May 2011 Articles (72)

Welcome to Two Fisted Tuesdays, Dieselpunks' weekly beat on the mean streets.

Starring Gerald Mohr and starting with the famous lines, "Get this and get it straight! Crime is a sucker's road and those who travel it wind up in the gutter, the prison or the grave." The Adventures of Philip Marlowe runs about 25 minutes without commercials. You can listen to this blast from the past in MP3 format for free at the link below.…

Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa is the craziest, most megalomaniacal scheme from the 20th century you never heard of.*

Sörgel (1885-1952) was a renowned German architect of the Bauhaus school, and a philosopher reflecting on culture, space and geopolitics. On the future’s horizon, he saw the emergence of three global superpowers, one uniting the American continent, another a Pan-Asian block, and Europe – possibly the weakest of the three.…

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.



We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.



Take up…

For Dieselpunks in the US today, which is Memorial Day, is one that I think probably touches many of us in a way that it might not some.

World War I in many ways gave birth to the Diesel Era. One cannot fully understand the Diesel Era without understanding the role of the Great War. I would highly recommend Tome's excellent article about the Lost Generation in the recent issue of the Gatehouse Gazette.…

It's Monday - a good day to honor an artist who possessed a unique vision of future, a weird sense of humor and an ability to mix different influences like Art Nouveau and Surrealism into a powerful blend worthy of Jet Age.

Hannes Bok is the pseudonym of Wayne Francis Woodard. He was born July 2, 1914 in Kansas City, Missouri. His father was Irving Ingalls Woodard, an electrician lineman from Chicago, IL. His mother was Julia L. Parks, a…

The great Ken Burns will be back soon with a documentary that I bet all of us here will want to see:

Watch the…

This streamliner is famous, against all odds.

It never set a speed record. Its elegant shape wasn't drawn by a great designer like Dreyfuss, Loewy or Kuhler. It wasn't built by any major locomotive works like ALCO, Baldwin or Lima. But it survived.

Norfolk and Western Railway's J class steam locomotives were a class of 4-8-4 locomotives built by the Norfolk and…

Welcome to the Saturday Matinee on Dieselpunks.

When Lt. "Wild Bill" Traynor, bad boy of the Marine Corps, arrives at a San Diego Marine Base, he is surprised to discover he has been assigned to duty under his old rival, Captain Benton. While eluding the advances of Rosita, a Latin dancer, Bill becomes involved with Benton's fiancee, Dorothy Manning, whom he quickly wins and Benton accepts the impending marriage.

On his wedding eve, Bill, in the company of Rosita,…

World's first purpose-built airliner was much more comfortable for the crew and passengers than any of its contemporaries.

Junkers F.13, developed in 1919, is a true milestone in the history of aviation. As Johan Visschedijk writes, it "was designed from the beginning with two goals: to be the first all-metal airliner and the first series-produced airliner. "…

A car too beautiful to be true, too advanced to be a mid-1930s model. And real. The Tatra is the first production aero-dynamic automobile. This luxury car features a unique design including a sloped 45-degree three-piece windshield - fenders, headlamps, door hinges and handles integrated into the body - the absence of running boards and a smooth underbody. The large tailfin decreases side wind effect and…

While it may sound unusual to hear about lighter-than-air ships dropping bombs on major cities - at least outside The War in the Air - the Germans pushed to set London alight with firebombs during their raids at the start of WWI.

The first German bomb to land on London was an incendiary dropped from a Zeppelin on May 31, 1915. It's shell (pictured right) survived intact, though it crashed into a house and set two rooms on fire.

The destruction wrought by…

Want an airship? Pay for it!

This poster urges the public to join OSOAVIAKHIM, Union of Societies of Assistance to Defence and Aviation-Chemical Construction, which prepared Red Army reserves and used its members' fees to fund new aircraft squadrons and airship flotillas. The poster above (1930) is far less convincing than "Have you enlisted?", a real masterpiece created by D. Moor ten years earlier, during the Civil War:…

The Northover Projector was a classic improvised 'pipe gun' pieced together British weapon of World War II. Facing possible invasion by the forces of Hitler's Germany and no spectrum of anti-tank weapons ready for territorial defense, ingenuity became the weapon's designer's best friend.

With the Northover Projector they turned a simple piece of pipe into an…

The second French WWI tank - no better than the first and even worse.

Originally the tank produced by Saint Chamond was meant to be identical to the Schneider CA. Early 1916, the proposed definitive prototype of this latter tank was prepared in an army workshop. The type used tracks from the American-made Holt caterpillar tractors that were already employed in France for…

Welcome to Two Fisted Tuesdays, Dieselpunks' weekly beat on the mean streets.

Starring Gerald Mohr and starting with the famous lines, "Get this and get it straight! Crime is a sucker's road and those who travel it wind up in the gutter, the prison or the grave." The Adventures of Philip Marlowe runs about 25 minutes without commercials. You can listen to this blast from the past in MP3 format for free at the link below.…

Here's a fine example of Australian Art Deco - to commemorate Green Continent's entrance to Dieselpunk Top Ten:

No event, other than the two World Wars, has had a greater effect on the morale, economic and the social life of Australians than the Great Depression of the early 1930's. The Building of the IOOF Manchester Unity inspired and convinced Melbournians that the…

Lights out, everybody.

On Miskatonic Mondays, we celebrate the "weird" fiction of HP Lovecraft and the genre of otherworldly horror that it spawned.

As you probably already know, the hugely over-priced Mountains of Madness movie starring Tom Cruise is officially DOA.  Since leaving The Hobbit, Guillermo del Toro has been teasing the fanboys and girls with dreams of a James Cameron produced film of alien horror.

Well, the…

Chapter 11: The Great Collapse

"But when we contrast the state of man in the opening of the twentieth century with the condition of any previous period in his history, then perhaps we may begin to understand something of that blind confidence. It was not so much a reasoned confidence as the inevitable consequence of sustained good fortune. By such standards as they possessed, things HAD gone amazingly well for them. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for the first time…

The most famous character played by Brigitte Helm is Maria in Fritz Lang "Metropolis".

What makes these sailors so happy?

They are having fun. The Film Fun with cover art by Enoch Bolles, a great American illustrator who perfected the pin-up genre. Inner pages, so funny at the moment, will soon be forgotten and lost. The cover, almost for sure, will live on, glued to the sailor's suitcase lid or to the bulkhead above the other sailor's berth, if the Captain won't mind.…