Lost Worlds Mod Thread

It is believed that at some time during 1688 Lloyd’s Coffee House opened in Tower Street, London. The first mention of Lloyd’s appeared in the late 1680s when an advertisement in the London Gazette offered “a reward of a guinea for information about stolen watches, claimable from Mr Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House in Tower Street”. People who could meet their share of a claim, if need be, to the full extent of their personal fortunes. At his coffee house, and until his death in 1713, Lloyd encouraged a clientele of ships’ captains, merchants, ship owners and others with an interest in overseas trade.

Throughout the 18th Century, the informal gathering of merchants at Lloyd’s Coffee House gradually assumed a more cohesive identity. However, there was little or no restriction of activities and the professionalism of the group was mixed. So in 1769, a number of Lloyd’s more reputable customers decided to break away and set up a rival establishment in nearby Popes Head Alley. ‘New Lloyd’s Coffee House’ as it was called, soon proved to be too small. So a committee was elected to find new premises. Some 79 underwriters and brokers each subscribed £100 towards a new premises. Lloyd’s had become the property of subscribers.

In 1774, rooms were leased in the Royal Exchange and ‘New Lloyd’s’ left the coffee business for good. While still referred to as ‘Lloyd’s Coffee House’ for many years, it was much more like a place of business. The modern Lloyd’s had been born. Over the next century the society of underwriters at Lloyd’s gradually evolved.

Membership was regulated and the elected Committee was given increased authority, but for much of the 19th century the committee exercised little power over its underwriting members. Lloyd's remained a loosely run club. Not until 1851 did a general meeting resolve that any member becoming bankrupt should forfeit his membership.
Between 1849 and 1870 the underwriting membership of Lloyd's had doubled. The committee became increasingly concerned to see that applicants for membership had the necessary means to support their underwriting. From 1856, in a few cases, guarantees or deposits were required, but it was not until 1882 that they became mandatory. Even then they related only to marine insurance.

Legislation was sought to strengthen the committee's powers. The Lloyd's Act, 1871, made Lloyd's a corporation, the Society of Lloyd's. The objectives of the society were stated as the carrying on of marine insurance by members and the collection and publication of intelligence. At that time Lloyd's' participation in non-marine insurance was negligible and the Act made no reference to it or, indeed, to insurance brokers.

After 1871 the volume of non-marine insurance became significant. Its growth was largely due to the efforts of C. E. Heath, an underwriter who began his own business in 1881. Besides transacting fire insurance he pioneered new forms such as all risks insurance on property on land, and on household burglary. C. E. Heath underwrote on behalf of a syndicate which in 1887 comprised 15 Names.

The provision of intelligence loomed large in the work of Henry Hozier, who was secretary from 1874 to 1906. In addition to strengthening Lloyd's' central staff, he saw the desirability of getting information promptly, and set up coastal telegraph stations for that purpose. By 1884 Lloyd's had 17 stations at home and six abroad.

The years 1875 to 1900 saw the accelerating development of Lloyd's in two respects. Thanks to the activities of Lloyd's brokers, much business began to reach Lloyd's from the United States and other overseas sources. Reinsurance, that is, the acceptance of liabilities assumed by direct insurers under their own policies, came to be transacted at Lloyd's, which pioneered novel forms of reinsurance contracts.

The huge, modular wood, glass and iron structure at the top of Sydenham Hill was originally erected in Hyde Park in London to house The Great Exhibition of 1851, showcasing the products of many countries throughout the world.

The Crystal Palace's creator, Joseph Paxton, received a knighthood in recognition of his work. Paxton had been the head gardener at Chatsworth House. There he had experimented with glass and iron in the creation of large greenhouses, and had seen something of their strength and durability, knowledge that he applied to the plans for the Great Exhibition building. Planners had been looking for strength, durability, simplicity of construction and speed—and this they got from Paxton's ideas. The project was engineered by Sir William Cubitt.

Full-size, living elm trees in the park were enclosed within the central exhibition hall near the 27-foot (8 m) tall Crystal Fountain. Sparrows became a nuisance; Queen Victoria mentioned this problem to the Duke of Wellington, who offered the famous solution, "Sparrowhawks, Ma'am".

A Christmas Carol is a novella by English author Charles Dickens first published by Chapman & Hall on 17 December 1843. The story tells of sour and stingy Ebenezer Scrooge's ideological, ethical, and emotional transformation after the supernatural visits of Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. The novella met with instant success and critical acclaim.

The book was written and published in early Victorian era Britain when it was experiencing a nostalgic interest in its forgotten Christmas traditions, and at the time when new customs such as the Christmas tree and greeting cards were being introduced. Dickens' sources for the tale appear to be many and varied but are principally the humiliating experiences of his childhood, his sympathy for the poor, and various Christmas stories and fairy tales.

The tale has been viewed as an indictment of nineteenth century industrial capitalism and was adapted several times to the stage, and has been credited with restoring the holiday to one of merriment and festivity in Britain and America after a period of sobriety and somberness. A Christmas Carol remains popular, has never been out of print.

It was in the midst of these improbable adventures that Campion Bond appeared at the club one day. The handsome spy received hearty welcome, expressed regret that he couldn't stay.
"I'm on official business, I'm afraid. We're aware of your experiments with Cavorite, and have taken an interest in your project."
Sawyer started, "How could you...?", but was quieted by Quartermain.
"The Queen," Bond continued, "desires to find the unfortunate Dr. Cavor for whom that substance is named, and has information in the form of a wireless transmission that was intercepted by a scientist in Colorado, in America. We believe that Cavor is on the moon, and we wish to assert the legal authority for his return."
"And how to you intend to do that?" Fogg asked dryly, "I would think that the present inhabitants of that planet might object to the Crown's assertion of authority."
"That is why you have been chartered," Bond responded, while placing an official document on the table in front of us, "to establish a foreign office on behalf of the Crown."
"Agreed." said Fogg without hesitation, "It's a fine idea."
Mrs. Lovelace mused, "We shall have to re-name our vessel then, to reflect our new charter."
"And that would be..?"
"The Moonraker. The H.M.S. Moonraker."
"Bravo!" said Bond, and toasted the room, and Mrs. Lovelace, who could not hide her sudden blush.

Ada Lovelace was a brilliant mathematician; she was also an inveterate gambler. It is often said that her interest in developing Babbage's machines was as much about betting on horse racing as it was about science. Phineas Fogg was also well acquainted with wagering, as most of his present fortune had come about as the result of a wager. So it was inevitable that the two got together to build a Predictive Engine. They set up shop in a warehouse not far from the center of London, a huge room with a gigantic Babbage machine at one end, and tables upon which were strewn newpapers, weather reports, Lloyd's Shipping Register, the Philosophic Journal, and all other manner of research. In the end, it paid off handsomely - in the markets and insurance investments - but not, alas, in sport wagering. We were also able, by this means, to predict certain technological advancements even before they'd been patented - a significant advantage to our cause, indeed.

Michael Faraday, FRS (22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Faraday began his career in science as Chemical Assistant at the Royal Institution, helping Humprhy Davy with projects such as the miner's safety lamp, but went on to conduct his own research and make many large contributions to natural philosophy.

In 1821, following Hans Christian Oersted's discovery of electro-magnetism, Faraday discovered electro-magnetic rotations, the principle behind the electric motor. In the early 1820s he also liquefied gases and in 1825 he discovered what was later called benzene.

In the late 1820s much of his time was spent working on a project to improve optical glass for the Admiralty, so it wasn't until 1831 that he was able to return to his research on electricity. His discovery of electro-magnetic induction in 1831 commenced a remarkable decade of work. Amongst other things, he rewrote the theory of electrochemistry (coining many words still in use today such as electrode and ion) and established his laws of electrolysis. In 1836 he built the Faraday cage, which showed that measurements of electric charge depended on the electrical state of the observer. This observation led Faraday to develop his theory that electricity was the result of varying magnetic forces between particles rather than a fluid as previously supposed.

In the 1840s Faraday argued against two major theories of 19th-century physics - that matter was ultimately divisible into chemical atoms, and that light travelled by flowing through a substance called the aether. Looking for alternative explanations helped him towards his discovery of the magneto-optical effect and diamagnetism in 1845 and culminated in his establishment of the field theory of electromagnetism which, when mathematised by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and James Clark Maxwell, became (and remains) one of the cornerstones of physics.

Wardenclyffe Tower (1901–1917) also known as the Tesla Tower, was an early wireless telecommunications tower designed by Nikola Tesla and intended for commercial trans-Atlantic wireless telephony, broadcasting, and to demonstrate the transmission of power without interconnecting wires.

In 1891 and 1892, Tesla had used an oscillatory transformer that bears his name in demonstration lectures delivered before meetings of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) in New York City" and the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE) in London. Of two striking results that Tesla demonstrated, one was that the wireless transmission of electrical energy was possible. A later presentation, titled "On Light and Other High Frequency Phenomena" was a key event in the invention of radio and could also be said to have begun the development of Wardenclyffe.

In the early presentations, the first experiment to be demonstrated was the operation of light and motive devices connected by a single wire to only one terminal of a high frequency induction coil, presented during the 1891 New York City lecture at Columbia University. While a single terminal incandescent lamp connected to one of an induction coil’s secondary terminals does not form a closed circuit “in the ordinary acceptance of the term”, the circuit is closed in the sense that a return path is established back to the secondary by what Tesla called “electrostatic induction” (or 'displacement currents'). This is due to the lamp’s filament or refractory button capacitance relative to the coil’s free terminal and environment; the free terminal also has capacitance relative to the lamp and environment. At high frequencies, the displacement current through these capacitances is sufficient to light the lamp.

The second result demonstrated how energy could be made to go through space without any connecting wires. This was the first step towards a practical wireless system. The wireless energy transmission effect involved the creation of an electric field between two metal plates, each being connected to one terminal of an induction coil’s secondary winding. Once again, a light-producing device (in this case a gas discharge tube) was used as a means of detecting the presence of the transmitted energy. "The most striking result obtained" involved the lighting of two partially evacuated tubes in an alternating electrostatic field while held in the hand of the experimenter. In Tesla's words,

... I suspend a sheet of metal a distance from the ceiling on insulating cords and connect it to one terminal of the induction coil, the other terminal being preferably connected to the ground. Or else I suspend two sheets as illustrated in Fig. 29 / 125, each sheet being connected with one of the terminals of the coil, and their size being carefully determined. An exhausted tube may then be carried in the hand anywhere between the sheets or placed anywhere, even a certain distance beyond them; it remains always luminous.

Here Tesla describes two different types of wireless transmitter, both employing a high-tension induction coil. One had a sheet of metal suspended from the ceiling and connected to one of the induction coil’s terminals, with the other terminal being connected to ground. The other type of transmitter had two sheets of metal suspended from the ceiling, each being connected to one of the coil’s high-voltage terminals.

While working to develop an explanation for the two observed effects mentioned above, Tesla recognized that electrical energy can be projected outward into space and detected by a receiving instrument in the general vicinity of the source without the need for any interconnecting wires. He went on to develop two theories related to these observations, which are:

1. By using two Tesla coil transmitter-receivers positioned at distant points on the Earth’s surface, it is possible to induce a flow of electrical current between them.

2. By incorporating a portion of the Earth as part of a powerful dual-elevated-terminal Tesla coil transmitter an electrical disturbance can be impressed upon the Earth and detected “at great distance, or even all over the surface of the globe.”

Wardenclyffe was the first of many installations to be constructed near major population centers around the world. If Tesla's plans had moved forward without interruption the Long Island prototype would have been followed by a second plant built in the British Isles, perhaps on the west coast of Scotland near Glasgow. Each of these facilities would have included a large magnifying transmitter of a design loosely based upon the apparatus which Tesla assembled at the Colorado Springs Experimental Station in 1899.

"It is intended to give practical demonstrations of these principles with the plant illustrated. As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction."

Related to the operation and utilization of Wardenclyffe Tower was Nikola Tesla's work on a macroscopic charged particle beam weapon called Teleforce. A Wardenclyffe styled facility which included the weapon was contemplated by Tesla. A descriptive 17-page type-written document on Tesla's office letterhead titled, "New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media", which presently exists in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade, shows that his macroscopic particle beam, also dubbed the "Peace Ray" or the "death ray" by contemporary media, was a narrow stream of charged macroscopic clusters of atomic mercury or tungsten accelerated by high voltage, produced by either a huge Van de Graaff generator or Tesla Coil.

Bedlam was a psychiatric hospital located in London in the 1800's. The word bedlam, meaning uproar and confusion, is derived from its name. Although the hospital is now at the forefront of humane psychiatric treatment, for much of its history it was notorious for cruelty and inhumane treatment – the epitome of what the term "madhouse" connotes to the modern reader.

The Hospital became famous and notorious for the brutal ill-treatment meted out to the mentally ill. In 1675 Bedlam moved to new buildings in Moorfields designed by Robert Hooke, outside the City boundary. The playwright Nathaniel Lee was incarcerated there for five years, reporting that: "They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me."

The inmates were first called "patients" in 1700, and "curable" and "incurable" wards were opened in 1725-34. In the 18th century people used to go to Bedlam to stare at the lunatics. For a penny one could peer into their cells, view the freaks of the "show of Bethlehem" and laugh at their antics. Entry was free on the first Tuesday of the month. In 1814 alone, there were 96,000 such visits.

Eighteenth century Bethlem was most notably portrayed in a scene from William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress (1735), the story of a rich merchant's son whose immoral living causes him to end up in a ward at Bethlem. This reflects the view of the time that madness was a result of moral weakness, leading to "moral insanity" being used as a common diagnosis.

In 1815, Bedlam was moved to St George's Fields, Southwark, into buildings designed by James Lewis (a cupola was added later by Sydney Smirke). The inmates were referred to as "unfortunates" and must have had an uncomfortable time in their first winter there; no glass was initially provided for the windows, because of "the disagreable effluvias peculiar to all madhouses". This building had a remarkable library as an annex which was well frequented. Although the sexes were separated, in the evenings, those capable of appreciating music could dance together in the great ballroom. In the chapel the sexes were separated by a curtain.

- From The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H. G. Wells

The imposing, but likeable Hungarian and his companions ("Acrobats," we were told, "and fiercely loyal; with them, he can travel anywhere.") were visiting at Nemo's invitation.
"Electric weapons? But wouldn't they run out of power at some point?" asked Wells, "I imagine that would be inconvenient in a tight spot."
"They recharge themselves as they are used, Sir. My Electric torpedo boats can go faster than any other in the Mediterranean, and go as far as they wish. My other weapons have similar capabilities." Sandorf said this with an attitude of absolute certainty; there was no doubt of his sincerity.
"Well then we have a deal." said Fogg, directly.
"And you, Sir," said Sandorf as he grasped Fogg's arm, "have an Armoury."

Alexander Graham Bell spoke the first recognizable words into a telephone on March 10, 1876. Mr. Sherlock Holmes states that he believes, by his calculation, that, by coincidence, he spoke nearly the same words at nearly the same time, if the newpaper reports of the exact time of it are accurate: "Mr Watson, come here, I want you".

In June, 1878, The Telephone Company Ltd was formed to market Bell's patent telephones in Great Britain. Its premises were at 36 Coleman Street. It had a capacity for 150 lines and opened with 7 or 8 subscribers. One of the first telephone lines to be erected in the vicinity of London was from Hay's Wharf, south of the Thames, to Hay's Wharf Office on the north bank.

At that same time in America, Thomas Alva Edison patented a carbon telephone transmitter invented the previous year - a great improvement on Bell's telephone transmitter which worked by means of magnetic current. In 1879, Edison produced a telephone receiver known as the 'chalk receiver', 'motograph receiver' or 'electromotograph'.

The Edison Telephone Company of London Ltd was registered on August 2, 1879 to work the Edison telephone patents. The company's first exchange officially opened on 6 September at 11 Queen Victoria Street, London, with ten subscribers who used carbon transmitters and chalk receivers. By the end of the following February, when the company had another two exchanges in operation, it served 172 subscribers.

In 1880, after some litigation over patents, the Telephone Company Ltd and the Edison Telephone Company of London Ltd were amalgamated on 13 May to form the United Telephone Company. The new company, now controlling Bell's and Edison's patents, reflected the situation that existed by then in the United States.

Although the earlier Telegraph Acts contained no reference to telephones, a court judgement was issued on 20 December, 1880 in favour of the Post Office in a landmark legal action (Attorney General vs. Edison Telephone Company of London Ltd.). The judgement laid down that a telephone was a telegraph, and that a telephone conversation was a telegram, within the meaning of Section 4 of the Telegraph Act, 1869.

Independent telephone companies were thereupon obliged to obtain 31-year licences to operate from the Postmaster-General, the Post Office taking 10 per cent of gross income and having the option to purchase a telephone undertaking at the end of ten, 17 or 24 years. It was Post Office policy to issue licences for the few existing telephone systems, restricting these systems to areas in which they were operating, and to undertake the general development of the telephone itself.

On August 7, 1884, the Postmaster-General announced his decision to withdraw the restriction of exchange areas to five miles. Instead, telephone companies were to receive licences to work anywhere in the United Kingdom, and were thus enabled to create exchange areas of any extent and to connect them by trunk wires. The way was now clear for the development of a national system of trunk wires.

This 'liberalisation' by the Postmaster-General also brought about the birth of the public call office. Telephone companies were now allowed to establish telephone stations which any member of the public could use. There were little more than 13,000 telephones in use at this time and the Postmaster-General's decision allowed access to the telephone to a whole new sector of society to whom the new technology was largely only a rumour. The new 'call offices' were soon advertised in the national and local press. They were at first located in 'silence cabinets' found in shops, railway stations and other public places.

One of the first freestanding call offices (later to be known as 'kiosks') was introduced in Bristol in 1886 by the United Telephone Company. It was basically a small wooden hut where a three-minute call could be made for just 'tuppence' (a little under 1p). Not all early payphones had a coinbox built into them; some of the kiosks had a penny-in-the-slot mechanism on the door, while others had an attendant to collect the fee. The National Telephone Company actually produced subscribers' Trunk Pass Keys which were used to unlock call offices when members of the public wished to make a trunk call in the attendant's absence.

- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

In a Scottish Castle, far up upon wild and windswept hills, it is rumoured that the accursed methods of the brilliant young doctor have begun anew. It is not known who is doing this, or by what agency, save that the disappearance of corpses, evidence of strange chemicals being delivered to the castle manor, and electrical discharges which can be seen from a considerable distance. There are opinions that the known accounts of Frankenstein's demise are flawed by the conclusion itself: if all of the protagonists have died, whence comes the story of their demise? Shelly provided evidence of correspondence; her fair countenance would be blameless in such subterfuge. In any case, it remains a fact that there is no actual evidence of the Doctor's death; and that his detailed journals were never found. If it is true that his dark science is again being practiced it hardly matters: the ghastly progeny of such effort must be captured and protected, both from itself and from those who would tear it apart to try to learn the secrets of its creation. If it cannot be captured, it must however, be killed; for the spawn of evil is evil, and unchecked, cannot be any but the greatest and most terrible danger to anyone who might stumble into its way, unaware of their own peril, unaware that the monster's mission is to compensate the devil for that which has been taken from him.

Mary Shelley (née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's life itself seemed to embody and symbolize the history of the American west. Born in 1846 in a log cabin in Iowa, he grew up on the cutting edge of Turner's notorious "meeting point of savagery and civilization." He was present for every key moment in westward expansion, including the gold rush, the Pony Express, the building of the railroads, and cattle herding on the Great Plains--and found himself playing a part in nearly every one of these crucial stages of development. A career as a scout during the Civil War earned him his nickname and established his notoriety as a model frontiersman. During his scouting days, Cody also added Indian warfare to his already impressive resumé of mythical western experiences.

In confrontations over land ownership in the 1860's and 1870's, Cody distinguished himself as a superior scout and expedition leader, but in late summer of 1876, he moved from national hero to mythic legend. The defeat of Custer and his Cavalry at Little Big Horn on June 25 retrieved the Indian Wars from back-page news and brought them to the headlines. In the wake of public shock and outrage over this defeat, the Fifth Cavalry avenged Custer's defeat in a Cheyenne skirmish at Warbonnet Creek, Nebraska on July 17. Cody confronted Cheyenne leader Yellow Hand, shot and scalped him, and as the story goes, raised the scalp of the dead warrior to the charging Fifth Cavalry while delcaring "First scalp for Custer!" Whether any gesture of victory and revenge occurred is uncertain, but the killing of Yellow Hand was genuine. No matter what may have transpired after he claimed that scalp, Cody the man met Cody the legend on the bluffs of the Warbonnet Creek, and history and myth commingled to set the stage for the Wild West Show.

In 1883, in the area of North Platte, Nebraska, Cody founded "Buffalo Bill's Wild West," a circus-like attraction that toured annually. (Despite popular misconception, the word "show" was not a part of the title.) With his show, Cody traveled throughout the United States and Europe and made many contacts.

In 1893 Cody changed the title to "Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World". The show began with a parade on horseback, with participants from horse-culture groups that included US and other military, American Indians, and performers from all over the world in their best attire. Turks, Gauchos, Arabs, Mongols and Georgians, displayed their distinctive horses and colorful costumes. Visitors would see main events, feats of skill, staged races, and sideshows. Many historical western figures participated in the show. For example, Sitting Bull appeared with a band of 20 of his braves.

Cody's headline performers were well known in their own right. People such as Annie Oakley and her husband Frank Butler did sharp shooting, together with the likes of Gabriel Dumont. Performers re-enacted the riding of the Pony Express, Indian attacks on wagon trains, and stagecoach robberies. The show was said to end with a re-enactment of Custer's Last Stand, in which Cody portrayed General Custer, but this is more legend than fact. The finale was typically a portrayal of an Indian attack on a settler's cabin. Cody would ride in with an entourage of cowboys to defend a settler and his family.

In 1887 Cody brought the show to Great Britain in celebration of the Jubilee year of Queen Victoria. It played in London before going on to Birmingham and Salford near Manchester, where it stayed for five months. Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux who was traveling with the show, met Queen Victoria in London; calling her "Grandmother England." He and several others were left behind when they missed the boat taking the show back to the United States. They found work with another traveling exhibition, and traveled to several other European cities including Paris, France.

Thomas Roch was an inventor--an inventor of genius. Several important discoveries had brought him prominently to the notice of the world. Thanks to him, problems that had previously remained purely theoretical had received practical application. He occupied a conspicuous place in the front rank of the army of science. It will be seen how worry, deceptions, mortification, and the outrages with which he was overwhelmed by the cynical wits of the press combined to drive him to that degree of madness which necessitated his internment in Healthful House.

His latest invention in war-engines bore the name of Roch's Fulgurator. This apparatus possessed, if he was to be believed, such superiority over all others, that the State which acquired it would become absolute master of earth and ocean.

The fulgurator was a sort of auto-propulsive engine, of peculiar construction, charged with an explosive composed of new substances and which only produced its effect under the action of a deflagrator that was also new.

When this engine, no matter in what way it was launched, exploded, not on striking the object aimed at, but several hundred yards from it, its action upon the atmospheric strata was so terrific that any construction, warship or floating battery, within a zone of twelve thousand square yards, would be blown to atoms. This was the principle of the shell launched by the Zalinski pneumatic gun with which experiments had already been made at that epoch, but its results were multiplied at least a hundred-fold.

I believe that one of the most significant contributions to science is one which the public will never know of, that is, the creation of a photoelectic-cavorite mixture that could be applied to the bottom of a sphere, which would, when released like a balloon, rise above the atmosphere of the planet, to a particular spot directly overhead.

It would, of course, be hurtling through space around the earth at an alarming rate - Ada calculated that it would be in the range of 10,700 metres per second - because we and every other thing on the earth travels that fast around the earth in the normal course of our own travels through the heavens. But it would appear to remain unmoving in the sky, in relation to ourselves.

The second part, then, was to place a telescope and wireless transmitter aboard the platform. The telescope would act like a light-box, and an image of the sky would appear against a surface opposite the lens. Then (and here's the genius) photoelectric cells would detect the lightness or darkness in the image and transmit it, via the wireless device, to a specially made light-projector below, from which image a photograph might be taken. In all, it was like a type of long-distance camera, one which has the photographer miles from the lens, but still in control of the image. Gyroscopes within the sphere, in the meantime, would keep the image still enough not to blur.

In short, the design was genius, and all the more remarkable because it was developed during a conversation that Mrs. Lovelace had arranged between Sir Faraday and Thomas Edison, during a visit to London by the latter. She had manipulated the conversation in such a way that the scientists thought that they were engaging in an intellectual game of what-if's over drinks. Ada was able to keep the conversation light, and the atmosphere entertaining, playfully prodding the great men into specifics at critical points, and even to challenge each of them to outdo the other in the accuracy of his contribution as part of the 'game'.

It was quite late in the evening when she tossed a pile of napkins onto the downstairs writing-desk where Mina Harken happened to be sitting, as was often her habit late into the evening. "It's all there," said Ada, "and it will work; I can guarantee it."
Mina examined the napkins; they were covered with inked equations and diagrams.
"This is amazing, Ada," said Mina, "Fogg will be so pleased."
"I hope so," said Ada over her shoulder as she started up the staircase to her room, "I charged the entire evening to his account."

A penny dreadful (also called penny horrible, penny awful, penny number and penny blood) was a type of British fiction publication in the 19th century that usually featured lurid serial stories appearing in parts over a number of weeks, each part costing a penny. The term, however, soon came to encompass a variety of publications that featured cheap sensational fiction, such as story papers and booklet "libraries". The penny dreadfuls were printed on cheap pulp paper and were aimed primarily at working class adolescents.

These serials started in the 1830s, originally as a cheaper alternative to mainstream fictional part-works, such as those by Charles Dickens (which cost a shilling [twelve pennies]) for working class adults, but by the 1850s the serial stories were aimed exclusively at teenagers. The stories themselves were reprints or sometimes rewrites of Gothic thrillers such as The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, as well as new stories about famous criminals. Some of the most famous of these penny part-stories were The String of Pearls: A Romance (introducing Sweeney Todd), The Mysteries of London (inspired by French serial The Mysteries of Paris) and Varney the Vampire. Highwaymen were popular heroes. Black Bess or the Knight of the Road, outlining the largely imaginary exploits of real-life English highwayman Dick Turpin, continued for 254 episodes.

In late 1893, a publisher, Alfred Harmsworth, decided to do something about what was widely perceived as the corrupting influence of the penny dreadfuls. He issued new story papers, The Half-penny Marvel, The Union Jack and Pluck, all priced at one half-penny. At first the stories were high-minded moral tales, reportedly based on true experiences, but it was not long before these papers started using the same kind of material as the publications they competed against. A.A. Milne once said, "Harmsworth killed the penny dreadful by the simple process of producing the ha'penny dreadfuller."

The Home Office and the Foreign Office were born on 27 March 1782, when the Rockingham administration took office and the work of the two Principal Secretaries of State was divided in a new way. Many of the functions of the Secretaries of State, and their assistants, had existed since the office grew up in the 13th century; since the early 17th century foreign affairs had been divided between the Northern and Southern Department, with the Secretaries of State sharing domestic responsibilities. But in 1782, it was at last decided to divide more rationally, and that Charles James Fox should be responsible for foreign affairs, and the Earl of Shelburne for domestic (and also colonial) affairs. The staff were divided between the two offices, with most of the Southern Department staff coming to the Office of the Secretary of State for the Home Department, which was and still is the correct title, though it came to be called the "Home Office" in common usage by the early years of the 19th century. It was not until the 1840s that the term was used officially.

The earliest duties of the Home Office were heavily weighted in the direction of Crown grants, appointments and preferments of all kinds - the King’s business in fact. The Office was also the channel for the government affairs of Scotland, Ireland, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and all colonies. Criminal business, which meant largely the use of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy and transportation, was part of the responsibilities from the earliest days, though oddly enough the staff concerned did not come on the full establishment until 1870, and the Criminal Department did not in early years enjoy the prestige of the General, Domestic, or Chief Clerk’s Departments. The ‘King’s Peace’, or the maintenance of internal peace and order, at first through the agency of the magistrates and the military, and after 1829 increasingly through the police, was, and remained a heavy responsibility. The first Aliens Act came in 1793. The first immigration officers were inevitably the magistrates, but the Home Office had a small central sub-department and used King’s Messengers to carry out deportations. After victory over Napoleon control of movement of aliens was less and less enforced for nearly a century: a considerable change from the 1790s when an alien returning for a second time after deportation was liable to the death penalty.

One of the greatest of all Home Secretaries was Robert Peel, who held office from 1822-1827 and again from 1828-1830. He was responsible for eight criminal law Acts which modified and reformed the savage medieval jumble of the criminal law; and for the Prison Act 1823 which began the process of bringing order and some standards to the local prisons of the country; while in his second term he secured, after years of opposition, the passage of the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 which gave us our first large, disciplined and uniformed police force.

Despite the short lull in expressions of public discontent following the Great Reform Act in 1832, internal disorders and the struggle to maintain the King’s (or after 1837 the Queen’s) Peace continued to occupy a large part of the energies of Home Secretaries and their helpers. The Chartists had replaced the Luddites as the main focus, and the Home Office, aided by the indefatigable magistrates, the military and increasingly the professional police, struggled to keep order. In the 1830s under two more Home Secretaries who were future Prime Ministers, Lord Melbourne and Lord John Russell, the Municipal Corporations Acts of 1835, made provision for police forces in towns other than London, and the County Police Act 1839 laid the basis for rural police (though Parliament turned down the bold recommendation of a Royal Commission that there should be a national rural police). The reform of the criminal law continued; by 1841 although there remained eleven capital offences the death penalty was in practice kept for murder; and the treatment of serious offenders became less and less a matter for transportation or the hulks, with the opening of the new convict prisons, Millbank, Pentonville, Portland and Dartmoor. In 1833 the Home Office assumed a different and significant responsibility, which was to loom large throughout the next century. Under Lord Shaftesbury’s Factory Act the first Factory Inspectorate was set up as part of the Home Office and in 1842 the responsibility was extended to the mines. This was the beginning of the Home Office’s industrial and social responsibility.

Throughout the period, the work increased - by steady progression of existing duties and by acquisition of new responsibilities as the government moved into new spheres of activity. This was particularly marked under the great reforming governments of Gladstone (1868-1874), and Disraeli (1874-1880) - but was by no means confined to those administrations. The Police Act of 1856, attempted by Palmerston and completed by Grey, made county forces compulsory, and provided for Home Office inspection through Inspectors of Constabulary. The Prisons Act of 1877 created the Prison Commission and finally brought all prisons under control of the Home Secretary. In the field of criminal law, the Extradition Acts of 1870 and 1873 opened the way for bilateral treaties with most countries in the world, the Summary Jurisdiction Act 1879 and the Justices’ Clerks Act 1877 established Home Office controls over the administration of Magistrates Courts; there were weighty consolidating Acts such as the Offences against the Person Act 1861 and the Larceny Act 1879. The Summary Jusrisdiction Act 1879 introduced the possibility of probation of offenders. As examples of new work, the Explosives Act of 1875, largely the work of Col. Sir Vivian Majendie, the first Chief Inspector of Explosives, followed upon the blowing up of a gunpowder barge on the Regent’s Canal, and in 1876 there was the Cruelty to Animals Act, again setting up an Inspectorate and providing for control of experiments on living animals. Sir Edward Troop observed grimly that earlier Home Office interest in this field had been mainly directed to the availability for scientific experiment of the bodies of executed criminals. The Liquor Licensing Act of 1872 gave the Home Office new and controversial duties as did the Food and Drugs Act 1875.

Wrought ironwork, forged by a blacksmith using an anvil, was widely used in England during the 18th century in gates and railings in London and towns such as Oxford and Cambridge. As iron became more common, it became widely used for cooking utensils, stoves, grates, locks, hardware and other household uses. From the beginning of the 19th century, wrought iron was being replaced by cast iron due to the latter's lower cost.

Cast iron is produced in a furnace stoked with alternate layers of coking iron then poured into molds. After the iron cools off, the sand is cleaned off. By the end of the 18th century, cast iron was increasing used for railings, balconies, banisters and garden furniture due to its lower cost.

Early iron smelting used charcoal as both the heat source and the reducing agent. By the 18th century, the availability of wood for making charcoal was limiting the expansion of iron production, so that England became increasingly dependent for a considerable part of the iron required by its industry, on Sweden (from the mid 17th century) and then from about 1725 also on Russia.

Smelting with coal (or its derivative coke) was a long sought objective. The production of pig iron with coke was probably achieved by Dud Dudley in the 1620s, and with a mixed fuel made from coal and wood again in the 1670s. However this was probably only a technological rather than a commercial success. Shadrach Fox may have smelted iron with coke at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire in the 1690s, but only to make cannon balls and other cast iron products such as shells. However, in the peace after the Nine Years War, there was no demand for these.

Bar iron thus continued normally to be made with charcoal pig iron until the mid 1750s. In 1755 Abraham Darby II opened a new coke-using furnace at Horsehay in Shropshire, and this was followed by others. These supplied coke pig iron to finery forges of the traditional kind for the production of bar iron. The reason for the delay remains controversial.

In the early 17th century, ironworkers in Western Europe had developed the cementation process for carburizing wrought iron. Wrought iron bars and charcoal were packed into stone boxes, then held at a red heat for up to a week. During this time, carbon diffused into the iron, producing a product called cement steel or blister steel.

The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass-production of steel from molten pig iron. The process is named after its inventor, Henry Bessemer, who took out a patent on the process in 1855. The process was independently discovered in 1851 by William Kelly. The process had also been used outside of Europe for hundreds of years, but not on an industrial scale. The key principle was removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron. As the carbon burned off, the melting point of the mixture increased, but the heat from the burning carbon provided the extra energy needed to keep the mixture molten. After the carbon content in the melt had dropped to the desired level, the air draft was cut off: a typical Bessemer converter could convert a 25-ton batch of pig iron to steel in half an hour.

Until these 19th century developments, steel was an expensive commodity and only used for a limited number of purposes where a particularly hard or flexible metal was needed, as in the cutting edges of tools and springs. The widespread availability of inexpensive steel powered the Second Industrial Revolution and modern society as we know it. Mild steel ultimately replaced wrought iron for almost all purposes, and wrought iron is no longer commercially produced. With minor exceptions, alloy steels only began to be made in the late 19th century.

- A. Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)

"The Gold-Bug" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Set on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the plot follows William Legrand, who was recently bitten by a gold-colored bug. His servant Jupiter fears him to be going insane and goes to Legrand's friend, an unnamed narrator who agrees to visit his old friend. Legrand pulls the other two into an adventure after deciphering a secret message that will lead to a buried treasure.

The story is often compared with Poe's "tales of ratiocination" as an early form of detective fiction. Poe became aware of the public's interest in secret writing in 1840 and asked readers to challenge his skills as a code-breaker. Poe took advantage of the popularity of cryptography as he was writing "The Gold-Bug" and the success of the story centers on one such cryptogram.

Poe submitted "The Gold-Bug" as an entry to a writing contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. His story won the grand prize and was published in three installments, beginning in June 1843. The prize also included $100, likely the largest single sum Poe received for any of his works.

On 21 October 1854, Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Nightingale and including her aunt Mai Smith, were sent to the Ottoman Empire, about 295 nautical miles (546 km; 339 mi) across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.

Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul). She and her nurses found wounded soldiers being badly cared for by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients.

During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there. Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Conditions at the temporary barracks hospital were fatal to the patients because of overcrowding and the hospital's defective sewers and lack of ventilation.

While at Scutari, Florence Nightingale gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp", deriving from a phrase in a report in The Times:

She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.

The phrase was further popularised by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem "Santa Filomena":

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

While she was in the Crimea, on 29 November 1855, a public meeting to give recognition to Florence Nightingale for her work in the war led to the establishment of the Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses. There was an outpouring of generous donations.

By 1859 Nightingale had £45,000 at her disposal from the Nightingale Fund to set up the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital on 9 July 1860. The first trained Nightingale nurses began work on 16 May 1865 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. She also campaigned and raised funds for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury, near her family home.

Nightingale also wrote Notes on Nursing, which was published in 1859, a slim 136-page book that served as the cornerstone of the curriculum at the Nightingale School and other nursing schools established, though it was written specifically for the education of those nursing at home. Nightingale wrote "Every day sanitary knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of how to put the constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from disease, takes a higher place. It is recognised as the knowledge which every one ought to have – distinct from medical knowledge, which only a profession can have".

Nightingale was a constant advocate for the improvement of care and conditions in the military and civilian hospitals in Britain. Her popular books on the subject include Notes on Hospitals, which deals with the correlation of sanitary techniques to medical facilities; and Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army.

Notes on Nursing also sold well to the general reading public and is considered a classic introduction to nursing. Nightingale spent the rest of her life promoting the establishment and development of the nursing profession and organizing it into its modern form.

One of Nightingale's signal achievements was the introduction of trained nurses into the workhouse system in England and Ireland from the 1860s onwards. This meant that sick paupers were no longer being cared for by other, able-bodied paupers, but by properly trained nursing staff.

By 1882, Nightingale nurses had a growing and influential presence in the embryonic nursing profession. Some had become matrons at several leading hospitals, including, in London, St Mary's Hospital, Westminster Hospital, St Marylebone Workhouse Infirmary and the Hospital for Incurables at Putney; and throughout Britain, e.g., Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley; Edinburgh Royal Infirmary; Cumberland Infirmary and Liverpool Royal Infirmary, as well as at Sydney Hospital in New South Wales, Australia.

In 1883, Nightingale was awarded the Royal Red Cross by Queen Victoria.

The Weldon Institute, formerly the Weldon Institute of Dirigible Research and now properly The Weldon Institute of Aeronautical Research, was founded for the purpose of researching and promoting lighter-than-air craft. After the events chronicled by many of the papers, and by M. Verne in his book, the scope of the Institute's research was greatly expanded to include all sorts of air vehicles, manned and unmanned, with enormous gas bags, or with wings, or propellers and combinations of all of the above.

Quatermain was off trading stories of Africa with Sir Richard Burton, and Mrs. Lovelace had gone to the country, so it was left for myself, Mina Harken and Alice Liddle to travel out to the Institute's facility in Newbridge. I shall never forget the look on young Alice's face when she saw the field of dirigibles. Before the wheels had come to a halt, she was out running, arms in the air, squealing with glee.

So, Mina and Alice toured the field while I conducted business indoors. Mssrs. Prudent and Evans, the Secretary and President of the Institute were my hosts. They had the appearance of proper english businessmen, but were not reserved at all about discussing their work. Their offices reflected enterprise - the tables were covered with papers, and all about the offices were models of elaborate airships. Mr. Prudent (or Evans, I wasn't sure) was quite eager to show me every one of their latest projects, and I must admit that all of it was both quite impressive and well over my head.

The best memory of that afternoon was when we stepped out of the Institute's offices and onto the steps and I could see Alice out on the field, talking to what looked like a young man on the back of a mechanical wasp. Alice stood looking up with her feet together, hands behind her back, absolutely unafraid of the gigantic machine with the furiously beating wings, despite the unavoidable fact that if it had fallen on that spot, it would surely have crushed her.

"Great George!" I exclaimed.

My companion followed my gaze, and spotted the immediate cause of my outburst. "That?..oh, that is an Ornothopter, sir. Quite safe. It can't get very far off the ground as yet, but we are, as ever, striving..."

I had stopped listening. I was watching Alice wave goodbye to her friend, and jump to take Mina's arm as they both walked gaily back across the field.

The Weldon Institute appears in the Jules Verne novel "Robur the Conqueror" (1886).

The Gridley wave device appears in many of the stories and books of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Under Construction

Under Construction

Under Construction

The Torchwood Institute was founded by Queen Victoria in 1879, following a personal encounter she had with an extraterrestrial being. While staying at Torchwood House, the Scottish estate of Sir Robert MacLeish, the Queen was attacked by an alien intelligencer, which was ultimately dispatched, thanks to the sacrifice of Sir Robert.

Having discovered that "Great Britain had enemies beyond imagination," Victoria decided to establish the Torchwood Institute in memory of Sir Robert.

Her Majesty states in the Torchwood Charter 31 Dec 1879 that "Torchwood is also to administer to the Government thereof in our name, and generally to act in our name and on our behalf, subject to such orders and regulations as Torchwood shall, from time to time, receive from us through one of our Principal Secretaries of State."

In 1882, Victoria expanded Torchwood's role to include the acquisition of alien technology, creating the policy that "if it's alien, it's ours". In 1888, Victoria reiterated the secrecy policy of the Torchwood Institute, protecting her subjects from the "evils that [Torchwood] fight".

If you need a werewolf unit (or any other shapeshifting unit) for your own purposes, here's a little tutorial for you on how to make one:

First find your two extremes - a human unit and an animal unit. For the purposes of this description, we'll use
RM80's Hooligan and embryodead's Dire Wolf .

I like the Hooligan for this, because it's kind of a timeless unit, so your Wolfman can fit into several different mod environments.

So once you have all that on your desktop, let's start a new file folder and call it Wolfman.

Now open the Hoolgan folder; there are several files, including the INI file, and flc and pcx files. Copy all of the files from the Hooligan folder into your new Wolfman folder. Once it's in there, rename the Hooligan.INI file to Wolfman.INI - the name must be exactly as it appears on the folder; if the two names don't match, the game can't find it.

Now let's look into our new Wolfman.INI file. If you click on it, it should open with your Notepad program.

In that file you see the unit instructions. Right at the top, we see:

[Animations]
BLANK=
DEFAULT=HoDe.flc
WALK=
RUN=HoRu.flc
ATTACK1=HoAt.flc
ATTACK2=
ATTACK3=
DEFEND=
DEATH=HoDi.flc
DEAD=
FORTIFY=HoFo.flc
FORTIFYHOLD=
FIDGET=HOFi.flc
VICTORY=HOVi.flc

These are the instructions for which files the unit will use for different actions. Some of these, like WALK, and DEAD, don't appear to have any use. Some of the actions listed below this are used for workers, and I know that BUILD is used by both Settlers and Paratroopers. There are tutorials for all this, and we don't have to know all that now...

The commands in that list that we're immediately interested in are the ATTACK and FORTIFY commands. The reason for that is that the Fortify animation is used as a set-up for the Attack animations, so they're a pair.

Now we'll open the Dire Wolf folder, and we see files in it named DireWolf_AttackA.flc, DireWolf_AttackB.flc, and DireWolf_Fortify.flc. Those look like the files we need. Let's copy all of these and put them into our Wolfman folder.

Now if we go back into the Wolfman INI file, you can see what we have to do - we'll replace the Fortify and Attack commands to read the flc files we've copied from the Dire Wolf folder. It ends up looking like this:

[Animations]
BLANK=
DEFAULT=HoDe.flc
WALK=
RUN=HoRu.flc
ATTACK1=DireWolf_AttackA.flc
ATTACK2=DireWolf_AttackB.flc
ATTACK3=
DEFEND=
DEATH=HoDi.flc
DEAD=
FORTIFY=DireWolf_Fortify.flc
FORTIFYHOLD=
FIDGET=HOFi.flc
VICTORY=HOVi.flc

And that's it. Make sure that all of the entries are exactly correct, save and close. We didn't mess with the sound files commands, found further down in the INI text, but the concept is the same. The Hooligan file doesn't include any sound files, and it won't hurt to leave it that way, but if you like, you can borrow sounds from other units (there's also a thread for sound files in the forum), especially the attack and fortify wav files from the Dire Wolf folder.

So there. You've made your first unit. Would you like some custom graphics for that? Okay, here then -

View attachment Wolfman pedia.rar

You now have everything you need to put the unit into a game. Drop a little text file named README into the Wolfman folder that says:

This unit is made by {insert your name here} from RM80's Hooligan and Embryodead's Dire Wolf. They deserve our eternal gratitude.

LLaP