I've always been curious how stuff developed in the Difference Engine between the conversation of Ada Lovelace and Fraser up to the dystopic future of 1991. There were so many people I was curious about and how history would have run its course. So, I was interested in the possibilities of sketching out a timeline, using both fictional characters (characters from Disraeli's novels were real in the Difference Engine, so one in particular I had in mind of using was Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, here Director of the Imperial Secret Service) as well as real ones (I imagine that in the meritocratic society of the Difference Engine with its enthusiasm for mathematics, logic and computers, we would see both a Prime Minister Bertrand Russell and a Prime Minister Alan Turing). I'm also curious to see people like John Stuart Mill, John Neville and John Maynard Keynes (whom I included in a PM list a while back), Theodore Roosevelt, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov and Keir Hardie live their lives in this timeline. Plus, what will Vladimir Lenin and Kerensky end up doing? And how are things going in my beloved Scandinavia, is there any chance that Alfred Nobel could play an interesting role?
So, purley in the interest of fan-fiction writing, help me sketch out how we end up in steampunk-Matrix of 1991.