Tech-TL w/o electricity...?

I am working on a writing piece, and I would love some help.

The genre of my piece is "steampunk" (The Difference Engine as a point of reference) which generally accompanies a higher tech swing EARLIER in history, based on a PoD or ASB, than in OTL.

However, I would like to only change the "discovery of the ability to harness electricity" in OTL... making TTL similar, however with steam, coal, etc being the prevalent forms of power... and see how close to present day we could bring it. Basically, just pushing the harnessing of electricity back as far as we can. My setting would be late teens, early 20's (WWI or immediately after) though this story will be based only on the TECH level, not on the political ramifications.. though I as a person would be interested in discussing those as well.

Sorry if this is disjointed/unorganized.. my brain cycles are happening over in the word processor, not here in the Firefox window. I will answer any questions and try to brainstorm along with all the great minds here.

I'm posting this here, b/c I figured the PoD would actually be BEFORE Edison, et al.

Thanks for any help.
 
I suggest removing Michael Faraday. In order to avoid having to introduce and unfortunate accident, POD would be around 1790, so as to avoid Michael ever being born.
There are other people around in the same time period who could replicate his work, but not all at once. I'd guess that'd give you at least a decade of retardation in electromechanical technology and electromagnetic theory, probably more, but I'm not sure just how far it can be plausibly stretched.
As a side effect, chemistry might be slightly slowed as well.
 
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