"Chapter 931: An Era-Defining Invention... the Difference Engine?"
Iver froze for a moment.
It wasn't because he didn't know... Quite the opposite. It was because he knew too much.
Knowledge from two worlds overlapped, leaving Iver's mind somewhat muddled for a moment.
In the other world, Charles Babbage was a British inventor. He invented a machine that could process and calculate complex data. Its results could be printed directly, and the machine was called the Difference Engine.
The so-called "difference" referred to converting the complex calculations of function tables into difference calculations, using addition in place of squaring. He had even designed another, more complex machine—a programmable general-purpose computer called the Analytical Engine. This concept could be said to be the forerunner of modern computers.
At the time, the prototype of the Difference Engine had already been completed, but the full-sized version could not be finished because of limited manufacturing technology... For that reason, the British government decided the machine was nothing but a waste of money and stopped funding it.
Only a hundred years later, when manufacturing precision had improved, did people discover that Babbage's blueprints had actually been correct.
In Avalon, however, there was also a man with the same name around roughly the same time. Yet they had taken completely different paths.
Avalon's alchemist Charles Babbage was born in 1791. Queen Sophia had not yet ascended the throne then, and Avalon was still in the era of Hanging King Tudor III.
Charles had grown up in an atmosphere of terror, witnessing how Transcendents of other Paths were captured by those iron gauntlets.
The school Charles later attended was the Royal Law University. Old Moriarty was from the same era, probably only a few years apart from him.
Later, when he went to study abroad in the Theocracy