Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"I'm strictly an ivory-tower person. I can explain things but I can't do things."
- Isaac Asimov
 |
| Steam-Propelled Moving Houses | ||
| Otherwise ordinary residences that move from place to place, powered by steam. |
| "Oh! what is that?" cried Edric, without attending to him, as, lost in amazement, he saw a house in the suburbs gently slide out of its place, and glide majestically along the road, a lady at one of the windows kissing her hand to some one in another house as she passed. "Do my eyes deceive me, or does that house move?"
"Certainly it does," replied the doctor. "Did you never see a moving house before? You must have heard of them at any rate, for nothing can be more common. It certainly is convenient, when one wants to go into the country for a few weeks, to be able to take one's house with one: it saves a great deal of trouble in packing, and permits one to have all of one's little conveniences about one. You see that there are grooves in the bottom of the houses that just fit on the iron railways; and as they are propelled by steam, they slide on without much trouble. It does not answer, however, with any but small houses, for large ones can't well be made compact enough. |
| From The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century,
by Jane Webb Loudon. Published by Not known in 1828 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the traction city from Philip Reeve's 2003 novel Mortal Engines.
Comment/Join this discussion ( 3 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century
More Ideas
and Technology by Jane Webb Loudon
Tech news articles related to The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century
Tech news articles related to works by Jane Webb Loudon
Steam-Propelled Moving Houses-related
news articles:
- Would Movable Houses Make Cities Better?
| Real-Life Macau or Ghost In The Shell |
| Galini 3D Printed Sleeping Pod Tiny Houses |
| Seasteading Floating Cities |
| Aequoreas Floating Village 3D Printed From Ocean Junk |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
