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by Michael White (Author)
To the casual observer, the age of steam and the subsequent industrial revolution was to revolutionise the structure of Great Britain in almost every fundamental way. This time saw the rise of the middle class and the entrenchment of the upper class. The working class moved from rural employment to factories and mills. Towns and docks and harbours grew around the industries that the steam engine created to cater for them, and there it could have stopped. The Difference engine however created by Sir Charles Babbage was the first indication that the industrial revolution could head beyond industry, and with the completion of the Analytical Engine in 1834 a new revolution began to take place: this was the age of the technocrat, and the computational engines began to proliferate and become more commonplace. Machines that could think and make decisions, driven by steam and mechanisms of wood and brass, the likes of which had never been seen before. This was a very British revolution however. Queen Victoria sat upon her throne and saw her country grow to dominate the world, her trade and technology so advanced beyond any other that computational devices were common and in most well to do homes. Yet the workforce was needed even more, and outstripped the supply. By the middle of the nineteenth century drastic measures had to be taken by her majesty's government and the working classes were placed in designated areas, their currency being their availability for work in the factories and mills, the computational engines and the data sheds that they produced. The poor house was the start of this process, but with the new technology it was greatly expanded, and now all of the working classes were under the jurisdiction of the local mill and factory owners, the true drivers of this data fed industrial age. In the skies above London, Zeppelins filled the air, swollen with lighter than air gas and flame, and on the ground even the most trivial of items were gathered and improved upon by the computational engines. This was the age of steam, yes, but it was also the age of the analytical engines, and they made Britain the greatest power that the world has ever known.
