CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/22/2013

Charles Dellschau's 'Steampunk Like Contraptions'

"Sometime in the mid-1960s, a junk dealer in Houston, Texas acquired 12 large notebooks that had been thrown out to the curb after a house fire," John Foster writes in this week's Design Observer. "Filled with mysterious, double-sided, collaged watercolor drawings, the journals were eventually discovered at the junk shop in 1969..."
Produced by butcher Charles Dellschau (1830–1923) after his retirement in 1899, the works contained "newspaper clippings (he called them 'press blooms') of early attempts at flight overlapped with his own fantastic drawings of airships of all kind. Powered by a secret formula he cryptically referred to as 'NB Gas' or 'Suppa' — the 'aeros' (as Dellschau called them) were steampunk like contraptions with multiple propellers, wheels, viewing decks and secret compartments. Though highly personal, autobiographical (perhaps!), and idiosyncratic, these artworks could cross-pollinate with the fiction of Jules Verne, Willy Wonka and the Wizard of Oz. The works were completed in a furiously creative period from 1899 to 1923, when air travel was still looked at by most people as almost magical." Featured image is reproduced from Charles Dellschau, the first monograph ever published on the artist.