These days, it feels as if you can’t go very long at all before scrolling past anoth­er announce­ment about some new tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment (real­ized or sched­uled) relat­ed to space explo­ration. Some react to this by won­der­ing what could pos­si­bly be out there in the uni­verse to jus­ti­fy such enor­mous­ly cap­i­tal- and research-inten­sive projects. Cen­turies ago, sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments were no doubt voiced about the more adven­tur­ous kinds of sea­far­ing. In the new Ani­ma­graffs video above, you can see all that went into the con­struc­tion and equip­ment of a six­teenth-cen­tu­ry explor­er’s sail­ing ship in great detail, from the keel to the fish davit.

The par­tic­u­lar ship you see bro­ken down into its con­stituent parts in this video nev­er actu­al­ly exist­ed. But it may look famil­iar, espe­cial­ly if you’ve seen the recon­struc­tion in Lon­don of Gold­en Hind, the galleon in which Fran­cis Drake cir­cum­nav­i­gat­ed the world in the fif­teen-sev­en­ties. The video’s cre­ator Jacob O’Neal drew a good deal of inspi­ra­tion from that par­tic­u­lar ship, but also incor­po­rat­ed oth­er char­ac­ter­is­tics bor­rowed from the Mary Rose, the Mayflower, Swe­den’s Vas­sa, and var­i­ous Span­ish galleons of what we now regard as “the ear­ly age of sail, when ships began to cross the globe instead of mere­ly fol­low­ing coast­lines or cross­ing inter­nal bod­ies of water.”

How­ev­er advanced a mod­el it would’ve been in its day, this ship could only make a long transocean­ic jour­ney so com­fort­able for its crew of 80 or so, most of whom would’ve been sleep­ing on mats, sub­sist­ing pri­mar­i­ly on bread and beer (rationed at one gal­lon per man per day), and using rudi­men­ta­ry out­door toi­lets. Pre­sum­ably, few would have signed up for such a tri­al if not for the promise of bring­ing rich­es back from dis­tant lands — sup­ple­ment­ed, in the par­tic­u­lar case of the Gold­en Hind, by “unof­fi­cial­ly sanc­tioned pira­cy of Span­ish galleons.” We have here, in oth­er words, a vari­ety of pirate ship, the vehi­cle for swash­buck­ling adven­tures fan­ta­sized about by gen­er­a­tions upon gen­er­a­tions of young­sters.

I myself nev­er dreamed of pira­cy, but I do remem­ber the rap­tur­ous gid­di­ness with which my first-grade class react­ed to learn­ing about the sail­ing ship’s “poop deck.” O’Neal does­n’t neglect that com­po­nent, but nor does he dwell on it, hav­ing many more impor­tant parts to explain and con­tex­tu­al­ize in 40 min­utes. To get an idea of how dra­mat­i­cal­ly ships evolved as the age of sail pro­gressed, have a look at his hit video on the eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry HMS Vic­to­ry just above. Though the age of space explo­ration seems to have yet to begin in earnest, some of us are no doubt already psych­ing our­selves up to climb into the mod­ern equiv­a­lent of the Gold­en Hind for the 34-month trip to Mars.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See the Well-Pre­served Wreck­age of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarc­ti­ca

Watch the Sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia Ani­mat­ed in Real Time (1915)

16th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese His­to­ri­ans Describe the Odd­ness of Meet­ing the First Euro­peans They Ever Saw

How an Ancient Roman Ship­wreck Could Explain the Uni­verse

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A mid­dle-class Parisian liv­ing around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry would have to bud­get for ser­vices like not just water or gas, but also time. Though elec­tric clocks had been demon­strat­ed, they were still a high-tech rar­i­ty; installing one in the home would have been com­plete­ly out of the ques­tion. If you want­ed to syn­chro­nize time­keep­ing across an entire major city, it made more sense to use a proven, reli­able, and much cheap­er infra­struc­ture: pipes full of com­pressed air. Paris’ pneu­mat­ic postal sys­tem had been in ser­vice since 1866, and in 1877, Vien­na had demon­strat­ed that the same basic tech­nol­o­gy could be used to run clocks.

“The idea was to have a mas­ter clock in the cen­ter of Paris that would send out a pulse each minute to syn­chro­nize every clock around the city,” writes Ewan Cun­ning­ham at Pri­mal Neb­u­la, on a com­pan­ion page to the Pri­mal Space video above.

“The clocks wouldn’t have to be pow­ered, the bursts of air would sim­ply move all the clocks in the sys­tem for­ward at the same time. As for the mas­ter clock itself, it was kept in time by “anoth­er super accu­rate clock that was updat­ed dai­ly using obser­va­tions of stars and plan­ets” at the Paris Obser­va­to­ry. Just five years after its first imple­men­ta­tion in 1880, this sys­tem had made pos­si­ble the instal­la­tion of thou­sands of “Popp clocks” (named for its Aus­tri­an inven­tor Vic­tor Popp) in “hotels, train sta­tions, hous­es, schools and pub­lic streets.”

In 1881, the vis­it­ing engi­neer Jules Albert Berly wrote of these “numer­ous clocks stand­ing on grace­ful light iron pil­lars in the squares, at the cor­ners of streets, and in oth­er con­spic­u­ous posi­tions about the city,” also not­ing those “through­out their hotels were, what is unusu­al with hotel clocks, keep­ing accu­rate time.” Apart from the great flood of 1910, which “stopped time” across Paris, this pneu­mat­ic time-keep­ing sys­tem seems to have remained in steady ser­vice for near­ly half a cen­tu­ry, until its dis­con­tin­u­a­tion in 1927. But even now, near­ly a cen­tu­ry late, some of the sites where Popp clocks once stood are still iden­ti­fi­able — and thus wor­thy sites of pil­grim­age for steam­punk fans every­where.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

How Big Ben Works: A Detailed Look Inside London’s Beloved Vic­to­ri­an Clock Tow­er

The Clock That Changed the World: How John Harrison’s Portable Clock Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Sea Nav­i­ga­tion in the 18th Cen­tu­ry

Clocks Around the World: How Oth­er Lan­guages Tell Time

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.