Falling Back to Dieselpunk

[jeff_duntemann]

My writing time has taken some hits in the last few weeks, but the weather has hugely improved. It got up to 72 here today, so with joyous enthusiasm I took a long walk. As usual, something occurred to me, this time when a badly adjusted dump truck went past and bathed me in fumes. Ahh! Dieselpunk!

The insight followed soon after: If the world went

Comments

[chris_gerrib]

Ironically, I in the past couple of weeks had exactly the same thought about 75% of humanity gone. I'm rather more optimistic about high-tech society thriving (25% of 300 million Americans = 75 million, which isn't something to sneeze at), but I do think that you're on to something about dieselpunk.

[jeff_duntemann]

Think of losing a person as blowing a very small hole in a very large fabric. At first glance it seems that if the holes are evenly spaced, it takes a lot of holes to do serious damage to the fabric, and the question becomes, How many holes? In fact it's worse than it seems, because society's moving parts are not evenly spaced across the land. Losing 75% of the folks in Silicon Valley would destroy the high-tech industry there, since it's so close-knit and the skills so specialized.

[kevinnickerson]

Doesn't diesel require much better machining tolerances than steam? I'd think you could build a working steam engine from wood. Well, everything except the boiler, and that might even be possible. It would leak and be inefficient, but it could be done.

[jeff_duntemann]

You're right about that, and I was wrong. Diesel fuel injectors are particularly tricky to make, compared to the components of an Otto-cycle engine.

Interesting you mention an all-wood steam engine. Years ago I looked into the notion of building a steam engine out of stone and wood, with stone for the cylinders and boiler and wood for most everything else. Didn't take it too far, but it would be an interesting experiment.

[anonymous]

[jeff_duntemann]

Oh my yes. I have two or three shelf-feet of Lindsay books down in my workshop, many of which are Dieselpunk-era books that have fallen out of copyright. Others are new books on kitchen-table tech of various sorts, including several really good books on vintage electronics.

One I've been through recently is *Instruments of Amplification* by H. P. Friedrichs, which explains how a number of Steampunk and Dieselpunk electronic and electromechanical technologies can be recreated in the modern day, with modern materials. Highly recommended.