Did you ever used to read Marvel’s What If…? comics?  I did.  Fascinating alternate histories in the Marvel universe.  There is a lot of literature out there like that.  I once listened to a story about a time traveler who went back to help the South win the war using advanced weaponry.  I love Radio Reader.

Anyway, this whole steampunk thing is like an entire What if…? genre.  The thing is there were a lot of clever bastards roaming around the planet during the steam era.  One such non-dumby was Charles Babbage.

One of the crazy steam era ideas Babbage put forward was the difference engine.  More or less a pocket calculator for an enormous pocket.  It is run by a steam engine, after all.  He also worked on (though never completed) a more advanced calculating machine called the Analytical Engine.

Here’s where the steampunkers can get excited.

Recently Nathan Myhrvold commissioned and London’s Science Museum has put on display a working model of Babbage’s difference engine.  You can find out more about it here.

But that’s not enough apparently.  Now some British folks are looking to build a working model of the Analytical Engine from Babbage’s various notes and partial designs.  Here is a good starting point article.

With a likely price tag in the millions, why are they building this?  Surely the only answer is “because we can (we hope)”.

Good luck, fellow crazies.