In the London Docks. Engraving: Gustave Doré. From: "London - A Pilgrimage", text by W. B. Jerrold, engraved C. Maurant, 1872.
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Warships at Anchor by Moonlight by Eduardo de Martino
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A few Fresnel lenses from my visit to the National Museum of the Great Lakes! This one is a fourth-order lens from the lighthouse on Ojibwa Island, Lake Michigan, made in 1891.
A cute little fifth-order lens, which was used in Sandusky Harbor, Ohio, in 1891.
No first-order Fresnel lenses were used on the Great Lakes, and only five second-order lenses were placed. One of them was in the Spectacle Reef Lighthouse on Lake Huron in 1873, now in the museum:
My photography doesn't give a true sense of scale; that second-order lens is huge.
There is also a model of the lightship Huron, which is now a museum ship you can visit.
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So I bought this painting of the Cutty Sark in a charity shop for 50p. And on the back it’s got this placard - pretty cool, right? Obviously it’s staying
Obviously the frame is a little busted and it can’t hang but that’s a 10 minute fix.
So I remove the card first thing to save for later and —
It’s a fucking menu. And apparently a really fancy one - it got French words. I’m laughing my ass off because some guy cut out a description of the Cutty Sark from a restaurant menu and stuck it to the back of a painting of said ship. At this point I’m having a blast and joking that “Oh, what’s next, the painting itself is gonna be from the dessert menu, I bet!”
IT WAS THE FUCKING WINE MENU. And this has to be ancient because £1.25 for a bottle of wine?? 20p for a glass?!
So quite a few decades ago some guy stole a menu, took it home, then cut out the painting of The Cutty Sark and it’s description and framed it to presumably hang on their wall. And now it is in my home, on my mantle and whenever I have guests over they’ll go “Oh what a nice picture of a ship!” But they won’t know. Only I will know that it is in fact the front piece of a wine menu. Like. The process behind how this came to be.
I’m keeping this forever.
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Do… does he, you know, sail and use steam power?
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Early roads west were carved through a forbidding wilderness
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It is impossible to contemplate any steam-engine, without feeling wonder and admiration at the ingenuity of man; but this feeling is raised to a degree of awe when you look at a locomotive engine—there is such enormous power compressed into so small a space—I never can divest myself of the idea that it is possessed of vitality—that it is a living as well as a moving being—and that idea, joined with its immense power, conjures up in my mind that it is some spitting, fizzing, terrific demon, who, if he could escape control, would be ready and happy to drag us by thousands to destruction.
— Frederick Marryat, "Diary on the Continent" (Olla Podrida)
Inauguration du premier chemin de fer en Belgique or Départ de la Flèche le 5 mai 1835 by Jan Antoon Neuhuys, 1885. An artistic recreation of the new Belgian rail lines of 1835 that Marryat witnessed on his continental tour.
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Submarine USS Seal (later renamed G-1) photographed in 1912
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For the boat people in this place, consider helping save the Cape Ray wreck : https://gofund.me/3e6ebe48
It's had a little coverage (obviously bigger things are in the news) but the idea of trying to hold onto a strange visitor from out of the past and the sea hits the sentiments.
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Here’s my contribution to @theterrorbigbang, where I got to collab with the wonderful @fighting-naturalist. Check out her story that inspired this painting here.
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Morning and Evening shipping, by William Thornley (Active 1857-1898
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Vintage railway posters evoke a bygone era of romantic travel.
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By the steamboats, rail-roads, and the wonderful facilities of water-carriage, a journey of five hundred miles is as little considered in America, as would be here a journey from London to Brighton. “Go ahead” is the real motto of the country; and every man does push on, to gain in advance of his neighbour.
— Frederick Marryat, Diary in America
'Philadelphia Citizen's Line of Steam Boats to New York and Baltimore': 1831 lithograph by William L. Breton.
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Men of the United States Live-Saving Service in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, circa 1900
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