Coworker: "When do you normally leave for the day?"

Geis: "4:30."

Coworker: "Leaving early for something?"

Geis: "Nope. Just going home."

Coworker: "At 3:30?"

Geis: "No, it's 4:30." (looks at watch) "Yea, it's. . . " (looks at watch again) "3:30."

As with every convention, I wanted to get going to the Steampunk Empire Symposium in Cincinnati as early as I could. But, also as with most conventions, I was constrained by the schedules of others. In this case, my daughter wanted to go to the con as well but had to work half a shift so I couldn’t leave Pittsburgh until 11:30. Even so, we made excellent time and arrived well in time to unpack the car and get changed to attend the first item on the program that I had wanted to see.

Saturday

Lord Bobbins did a presentation on photo manipulation. At last year's TeslaCon he had placed a number of period type photos over the generic photos and paintings the hotel had about. Thinks like battlefields with airships, fantastical field artillery, the destroyed Eiffel Tower. Some of what he presented was useful to me but much of it was not because he uses Photoshop on a Mac and I use Gimp on Ubuntu. I was astonished with his comments as to how quickly he could produce a decent image. Something he would crank out in an hour would take me all afternoon if I could accomplish it at all. I need to update my Ubuntu OS to version 12 soon, maybe then I'll update my graphic software as well.

Beginning in 1829, Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner started plotting out trends in the properties of elements. He noted that some elements had similar properties with other elements in groups of three. English chemist John Alexander Reina Newlands saw a repetitive pattern and in 1869 published his law of octaves which states that "any given element will exhibit analogues behaviour to the eighth element following it in the table." Dmitri Mendeleev published his periodic table in the same year and his presentation became the standard seen in classrooms throughout the world.

But that space along the top, the half a dozen elements between helium and hydrogen and anything lighter, never turned up and the early 20th Century discoveries of the internal structure of the atom made it clear that such things would never be discovered. This, however, didn't stop people like Walter Russell from insisting into the mid-20th Century that not only were there elements to be found there but that there were some 24 elements down below hydrogen and these were all tied together in a unified theory of light and mind.

Russell's disregard for evidence allowed him to create a thorough, unified cosmology without the hindrance of having any basis in reality which was, therefore, utterly convincing to the ignorant.

You could write your story with helium but, if I can nit pick, there are some problems with that. Firstly, helium didn't become more widely available until after the turn of the century when the element turned up in natural gas wells of Kansas and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. And America kept a monopoly on the gas, refusing to seel it to Germany, the world's leader in commercial airships. You could simply change history to have helium deposits discovered earlier. Since you are probably also pushing back the innovations in aluminum processing that allowed for lightweight zeppelin superstructures, pushing back helium deposits isn't going to be an added narrative burden.

Enter sub-hydrogen elements.

(Take a few minutes to read the alphanon link and some of the "see also" links at the bottom of that page. Great guns, the woo density is astonishing. "The compound interetheric or seventh subdivision actuates sympathetic polarization to produce action and sympathetic depolarization to neutralize it, in the body as well as in matter." Wow.)

If we are talking about the aether specifically; the rarefied gas through which light propagates, then it is already all around us. One would need to come up with a way to distill, compress, condense or liberate the aether.

Something else to consider in a steampunk physics is what would happen if you were to distill the aether out of the space around you. Without the aether there would be no medium through which heat and light could propagate. Turning on an aether machine might make a very cold and dark space space around the machine.

"I understand that the role of Education Coordinator has been something of an ad hoc affair, illustrated in that the role is apparently shared between Allen, Mike and, now, me. But if this is going to work effectively, the role needs to be defined. This was, in fact, one of the conditions I set well before I even accepted your offer in October. I also understand that things such as conversions have taken up a lot of management time and prevented the development of a timetable for this transition. But, at this point, I feel I need something. A "Statement of Intent" perhaps. Something to inform me that the development of a job description is under way. It has been six months and so far all that exists is a verbal agreement. With two training cycles of actual work it is well beyond time to have more than that."

"We have already discussed as early as today and reviewed a Draft copy of the Job Description."

"Thank you for moving forward off of our verbal agreement, as well as, exemplifying great patience as we work out the logistics of this"

"I am dedicated to producing EXACTLY what we talked about"

"I want to put in writing JOB Well Done!! in regard to the new hires."

"Their performance is exactly in alignment with what I expected to see from you. We will work to clearly define each and every point that you have listed in your email "

"No matter how good (sic) you teach, you will always have that."

"I call (sic) the user back and ended the ntaskldr.exe. problem resolved. we teach that in training. my point is its (sic) hard to get these guys to follow procedures."

While researching the Great Airship Flap of 1897, I came across word of an article in the Winter 1990 issue of Skeptical Inquirer. It was, however, just a mention of the article. The article itself wasn't online and the back issue had been long out of print. Finally, though, a copy showed up on Amazon and I now have a chance to see what someone other than a UFOlogist thinks on the subject.

It doesn't start off well. The author, Robert Bartholomew, begins by talking about the Wright Brothers 1903 flight with the implication that there was nothing successful before that. He quotes British aviation historian Charles Gibbs-Smith:

This is pretty authoritative sounding, and completely untrue. There were plenty of successful dirigibles flying at this time starting with Henri Giffard's steam powered airscrew driven airship in 1852, through Gaston Tissandier's electric powered craft of 1883 and beyond. They weren't astonishingly successful. They didn't usher in the golden age of airships like von Zeppelin's masterpiece but they were flying and they were non-spherical.

You might look at Gibbs-Smith's statement and counter, "But Giffard and Tissandier were French. He distinctly said North America."

Dr. Peter Campbell flew an airship from Coney Island in 1887. Pilot Edward Hogan was lost at sea preparing for an ambitious flight across the Atlantic in Campbell's airship America in 1889.

Dr. Solomon Andrews flew an airship above Perth Amboy in 1863 and presented for the Smithsonian Institution in 1864 with the intention of winning a contract with the Union army. Even though the Secretary of War rejected that plan against the recommendation of a congressional commission, Andrews continued to build and fly airships until 1866.

There was Charles Ritchell's 1878 one-man Dirigicycle flying over Hartford, Richard Cowan and Charles Page's 70,000 cu-ft aerostat above Montreal in 1879, Carl Meyers Skycycle performing with circuses in 13 states and Arthur Barnard's pedal powered airship over Nashville in 1897. There were so many people flying in the skies above America that the New York Times noted "even flying machines loose their novelty." This was in 1888.

I have repeatedly hoped for someone other than a UFOlogist to take a balanced look at this issue and what we have here is a debunker of UFOs citing a self-described aviation history specialist who is demonstrably wrong. That appeal to authority does not bode well for the rest of the article being a convincing argument.

That argument is that the entire affair was a complete fabrication of the mind, driven by newspaper accounts. That newspapers either made up stories from whole cloth or exaggerated speculation and people were suddenly seeing airships. Then, the newspapers reported the sightings and people saw more airships. Except that the pattern didn't behave that way. The first wave of sightings were one night in November above the skies of San Francisco and then, in spite of multitudinous newspaper reports, there were no sightings for nearly a week. None. The theory of hysteria would have had airships in the sky all that week, wouldn't it?

Bartholomew credits the Frank Reade dime novels and Jules Verne's "Robur the Conqueror" as feeding into the hysteria which leads one to wonder, if it was Verne's fault, why did it take a decade after publication for this to happen. I've never heard of any phantom submarine sightings resulting from Verne's publication of "20,000 Leagues under the Sea."

I am very interested in history. And my interest in science fiction in general and steampunk in particular shows a desire for history being even more interesting than it already is. It would be exciting to learn that something that we have all believed was true for so long isn't what we thought. It's what drives paranormal investigators, zero-point enthusiasts, bigfoot hunters and conspiracy theorists. And, I have to admit, I probably have a bit of this inclination in my interest in the Mystery Airships of 1897. I would like nothing more than to find actual evidence that there really was such a thing.

But, unlike those that alter reality to fit their pre-conceived notions, turning every light in the sky into an alien spacecraft, I recognize that my belief is based on scant and circumstantial evidence. With a century past, the evidence I seek may be gone forever, if it ever existed at all. This is why I am so disappointed when I read articles such as this one that have the opposite bias, cynically debunking everything, again based on scant and circumstantial evidence. Bartholomew's conclusions ring of being definitive and yet I know for a fact that he has left out a lot of things that would cast doubt on his conclusions.