Luminiferous aether

Luminiferous Aether, or Aether for short in this setting, was supposed to be the medium that light waves propagated through. It made sense that in the same way sounds waves propagated through air (or other media), and water waves propagated through water, light waves propagated through some medium that we had yet to identify. In real life, this idea didn’t have strong experimental evidence against it until 1887 when Albert A. Michaelson and Edward W. Morley ran their famous experiment. Like a well-crafted experiment, it was set up so that the results would fairly conclusively either support the existence of Aether, or not support it. Of course in this world, Michaelson and Morley discovered a difference in the relative speed of two beams of light travelling at right angles to each other.

Aetheric Propulsion

As an outgrowth of there being aether, this world has two inventors who have discovered two different methods of aetheric propulsion. Basically this allows for steampunk spacecraft. There is no way steam engines, even if extremely advance, could provide motive force in space. And it isn’t any fun to require months or years to travel between planets. By making aetheric propulsion machines (without a lot of detail), I can have them provide any needed capability to allow late 19th century technology to safely traverse the void between worlds.

The Inventors

When coming up with who would invent aetheric propulsion, I looked at actual inventors of the time. Edison was an obvious choice. The Wizard of Menlo Park could have easily added an Aetheric Impeller to his vast array of inventions. Once I had him invent the first method of aetheric propulsion, a rival inventor was equally obvious.

Nikola Tesla was an absolute genius, and about as different from Edison as he could be. Edison was self-taught, and basically battered at a problem, trying one idea after another, until he figured out something that worked. Tesla was a university trained engineer/physicist who could (and did) calculus in his head. His approach was to consider a problem in minute detail for long enough that, often, the plan for a complete, or near complete, mechanism would spring to his mind, only requiring the calculations and possibly minor tweaking to turn into a blueprint suitable for manufacturing.

With those two as the inventors, a “Battle of the Aetheric Propellors” similar to the historical “Battle of the Currents” was an obvious next step. This is why Walter and Nikola are brought together by George Westinghouse, whose company lead the way in building the machines for alternating current electrical infrastructure, while Nikola was working for him.