The Difference Engines

This is one of the upcoming illustrations for my online serial "The Lair of the Clockwork Book", at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual ( [link] ).

Here we see the inventor Osgood Finnegan quite late in his career. He's standing in the middle of what he calls his Great Work, and it's safe to say that the Great Work seems to involve a lot of computation - because the room's full to brimming with difference engines, along with plenty of other mechanical devices whose purpose is even less obvious.