Imagine this; It’s December 16, 1776 and you’re walking around the Boston Harbour, when all of a sudden you see millions of dollars worth of waterlogged tea floating in the ocean. What do you do? *bing* That’s correct! Fight in the revolution or move north to Canada!

During November, our class started a project about revolutions. We started with a man named Crane Brinton, and his theories about revolutions throughout history. More info here, but to summarize Brinton theorized that all revolutions follow the same 4 stages. These stages are the:
Incubation stage, where people are unhappy with the way the government is acting.

Moderate stage, where popular leaders and celebrities share their opinions on the matter and people follow them.

Crisis Stage, where violence, riots, and political overthrows start.

Recovery stage, where the government rises again with the new ideology of the people. This could end with either peace or war.

Brinton wrote about these stages in his book, “The Anatomy of Revolution”. He also compared a revolution to a disease, in the sense that diseases follow these same steps.

Now that you’ve had that refresher, what have we been doing? We’ve been making Rube-Goldberg machines about different revolutions throughout history. These machines were called Metaphor Machines, because each different part of the machine has to be a metaphor for events that happened during our revolution. Oh, and we were in groups. Maggie, Jamie, Melika, and I chose the American Revolution, not to be confused with the Civil War.

Along with the metaphors and revolution, we also needed a steampunk aesthetic to our machine. Again, more info here, but here’s a quick summary. Steampunk is a genre of fiction depicting a futuristic Victorian era of technology. This technology is powered mostly by, you guessed it, steam engines. A lot of steampunk visuals show exposed gears, pipes, and wires, along with a copper, brass, and bronze colour scheme.

Now then, onto the machine.

We start on the Marble Platform, with a marble rolling down the Marble Ramp. As it rolls, it hits a domino that releases an American quarter that rolls down another ramp. The coin lands in the box on the Tax wheel, just as the marble finishes rolling. The marble knocks a tinfoil support away from a lever the Tax Wheel is placed on, starting the Wheel. The Wheel rolls through a short canal on our board to hit a weighted down teabag. The tea bag falls, slides down a short slope, and falls into the box on another lever. As the teabag lands it weighs the lever down, completing not one, but two circuits to start playing the American anthem on a speaker. The other circuit lights up the stars on the American Revolution Flag (the american flag at the time), completing the machine.

https://youtu.be/acW02eX3ZxM

Whooo, man. That’s a lot to take in.

A quick explanation of the metaphors:
Coin = the coin represents America
Tax Wheel = the tax wheel spins around and dumps the coin out. The taxes imposed by the British spun the economy of the US.
Tea bag+Box = a representation of the Boston Tea Party, when Americans protested the price of tea by dumping tea into the ocean.

This project taught me a lot about teamwork and that sometimes, things wont turn out the way you want them to. Different parts of our project were reworked, redesigned, and completely removed. We once had a pulley system that would pull the teabag up, then drop it onto the final lever.
We also learned a lot about the revolutions and about circuitry and wiring for this project as well. With this knowledge and experience, we can start off the second term strong. 2018, come at me!