Ani Niow, of One Letter Wonder, says she can’t fathom why she would get placed in the steampunk area at Maker Faire. I think I can fathom it. Victorian women, living in such a repressed society, used to get vapors where they would swoon and be out of it. Doctors could often treat the vapors by putting the women on huge vibrating machines until they felt better. Ani Niow has made a much more compact steam-powered vibrator and she says it is really better to run it off of compressed air, as the steam makes her model get extremely hot to the touch. The guts of the vibrator feature one of the “world’s smallest Tesla turbines created out of brass and Dremel cutoff discs”. She explains the genesis of her creation: “this is it. this is what happens when you’re an engineering student with a minor in sexuality and you find yourself funemployed.”