The Steampunk Boiler Room

How about this?

A clockwork mechanism that can power a train or other free-roaming land transport, a zeppelin or other type of aircraft, such as a gyro-copter, or a watercraft. The mainspring is regularly rewound by a "gerbil-run" sort of flywheel powered by the crew of whatever vehicle in which it is installed. This sort of power-plant – a “gerbil-rator”, if you will – would be far more ecologically sound than a coal-burning alternative, and in addition, it would provide for very physically fit crew people.

And for private vehicles and commercial over-the-road transport, how about cars, trucks and buses powered by the clockwork mechanism, with conveniently-located flywheel-stations that charge a nominal fee for the driver to hook up his or her vehicle and have a bit of a jog to re-wind their vehicle’s mainspring? The stations could even employ runners to serve folks who are disabled or elderly (at a small additional charge, of course).

Just imagine... cars, trucks and trains streaking across the landscape, airships soaring across the sky, ships crossing oceans, passengers and cargo transported anywhere on the planet, all without trailing great gouts of black smoke in their wakes. Even more, many industries that rely on steam-powered systems to run their manufacturing operations could use these engines to run assembly lines, drills, lathes and other machine-shop equipment, signficantly reducing the pollution of city air and water.

In the countryside, farms could use them to power tractors and all manner of other agricultural machinery. The applications to the construction industry are similarly varied and numerous – machinery like bulldozers, excavators, cranes, and cement-mixers could all be powered by the gerbil-rator.

In the home, the gerbil-rators could provide the impetus for any number of work-saving innovations, like a central ventilation or vacuum-cleaning system, lawn mowers and other gardening equipment, etc.

The same technology could be extrapolated over time to generate electrical power, as that technology becomes part of the narrative. Every home could have its own power plant, and people could sell excess power to a communal power grid that could supplement the energy generated by central generating facilities.

An engine like this would no doubt be heavy, but I think not much more so (if at all) than a coal-fired boiler, along with the fuel and water required to run such a thing. Not being an engineer, I don’t know what the springs and gear-ratio requirements would be, but for the purpose of a Steampunk story, the science doesn’t have to be real and functional in our world, just plausible enough to seem real and functional in the context of the tale.

No doubt there are many wrinkles to this that I, having spent only a little time considering it, have missed or mistaken. However, I think a tale centered around this kind of technology might have a flavor to it that differs from that of a standard steampunk story. In fact, I suppose this sort of thing would take most of the steam out of steampunk. Maybe it would be better named “springpunk” or “gearpunk”?

505 words.

Best regards,
CeruleanSon