Who Are We?
The BrassGears Adventurers Society is an 501(c) educational non-profit that delves in to alternate history, science fiction, and fantasy. We host events and workshops that explore our past, educate our present, and inspire our future. In this, the members of the BrassGears hope to inspire a love of history, creativity, arts and science through Steampunk.
History
Inaugural return of the BrassGears Adventurers Society on October 19, 1891 Presented by President Snap O’Grady
Good evening. My name is William Howard O’Grady, Photographer and Adventurer, though most of you know me by another name “Snap.” Snap O’Grady. Many of you are wondering why we are here? Why is this diverse, far flung group coming together? I will attempt to explain that and what we all have in common.
Since it’s inception in the late 1850’s, The BrassGears Adventurers’ Society’s founder, Professor Charles Babbage, sought to bring the world closer together by inventing the worlds first “Thinking Machine.” This machine was later known as “The Difference Engine” and it’s the basis of all thinking machines. Even the later invention of the “Aether Web,” something we are using at this very moment, can give a tip of its hat to the Difference Engine. Babbage worked with Lady Ada the Countess of Lovelace, noted Analyst and Metaphysician. It was she who was his sponsor and collaborator on the Difference Engine project. Though it was Babbage who produced the machine and how it would think, it was Lady Ada who formulated what it would think, thus becoming the first programmer. Their many adventures together and her early demise caused Babbage to found The BrassGears Adventurers’ Society in her honor. For, you see, the gears of the Difference Engine, its very heart, were made of brass. His purpose for founding the BAS was to bring together like minded trail blazers for tales of excitement, intellectual achievement and adventures of daring do! As a young man, I knew Babbage in Cambridge, England and in those early days of the BAS his heady sense of adventure was contagious for a novice adventurer, like myself. It was he who gave me my nickname Snap. As I was one of his young assistants at the time, the quicker I completed a task for him the happier he was. Finally, one day, he said to me “Young man you get things done in a Snap!” The nickname stuck. Time passed and I learned a lot and eventually became a full member of the BAS. In the fall of the year 1859 construction started on Babbage’s crowning achievement, The Great Brass Library. It was to be the meeting place of the BAS and the repository of all of its accumulated artifacts and knowledge. The library was completed in the spring of 1861. War sounded across the Atlantic, I bid good bye to Babbage and returned home to America to document and report on The Great Civil War. I came to that war filled with a sense of excitement and adventure and by its end, I left it being burdened with sadness and regret. I wandered a broken South and developed a taste for Mint Juleps, but my thoughts would always go back to Cambridge and the BAS. Years had passed and I finally returned across the sea, to that fabled library and it was the professor himself who enthusiastically greeted me on my return. As the weeks passed, I could tell he was not his jovial self, but filled with foreboding and dread. I knew he had made many enemies over the years, though he would not discuss who they were.
Finally, many of us confronted him. What was that peril that faced us? Babbage said “I will reveal all tomorrow. We need to prepare ourselves to face the threat.”
It was then that very night The Great Fire occurred, whose flames lit the sky and consumed the library, along with its patron, Charles Babbage. I was there that fateful night of October 18, 1871 and watched as Babbage returned again and again into the burning library, retrieving artifacts and papers. The last of which he went in but never returned. The fire spread so quickly, it was all I could do to save myself. As daybreak came, all that remained of that once glorious archive was a smoking ruin. Its loss and Babbage’s, were almost more than I could bear. A score of years have passed since that night. With no nexus to bind us, the remaining members of the BAS dispersed around the globe. The many adventures I have had since, along my meandering way and the people I have met; Capt. McClelland and his first officer Professor Edwin Dane of the Airship Brass Falcon, the globe trotting Phileas Fogg and so many others through the years. Some of us knew the great man, some did not, but regardless, with new friends and old, on the eve of what would have been Babbage’s 100th birthday, I wish to begin anew this BrassGears Adventurers’ Society, to rebuild our past, to pursue our future and do it with bold intent and a sense of adventure. A whole world awaits us.
Ladies and Gentlemen: Welcome to the inaugural return of the BrassGears Adventurers’ Society.
Back to Top
