"Merodachbaladan Smith was not the person you would expect to become one of the great inventors of all human history. Smith had been born in New Doncaster in Carolina[1] to a family of Bavarian immigrants (originally named Schmidt). However, during the Neo-Iconoclast Uprisings of 1889, his family (being members of the Reformed Jansenist Church of Carolina) had been targeted by the mob, as non-Protestant Christians were #########################################[2]. Seeing his childhood home burnt to the ground and his parents lynched made a deep impression on the young Merodachbaladan. Why was it, he asked himself, that people would divide themselves over such silly differences to produce chaos, when by working in unison they could be so much more productive? The fire, yes, the fire, could be destructive, but could fire also not be creative? Indeed, was not the use of fire which had heralded the beginning of human civilization?
Smith fortunately did manage to escape the riots, and eventually resettled with an uncle in La Cometa in the Republic of California. He was to attend to the Spanish-speaking Academy of Santiago de Zebedeo at a time when the writings of Pablo Sanchez were becoming increasingly popular among its students (see the Autumn of Upheaval of 1899), but there is little to suggest that Smith paid any interest in politics at the time. Instead, what Smith focused on was physics and the problems that the Copernican Atomic Model[4] at the time was facing.
[...]
Smith finally had his Eureka moment in 1911 when he endured a violent rainstorm. He realized that while from afar it looked like a continuous flow, if you looked closely, you saw that the water came in droplets. This allowed him to formulate what he called "discretized mechanics", but what would, in tribute to the rainfall that inspired it, be known as Droplet Mechanics[5].
[...]
The final triumph (or dismay) of Smith came in 1923, when the Societist Directorship of California could unveil the world's first Dionysium[6] bomb.
[1] Approximately at OTL Jackson, Mississippi. Originally intended to be a temporary regional capital, it had been named "New Doncaster" after the temporary capital of Great Britain during the Jacobin War while the official new capital of Northsburgh was being constructed (compare with OTL Canberra and Washington, D.C.). However, the Great American War put those constructions to a halt and at the end of the conflict, the lack of funds put a premature and abrupt halt to those construction plans, and so New Doncaster was to become the permanent regional capital.
[2] Here much have been blanked out, which considering that this book was donated to the New Library of Manchester from the remains of the library of Societist League of England after that association was banned in 1951, may indicate that it contains some information stressing the cataclysmic and violent effects of differences in opinion, certainly when pertaining to religion, which would give strength to the Societist interpretation of history. The English government of Joe Haroldson in power at the time was (in)famous for his use of heavy-handed Russian censorship laws, and thus, it is likely the the librarians deliberately would blank out offending passages. I speculate that the original line reads "non-Protestant Christians were blamed for the Carolinians' loss in the War of[3]
[3] Here I have to put an end to Dr. Tindale's lengthy footnote to preserve data storage space for the maps of ITTL modern England.
[4] In OTL we would say the planetary model, i.e. that there's a nucleus (sun) at the center and that the electrons (like planets) orbits it.
[5] We would say Quantum Mechanics, as light comes in small packets of "quanta".
[6] In OTL, Uranium takes it name from the eight planet, Uranus, with Neptunium and Plutonium following it in the periodic table. ITTL, Uranus was instead named Dionysus, hence Dionysium rather than Uranium."
