The Viner Codex

For the purposes of the story, it’s simplest to presume that, in the world of the Commonwealth, development of science takes place at essentially the same pace and sequence, and with much the same developers, as in our own timeline.

Within the Commonwealth itself, though, there are some significant sources of difference:

• the egalitarian sociopolitics of the Commonwealth bring far more women into science, right from the start, in effect almost doubling the scientific workforce, and expanding the scope of science more into areas such as health at an earlier stage than in our timeline
• the same sociopolitics mean that women-scientists known in our timeline, such as Caroline Herschel and Ada Lovelace are also more overtly credited with their discoveries
• the earlier focus of science on health also means that key women such as Ada Lovelace live longer to deliver on their scientific promise and prowess

For the technology of vinery – unique to the Commonwealth, and in part crucial to its success – there is a strong continued quest for the underlying science throughout the entire period of that timeline. But since the core and unique factors in the technology essentially operate at a cellular or sub-cellular level, the science remains elusive until instrumentation capable of working at that level can be developed – which, in their timeline as in ours, does not even begin to become available until toward the very end of the 19th-century.