Today’s steampunk writers, artists, and crafters adore translating 19th-century machine knowledge to create designs for modernized dirigibles, fantastic steam-powered weaponry, and even Victorianized laptop computers. Steampunk literature, film, and art offer excellent perspective on the history of technological design, both real and ideal. What did/should our machinery look like? What shapes our machines and context of technological choice? What values does technological design reflect and/or impose? Victorians wrestled with the challenge of inventing an iconography of appearance for steam engines, locomotives, and factories, without converging on consensus. The modern Steampunk movement has created its own visual language of mechanization, extrapolating both from actual Victorian technology and classic science-fiction (H.G. Wells, Jules Verne). Steampunk’s pseudo-celebration of 19th-century machine style engages basic questions about design: what is aesthetically attractive, socially relevant, and/or functionally appropriate? My research traces how technological aesthetics moved from Manchester’s Industrial Revolution reality to Steampunk fiction, illuminating how, when, and why ideas about machine style evolved. Early 20t-century industrial designers such as Raymond Loewy defined “the modern” by streamlining, while electrification, chemistry, and mass production promised to generate magical abundance. Steampunk reacts against that history, relishing the roughness and romance of solid metal as more honest than plastic’s prefabricated pseudo-perfection and environmental toll. Electricity’s mystery has been evaporated by ubiquity, restoring retro-allure to its dramatic opposite, the sheer physicality, noise, novelty, and even dangers of steam. At its best, steampunk captures David Nye’s “technological sublime,” seen in the 1851 Crystal Palace, Manchester’s scale of power, and Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exposition. Infusing Victorian-style technology with 21st-century sensibilities, steampunk also links to 1970s “appropriate technology” and computer-liberation movements, the ethic of technology by and for the people, freed from corporate marketing monopoly. Intellectually, steampunk can represent a useful corrective to technological determinism, providing insight into the roles of human choice and social context in shaping ideas about machine function, machine design, and mentalities of modernization.