The United States of Steam

Most of the world watched the American Civil War and rolled their eyes. They saw it as a brutal, clumsy affair fought by a nation ignorant of the subtleties of real war. The majority of political and military leaders in Europe were proficient in applying the sweep of cavalry squadrons and the marching and countermarching of lines and columns of infantry. Warfare was as much an elegant academic exercise and it was an exciting and deadly occupation. The American use of steam-powered trains to move troops, long trenches of men armed with long-range rifles, armored boats firing broadsides into each other at point-blank ranges, and the growing rise of steam technology turned what should have been an elegant fight between professional pugilist into an ugly affair of brute-force brawlers.   There were, however, a few more visionary military leaders and scientists around the world who realized that what was happening in America was the future of warfare. They began to secretly test out some of their technologies on American battlefields using the American Civil War as both a laboratory of military technologies and as a proxy war for tensions in Europe. These actions caused the Civil War to drag on until 1868 when the Union made two critical discoveries. They discovered a new gas mixed into the natural gas underneath the ground in Kansas, a gas they called Helios, a gas that could lift balloons but wouldn't explode. They also discovered how to crush and purify pitchblende to increase the concentration of Uranium. These cakes of concentrated Uranium ("boiler rocks") made their own heat and could be used as a permanent heat source to run a steam boiler. These advances allowed the Union to defeat the Confederacy in short order. Confederate zeppelins using hydrogen were easily shot out of the sky by the "unsinkable" Union zeppelins while Confederate armored cars were in constant need of fuel to burn to power their boilers while Union armored cars could run almost indefinitely (though Union troops quickly discovered that they needed to line their boiler assemblies with lead to keep their crews from getting sick from "boiler disease").   A laboratory accident in Prussia released a plague in Europe that destabilized the continent leading to an outbreak of war among ambitious warlords using some of the new technologies. The United States quickly became a dominant power in the world thanks to their helios gas and boiler rock technologies. Only England remained stable in Europe.