Babbage was frustrated that many of the tables, which were calculated and typeset by hand, had so many mistakes. So in 1821, he decided to design one. You can read more about Charles Babbage and his Engines—and why mathematical tables were so important—on my website (andreapenrose.com) under the Diversions tab.
My fictional Professor Sudler is based on Babbage, and while my story is set a number of years earlier than the actual building of Babbage’s prototype, geniuses are often ahead of their time!
As a side note, Lady Cordelia’s mathematic skill and creative genius for programming the fictional Computing Engine is an homage to Ada Lovelace, another fascinating real-life luminary of the Regency era. The daughter of bad-boy Romantic poet Lord Byron, Lovelace was a math prodigy, and after meeting Babbage through a mutual friend, she worked with him for a number of years, helping him develop his Differential Engine, as well as his more advanced Analytical Engine. She is credited with realizing that the punch cards which had been created to control the intricate weaving patterns of the new steam-powered Jacquard looms could be used to program a Computing Engine, and she also wrote a math sequence that is considered the first computer program.
One last charater note—William Hedley and his “Puffing Billy” are also both real, and the prototype locomotive was first used by Wylam Colliery, where its success helped spur the development of the railroad. (So Sheffield did indeed make a very savvy investment!)
As for the financial machinations by the villains, those too have some basis in fact. Their arbitrage scheme (arbitrage being, as noted, the simultaneous purchase and sale of an asset to profit from differences in price in different locales) is loosely modeled on a remarkably well-developed smuggling and arbitrage market for silver and gold which developed in Spain, reaching its height early in the eighteenth century.
Spain, through its New World colonies, led the world in silver and gold production from 1493 to roughly 1820. Spain also, like most countries then, subscribed to “bullionism”: the economic theory (now abandoned) that a nation’s wealth is defined by the amount of precious metals it owns. This led Spanish policymakers, first, to mandate price ceilings for gold and silver (allowing purchase by the Crown at an artificially low cost) and, second, to prohibit the export of the metals once they were received from the colonies.
A remarkably sophisticated network of merchant banking houses developed, however, to illegally buy metals at low prices in Spain to be smuggled to higher-priced markets in Northern Europe. As in this story, bills of exchange were used to move money and profits around European financial centers separately from the physical goods. High-tech for the day, double-entry accounting practices distributed the gains among those participating in this illegal commerce.
Superb research has been done by economic historians uncovering the detailed recordkeeping this scheme required (records were kept even of the exact pricing in these illegal markets!), analyzing the economics involved and tracing the genealogical ties purposefully developed by the participating merchant banks. As I have noted before, fact can at times be as strange as fiction. The story of this Spanish market makes for riveting reading, especially for those interested in a dollop of economics.
Both the opium smuggling from India into China, and the Chinese Emperor’s iron-fisted control of the tea trade—including the stricture that all tea had to be paid for with silver—described in the plot are based on historical fact, as is the description of how foreign merchants did their transactions. As for the East India Company, it was once the most powerful and feared economic institution in the world, but during the Regency era, the British government passed a number of laws regulating its practices, which forced it to adjust its old ways of doing business. As my characters point out in the story, a world experiencing momentous changes in so many aspects of life offered exciting opportunities—both for doing good and doing evil.
—Andrea Penrose
Murder at Queen's Landing Page 34