User Experience, Page the Second

Page the second! And introducing the difficulties of rejiggering this beast for a different format! If I was clever I’d have worked out some ingenious html5 way of presenting this comic but sadly I’m just some clown so just click and scroll, folks!

A Few Noteses:

George’s dialogue, with fortuitous aptness and of great help to my laziness in dialogue-hewing, is from the opening of her first piece of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life.

The ‘terror and alarm’ on one of the posters would have been occasioned by Chartist demonstrations.

‘Guppy’s Gadgets’ is presided over by Sarah Guppy– a fascinating and very under-documented lady, close to the Brunels.

Mmmm.. what else.. oh! How could I have failed to identify the mind behind the message zip-cables! Charles Babbage OF COURSE, suggested them in Machines and Manufactures, where they could make use of those otherwise unproductive church steeples, converging, naturally, on St Paul’s Cathedral. Of course Babbage’s plan was to have the cables themselves move, like a cable-car, which would be more efficient to be sure but not quite so cute as little teeny self-propelled steam-capsules.