am more interested in how these things develop when those tentpole events of our real past don’t occur; what drives change and what keeps things stagnant.
Yes, but not even just a gas flame but imagining what advances in that technology might look like. Price no object I would take this as a starting point but have the LED wrap look more like flames with maybe a slight flicker, and instead of touch activated control have dials that adjusted both intensity and color with the pretension being that it was being done by adjusting the gas mix. Maybe swap out the big pipe for the appearance of several smaller ones and small tanks on the side.
That’s exactly how I was thinking of it: steampunk being that world. The alternate reality in which the Babbage Difference engine was made in its time, becoming affordable, and provided the basis for technological advances without electricity being needed. Computing technology many decades earlier.
In terms of @GuanoLad 's version, in which the consumer demands that electricity production and delivery expanded to fill had already been met by technology that was provided by other means, including gas, mechanical, and chemical. Electric lights may be invented but were considered a novelty item with no practical purpose that other current technologies were not superior for.
The commercially available steampunk goggles that have jewelers loupes attached by means of a hose clamp look like poorly executed junk to me. Something like the image below is much more aesthetically pleasing to me, and the little watch gears look more like they could be for focusing adjustments or something.
Not the best photograph but here goes https://i.imgur.com/jfcXdPi.jpeg ETA- I cannot get the image to display in my post. It’s photo from 2014 Halloween. It’s me as a Son Of Ether with my Steampunk ethergoggles and stuff.
Excellent. BTW, just paste a link that end in .jpg, .jpeg, or .png on its own line in the post for it to auto-inline. For Imgur, that means to use the URL you get when you right-click on the image and copy the image link.
Yeah, in a way, that example looks more like something post-apocalyptic, where parts might have been repurposed just because of their shape, instead of function (i.e. a gear that is used as a frame for a lens just because it has a rim that fits the lens)
But cultural norms and fashion did change rapidly before the ICE was a thing. The early Industrial age was definitely not stagnant. Quite the opposite.
Good point. I dunno if you’ve seen Horizon: Zero Dawn, but it’s a game set in a world where robots manufactured by automatic factories run amok, and humans have been reduced to low-tech tribal communities. They all wear headgear and such scavenged from the robots. There’s some degree of utility for the armor, but mostly it’s just decoration. It had a purpose on the robot, but once repurposed it’s just about the shape.
So, maybe those goggles were from after the steampunk civilization collapsed, and there were loads of gears and such from junked machinery, and the bits were repurposed due to shape or if they looked cool.
This might be thinking too deeply into a $13 Halloween prop, though…
Don’t buy this. I ordered it twice, once from Amazon, and once from Ebay and had to get refunds both times because neither seller coughed up the neato anglerfish lamp.
I just ordered one of these lamps off eBay. It’s a little pricey, but then that seems to be unavoidable, and the free shipping makes up for that somewhat. It’s also so close to what I wanted that I couldn’t pass it up.
