For our project, we had the task of creating a working metaphor machine. A metaphor machine is a homemade machine that has each thing triggers the next thing in a sort of domino effect. It’s similar to the board game mouse trap (if you’ve never played or heard of the game mouse trap, then you need to rethink your life decisions). Each group had to choose one of the revolutions that we had previously learned about to incorporate into our machines. Was based on the Easter Rising revolution that occurred in Dublin Ireland, 1916. This revolution lasted for six days, but even in such a small amount of time, around 485 lives were lost and more than 2,600 badly injured. In the six days that the revolution took place, four main stages could be depicted from all of the events that took place. All of these stages were founded from Crane Brinton’s theory of Revolution. In this theory, Brinton proclaims that there are four stages to every revolution, and that a revolution can be compared to a disease or sickness, as each stage act similarly to how your body fights off a disease. For a more thorough understanding of Crane Brinton and his theory of revolution, go check out one of my earlier posts that thoroughly explains his theory in more detail.

Before advancing to the building portion of this project, we first needed to find the six key event from our revolution and figure out a way to embed them into our machine in some sort of metaphor. What set off our revolution was the start of WW1, when the Irish realized that they needed to be independent from Britain. An army man equipped with many needles swinging from a wooden pendulum was the first object that we attached to our machine, and was a metaphor for the start of WW1 and therefor the start of our revolution. Because The Irish couldn’t easily gain this independence, seven councilmen got together to plan out what measures had to be taken and how to come about them. The metaphor that we created for this stage was the popping of marble filled balloon, signifying the time when the Irish rebels banded together to combat against the British forces and become their own country. The British then take action in this third event and stage an attack on the Irish rebels, which is represented on our machine by the marbles rolling down a ramp as if they were soldiers racing into battle.

After realizing what the Irish were trying to do, the British made sure to foil whatever plans the Irish rebels had to conquer Britain. This included sending British battle ships to destroy a shipment of arms from Germany that was supposed to be delivered to the Irish rebels in an attempt to support their plans of independence. My group planned to display this by having the marbles fall into a container with blue painted on waves symbolizing the German ships that were gunned down before reaching Ireland. The fifth key event occurred when the British forces succeeded in forcing the rebels to surrender, executing many of their leaders, and unnecessarily claiming over 3,500 prisoners, most having no connections to anyone or anything to do with the revolution at all. This tragic event was depicted in our project when the marbles fall through a hole in the container and land in a cup that presses down and connects a circuit, turning on a few lights that are in cased inside a wooden cage filled with marbles, in turn, representing all of the prisoners held captive for something they may not have even had relations to. While the lights are turned on, another circuit simultaneously powers a motor, which in turn hoists a British flag using a pulley, representing how the British had overcome the Irish rebels. Occurrence took place five later, when Ireland finally declares independence from Britain and won. In turn, Ireland gained the right to their own government system, separate from British reign. The very last metaphorical objects that were to be placed on our machine were a homemade cardboard clock, and a potato. The clock, which is made out of cardboard and only has one big motor powered clock hand, is set off when a piece of paper is yanked out from between two pieces of a magnetized circuit, powering the motor to turn the clock hand. The clock hand then comes down on a potato (which would’ve been pre-cut) and with the force of the hand, splits in two. All together this represents the five years that went by before Irish independence (the clock), and the end when Ireland actually did achieve their goal of independence and the separation from Britain (potato splitting in half).

After this time consuming period of research and planning what would go where, it was finally time to go ahead and build. There was one more thing that we had to touch bases on that would occur during the building process, and that is steampunk. I have already touched bases on everything steampunk in an earlier post of mine, but basically steampunk is a sort of futuristic style set in a Victorian olden day setting. Objects with a steampunk aesthetic usually have exposed parts like wires and gears, as well as a similar colour scheme of metallic colours like silver, gold, bronze, and copper. We had previously learned all about steampunk in class, and had to somehow integrate our knowledge of the topic into our machines. My group did this by exposing all of the wires from our circuits, and using different metallic coloured spray paint to colour our objects, and the wooden board that they would be attached to. Once we had taken the time to build the separate parts, the only extreme challenge we had was making the circuits had having them work smoothly, which was really not an easy task. I think the hardest circuit to build and have work was the very first one that had to power the lights in the marble cage. The first thing had to do was figure out how to make a circuit that would turn on when weight was applied to part of it. To do this we used aluminum foil and attached it to two wires that were connected to the rest of the circuit. The goal was for the lights to light up when weight pushed the two pieces of foil together, allowing the current to run through and power the circuit. Some problems that we came across whilst tweaking the circuit were that not enough marbles fell into the cup to weight it down enough to turn on the lights, and sometimes there were enough but the lights still wouldn’t turn on because either there was a loose connection with one of the wires, or the lights burnt out, or there aren’t enough batteries for the circuit to work. These are just a few of the problems that we faced when trying to get this one circuit to work. With this said, once we got the wires to cooperate, found the right ratio of batteries to lights, and positioned the foil in such a way that it would press together when weight was applied, we were golden. Now we just needed to repeat this excruciatingly aggravating process of trial and error with our other two circuits, yay for us. The last two circuits had basically all the same problems but this time we knew what to do from our experience with the last one. Once we had made the objects, and had working circuits, it was time to put our machine to the test.

A very common problem we encountered a lot was that when the balloon popped, the marbles from the balloon would go everywhere but down the ramp like they were supposed to. We resolved this problem by adding an extra wide curved front piece of cardboard that would not only make sure the marbles went where they needed to go, but to keep the balloon in place before popping it. There also had to be some occasional tweaking of the circuits, but it was bound to happen and could easily be fixed. We also encountered some trouble when popping the balloon, because for the most part it wouldn’t pop. Being the smart individuals we were, we just added more weight to the army man and blew the balloon up bigger, which in turn made it thinner and easier to pop. We had finally fixed everything that needed fixing and our machine was complete. Below is our finished video basically recapping everything about our machine and giving a little bit more insight into the events of the Easter Rising, as well as showing a full run through of our glorious machine.