THE CODE OF STEAM AND STEEL is an Adventure Role-playing game of Scientific Romance and Steam-Punk. Specifically designed to focus upon the Adventurers, their Exploits and the Dilemmas they face - rather than spending hours playing out common brawls. Play it anywhere with just two six-sided dice, pencil and paper. A game can last a couple of hours, a campaign can span a lifetime. * Five minute character creation! * Ten minute affrays and set-to's! * Hours of Jolly Good Fun! * Easy to pick up and play. * Hard to put down. * THE lightweight, fast-play Role-playing game of Scientific Romance. Pip pip! (Tiffin not included.)

Ninety photographs with captions present the activities of the Norfolk and Western Railway, the last major railroad in America to use steam power. Most of the photographs were taken at night, and Thomas H. Garver's afterword includes description of Link's methods of flash photography.

"Sugar, Steam and Steel is about cane sugar and the transformation of an Indonesian island into the 'Oriental Cuba' during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Between the 1830s and the 1880s, sweetener manufacture in Dutch-controlled Java - the crown jewel of the erstwhile Netherlands Indies - drew decisively away in matters of technology and sugar science from other Asian centres of production which had once equaled or, more often, surpassed it in terms of both output and know-how. Along with its larger and altogether more famous Caribbean counterpart, Java's industry came to occupy a position at the apex of the trade in what had become by this date a key global commodity. Along with the beet sugar producers of (post-1870) Imperial Germany, Cuba and Java accounted for a little over one-third of the world's recorded output of the industrially manufactured kind of sugar usually referred to as 'centrifugal'. While Cuba held the position of the world's largest supplier of cane sugar to international commodity markets, 'Dutch' Java emerged from almost nowhere to take second place. The island had begun the nineteenth century as one of a number of centres - in fact, a rather minor one - of pre-industrial sugar production located in tropical and sub-tropical Asia from the Indian sub-continent through to the southernmost islands of Japan. It ended the century not only as by far the largest of Asia's producer-exporters of sugar but also - critically - as the sole example of the sustained and successful large-scale industrialisation of sugar manufacture anywhere in 'the East'. Sugar, Steam and Steel sets out to explain how and why this happened - and what its implications were for the long-term trajectory of the Java sugar industry in the international sugar economy."--Cover description.

All aboard! This train travels through history making stops in time to learn about the progress of travel by rail. Hop up into the cab of a speeding modern-day locomotive and look down the tracks into the past. Perhaps these are the same tracks that the diesel-electric locomotives of thirty years ago thundered down, pulling their loads. Perhaps you can see the steam engines of thirty years before that. Watch time unravel and the landscape change as the history of trains barrels through the pages of STEAM, SMOKE AND STEEL: BACK IN TIME WITH TRAINS. The first trains puffed great billowing clouds of smoke and showered passengers with burning embers as they sped down the rails at a pulse-pounding twenty miles an hour! By the 1850's, however, trains were traveling much faster, much farther, and much cleaner and train travel contributed to the growth of our nation. Young readers will be fascinated by the exciting -- and sometimes dangerous -- story of trains while they learn about the different kinds of engines, equipment, and jobs necessary for operating trains throughout history. The young narrator introduces readers to trains from the time of his great-great-great-great-great grandfather at the turn of the nineteenth century to his father's train of today, showing the great changes that invention and progress have brought over time. Patrick O'Brien's striking illustrations emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and romance of the train. Detailed and richly textured oil paintings take readers on a trip through time to ride aboard open-air cars, travel through mountain passes, and roar down the rails on high-speed bullet trains. Budding engineers will love getting a glimpse at the past and dreaming about the future of trains.

Journey to New York Times bestelling author Meljean Brook's gritty, alluring world of the Iron Seas, and gear up for passionate steampunk adventure... As the mercenary captain of the Lady Corsair, Yasmeen has learned to keep her heart as cold as steel, her only loyalty bound to her ship and her crew. So when a man who once tried to seize her airship returns from the dead, Yasmeen will be damned if she gives him another opportunity to take control. Treasure-hunter Archimedes Fox isn’t interested in the Lady Corsair—he wants her coldhearted captain and the valuable da Vinci sketch she stole from him. To reclaim it, Archimedes is determined to seduce the stubborn woman who once tossed him to a ravenous pack of zombies, but she’s no easy conquest. When da Vinci’s sketch attracts a dangerous amount of attention, Yasmeen and Archimedes journey to Horde-occupied Morocco—and straight into their enemy’s hands. But as they fight to save themselves and a city on the brink of rebellion, the greatest peril Yasmeen faces is from the man who seeks to melt her icy heart…

Eminent physicist and economist, Robert Ayres, examines the history of technology as a change agent in society, focusing on societal roots rather than technology as an autonomous, self-perpetuating phenomenon. With rare exceptions, technology is developed in response to societal needs that have evolutionary roots and causes. In our genus Homo, language evolved in response to a need for our ancestors to communicate, both in the moment, and to posterity. A band of hunters had no chance in competition with predators that were larger and faster without this type of organization, which eventually gave birth to writing and music. The steam engine did not leap fully formed from the brain of James Watt. It evolved from a need to pump water out of coal mines, driven by a need to burn coal instead of firewood, in turn due to deforestation. Later, the steam engine made machines and mechanization possible. Even quite simple machines increased human productivity by a factor of hundreds, if not thousands. That was the Industrial Revolution. If we count electricity and the automobile as a second industrial revolution, and the digital computer as the beginning of a third, the world is now on the cusp of a fourth revolution led by microbiology. These industrial revolutions have benefited many in the short term, but devastated the Earths ecosystems. Can technology save the human race from the catastrophic consequences of its past success? That is the question this book will try to answer.