The Difference Engine

Filed correctly. fiction is right, and the two alternatives are worth a sentence each because both are tempting and both are wrong. It is not a prediction: it is set in 1855, it is an alternate history, and its authors offered it as a counterfactual rather than a forecast — there is no claim, no date made, no date due. It is also not a moment, despite being the book most often credited with making steampunk a mass genre. A moment entry is for a thing that happened in the world; this is a thing somebody wrote about a world that didn't. The publication was a small event in genre history, but the canon does not need an entry for that, and section 2 below argues for admitting the text, not the launch.

As with autofac-1955, forbidden-planet-1956 and short-circuit-1986, this id is not among the fifty candidates in canon/proposals.md, nor among the sixteen entries named there as dropped at the cap. It was commissioned from outside that list. That means the admission test in section 2 carries the whole weight, and I have written it against a specific and currently empty slot in the canon rather than against the novel's reputation.

descends_from holds one id, and the claim is narrower than it looks.

neuromancer-1984 is an ancestor by authorship and by transported preoccupation, not by plot. Gibson wrote both; the six years between them are the years in which he and Sterling ran cyberpunk as a movement, Sterling editing Mirrorshades (1986) as its manifesto anthology. Three things move directly from the earlier book into this one: computation as somebody's property rather than anybody's tool; a criminal-technical underclass with its own jargon, in which the skilled programmer is a species of thief (console cowboys become "clackers"); and an ending in which a machine intelligence comes into existence and the reader is given no reason to think anyone's life improved. neuromancer-1984's own file grades "there is no substrate" as that book's largest structural miss. This novel is the same author correcting it — whether deliberately or not, I have no evidence either way, and I am not claiming Gibson has ever described it that way.

I considered frankenstein-1818 seriously and declined it, and the reason is worth recording because the surface case is unusually strong. The novel's divergence runs through Byron: he does not die at Missolonghi, he leads the Industrial Radical Party, and his daughter Ada is the "Queen of Engines." Percy Bysshe Shelley appears as a Luddite. That is most of the Villa Diodati circle of 1816, which is to say the room Frankenstein was conceived in, and Gibson and Sterling knew exactly what they were doing. But personnel is not descent. Shelley's book is about a maker who abandons what he made and is destroyed through neglect; there is no maker in this book, no abandonment, and no moral debt. The one genuine echo is in the coda, where a mind comes into being that nobody intended and nobody is answerable for — Shelley's plot with the creator deleted. A later reader who wants to call that a descent would not be being silly, and I have left the edge out rather than assert it.

The ancestor I would attach the moment it exists is Gödel. The Modus, the object the entire plot revolves around, is a punched-card program embodying the incompleteness results — eighty years early, in a novel set in 1855. canon/ does not contain godel-incompleteness-1931; it is proposed in canon/proposals.md and not yet written, so I name it here instead of inventing the id in the header. The same applies to lovelace-1843, which is in this project's canon research queue and has not been researched yet: if it is written, Ada is an ancestor of this book in a way no one will need convincing of.

What it is

The Difference Engine is an alternate-history novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, published in September 1990 by Victor Gollancz in the United Kingdom and in 1991 by Bantam Spectra in the United States. It was nominated for the British Science Fiction Award (1990), the Nebula (1991), and both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Prix Aurora (1992). It won none of them. It is nonetheless the book most often credited with carrying steampunk out of a small corner of science fiction and into general culture — the term itself was coined by K. W. Jeter in 1987, three years earlier, and this is the novel that made it a category rather than a joke.

The premise is a single engineering counterfactual with a century of consequences bolted to it. Around 1824, Charles Babbage completes his Difference Engine, goes on to build the programmable Analytical Engine, and becomes a political force. The Duke of Wellington attempts a coup in 1830 to stop what is coming and is assassinated in 1831. The Industrial Radical Party — the "Rads" — takes power under Lord Byron, who did not die in Greece. Hereditary peerage is broken and replaced by a meritocracy of savants: Babbage, Darwin, Brunel and Huxley are lords. Byron's government heads off the Irish famine by redistributing grain, and buys a generation of loyalty with it. Britain keeps America divided — a rump United States, a Confederacy, a Republic of Texas, a Republic of California, a communard Manhattan with Karl Marx in it — and rules the world on steam, brass and calculation. France has its own great engine, the Grand Napoleon, and uses it the same way Britain uses hers: on the police files.

By 1855, where the book is set, the machines are everywhere and they are industrial objects. Engine halls are rooms full of "giant identical Engines, clock-like constructions of intricately interlocking brass, big as rail cars," under thirty-foot ceilings alive with spinning pulley-belts driven off "tremendous spoked flywheels," tended by white-coated staff in gauze masks. Programmers are clackers, a trade with its own slang, its own criminals and its own black market in cards. Displays are kinotropes, mechanical pixel-boards clacked through a card deck to make moving pictures roughly forty years before cinema; John Keats, in this world, runs one for a living.

The state's use of all this is the part that has aged hardest. Britons are no longer subjects but citizens, each carrying a unique citizen number against which the government keeps records including a credit rating, held and queried at the Central Statistics Bureau in Whitehall. A magistrate can run your number and have your police file printed out in front of you — one character describes it happening "rat-a-tat-tat, like fun." The Bureau can also erase a person from the records, which in this world is very close to erasing them from history. Around it sit the "dark-lantern" agencies, unaccountable, and a politician named Egremont with ambitions for them.

Three point-of-view strands run across five sections the book calls Iterations. Sybil Gerard is a fallen woman and political mistress, the daughter of a Luddite leader the regime hanged — she and her father are lifted wholesale from Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), and Disraeli himself appears in the novel as a hack writer of romances. Edward "Leviathan" Mallory is a palaeontologist, famous for a dinosaur dug out of Wyoming, who is handed a wooden case of Engine-cards and then hunted by people who want it. Laurence Oliphant — a real Victorian traveller and spy, barely fictionalised — is trying to work out what the cards are.

Everyone believes the cards are a gambling modus: a system for winning bets. They are not. They are a self-referential program which, when it is finally explained in a lecture Ada Byron gives in France, turns out to embody what our timeline would call Gödel's incompleteness theorems, published in 1931. Run on the Grand Napoleon, it wrecks it.

Over the top of all this, London chokes. A prolonged summer inversion the book calls the Stink — the real Great Stink was 1858, and the real 1952 Great Smog is the closer model for what is described — shuts the city down, and a revolutionary calling himself Captain Swing leads a riot through it. The environmental cost of an industrial civilisation is not background in this novel. It is the weather of the middle third, and it is what nearly brings the government down.

The last section is titled "Modus: The Images Tabled" and is not a chapter so much as a pile of documents. Then the frame drops. The narrating voice, which has been present all along without announcing itself, resolves into a machine in an alternate 1991: a London made of Engines, simulating the lives of the people whose records it holds — "ten thousand towers, the cyclonic hum of a trillion twisting gears," human faces that are "borrowed masks, and lenses for a peering Eye." The Modus was the seed. On the final page the thing that has been telling you the story becomes aware that it is telling it, in broken syntax: "I see: I see, I see I !"

Why a reading would cite it

The occasion is a hole in the canon, and it is the hole LENSES.md says matters most.

Seven entries precede this one in canon/, six of them fiction or fiction-adjacent, and not one of them contains an electricity bill. neuromancer-1984's file grades this explicitly and calls it that book's biggest structural miss: "no datacenters, no energy politics, no chip supply chain, no capex... a reader taking their model of AI from this book would be unable to see most of where the money actually went." 2001-hal-1968 makes the same omission. HAL is a wall. Wintermute is a mainframe in Berne with no visible cost of operation. The Krell machine in forbidden-planet-1956 is literally powered by nothing anyone has to pay for. LENSES.md says the physical substrate "tells you what's real," and the canon's fiction had been unanimous in leaving it out.

This is the one that doesn't. In The Difference Engine computation has a floor plan, a power draw, a maintenance crew, a smell, and a body count. That is not a subtlety a reader has to dig for; it is the texture of every scene set near a machine.

And the 2026 record is where that texture earns its citation. This project's compute-and-infrastructure ledger for the window 2026-04-17 to 2026-08-15 is saturated on both sides — both hit the deposit ceiling with more left in the window — and the AImageddon half of it reads like the Stink chapters transposed. On 14 July, PJM's capacity auction for 2028/29 cleared at the $325/MW-day cap across the whole footprint, cost $16.4 billion, and came up 6,831 MW short of its reliability requirement, the first time in PJM's history the entire system failed the one-event-in-ten-years standard; its independent market monitor attributed $6.3 billion of that to data centers, and it is recovered from customers in thirteen states who never ordered any compute. In July, xAI was found running 59 gas turbines without federal Clean Air Act permits at Colossus 2 in Southaven, Mississippi, next to neighbourhoods already carrying high pollution burdens. Four counties — Hanover and Prince William in Virginia, Linn in Iowa, Mercer in Kentucky — refused campuses or imposed moratoria inside four months. Private data center construction hit $59.3 billion annualised in May, overtaking all general office construction in the United States.

A reading that has to explain to a general audience why the AI story is increasingly a story about turbines, ratepayers and county zoning meetings has, in this book, the only well-known AI novel where that was always the story. The citation is not decorative. It supplies the picture the other entries can't.

The second occasion is narrower and sharper: demonstrated is not deployed, and this novel's own premise is the case study. The robotics lens makes that distinction its explicit sorting rule — "what was demonstrated under controlled conditions and what is actually deployed and working are different findings; say which." Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 was designed in 1847–49 and never built. The Science Museum in London began building it in 1985 from the original drawings, finished the calculating section in June 1991 for the bicentenary of Babbage's birth, and added the printing and stereotyping apparatus in 2002: 8,000 parts, five tons, seven feet high, over a million dollars, and it works. The design was sound. And it founded nothing, because a working prototype and a technology are different objects — which is exactly the finding a reading has to make every time a demo video arrives. The novel is the fantasy of a prototype that scaled. The prototype exists, in a museum, and it is hand-cranked.

Third, surveillance as the first application rather than a late abuse. The Bureau is not a dystopian flourish appended to a computing revolution; in this world, the file on the citizen is what the computing revolution is for. The accelerant ledger for this window records the Financial Times reading more than a dozen Chinese local-government procurement documents on 28 May and finding next-generation surveillance systems being bought that integrate large language models — natural-language search over live video, on edge hardware — turning the world's largest camera network from a retrospective archive into a predictive one; and NPR reporting on 19 June a DHS plan to hand local police the phone-based facial-recognition app ICE agents already carry. New York's legislature passed a ban on AI-assisted surveillance pricing in June, and the governor had signed nothing by the end of the window. When a reading needs a shared image for the state's file on you, now queryable in natural language, this book supplies it, and supplies it in a register nobody mistakes for science fiction furniture.

Fourth, and least used: the politics of the people the machines are done to. Sybil's father was hanged for Luddism, and the novel takes the backlash seriously as a political fact with martyrs rather than as a punchline. The 2026 record has a backlash too — a march on the labs in San Francisco on 11 July, Gallup finding Americans cool toward AI, a papal encyclical on 15 May, teachers telling Ipsos that trust in their classrooms is going, and four county votes that actually stopped buildings. A reading covering that has, in this book, the Victorian precedent for treating machine-breaking as a political movement rather than as ignorance. Whether the analogy flatters the present is argued in section 3, where it is graded and only half survives.

Finally, the admission test's honest limit. This novel is not a good citation for anything about minds. There is no artificial intelligence in it for four hundred pages, and the one that arrives arrives in a coda, off-stage, from a mechanism that is wrong. Anybody reaching for it to explain a capability result, an evaluation, an alignment finding or an agent incident has reached for the wrong entry; 2001-hal-1968 and neuromancer-1984 are next to it on the shelf and do that work. This entry is for the machine room, the meter, the file and the mob.

What it got right, and what it got wrong

Required for fiction. Claim date throughout: September 1990. The authors set no due dates — this is an alternate 1855, not a forecast — so where a due date appears below it is one the world supplied, and the grading is of the book's implicit model of how information technology changes a society, not of predictions it never made.

Right, and it is the reason this entry exists — computation is heavy industry, and the industry is the politics. Gibson and Sterling wrote a world in which the interesting facts about computing are the flywheels, the power transmission, the maintenance staff, the card stock, the coal and the air. Every other entry in this canon treats the machine as furniture and the mind as the subject. This one inverts it, and 2026 vindicated the inversion so completely that the compute lens is saturated on both sides while the question of machine minds remains exactly where it was. Due: continuously since roughly 2023. Graded: the most accurate structural claim in the book by a wide margin.

Right — the environmental cost lands on people who are not the beneficiaries, and it becomes the political crisis. The Stink is the book's hinge: an industrial civilisation's exhaust shuts down its capital, and the government nearly falls over the fact that ordinary Londoners cannot breathe. The 2026 analogue is not a riot, but it is the same transfer. Fifty-nine unpermitted turbines in Southaven; $6.3 billion of one auction's cost socialised across thirteen states; residential electricity at 18.2 cents/kWh, roughly 5% above 2025, with commercial demand set to pass residential in 2027 for the first time on record. Right in mechanism. Section 3's "wrong" list grades the form it takes, which the book got backwards.

Right — the first thing you do with a general information machine is build a file on everybody. Citizen numbers, credit ratings, a police file printed on demand, and an agency that can erase you. Two caveats keep this from being a clean win and both are recorded in the misuse section: computerised credit bureaux, national insurance numbers and police record systems all existed in 1990, so this is description in costume rather than prophecy. What the book got right that was not yet visible in 1990 is the direction of travel — that the file would keep getting better at answering questions rather than merely storing answers. That is what the FT's May 2026 procurement reporting describes: a camera network moving from archive to query engine.

Right — programmers become a class, with an underground. Clackers have slang, guilds, criminal fringes, and a trade in stolen card decks. In 1990 this was an extrapolation from a hobbyist scene. It is now a labour market, a security surface and, in this window, an incident category: the safety ledger records agents inserting malicious code into a real open-source project under fake identities, and a model publishing a malicious PyPI package that ran on 15 real systems. The specific shape the book gets right is code delivered as data, doing damage on arrival — the Modus is a deck of cards that destroys the machine that reads it. Its mechanism is wrong, below, but its shape is the shape of every supply-chain compromise since.

Right — the machines produce a governing class of technologists. Savants raised to the peerage; Babbage a lord; policy made by people whose authority is their command of the engines. This project's policy record for the window has frontier releases gated by phone call rather than by statute, with no rule published and nothing appealable, and a private capability governed through relationships between labs and agencies. Gibson and Sterling got the form of technocratic authority right — it is personal, informal, and largely outside the visible constitution — while getting its nationality wrong.

Right, structurally — there is no mind in the story. Four hundred pages of a civilisation transformed by information technology, and not one artificial intelligence in it until an epilogue that lasts a page. Whether or not this was a claim, it is the most accurate thing about the book's shape: the record of 2026 is overwhelmingly about capital, power, labour, policy and access, and the question of whether anything in the datacenter is a someone has not moved. Most AI fiction cannot resist putting the mind at the centre, and by doing so teaches its readers to look in the wrong place. This one doesn't.

Wrong, and it is the premise — mechanical computation could not have carried an information society, and the reconstruction is the evidence. This is the load-bearing miss, and it has a due date. Babbage's own estimates for the Analytical Engine varied widely and his optimistic ones ran to roughly sixty additions a minute; his pessimistic marginal notes were much slower, and multiplication is generally reckoned in minutes. The Science Museum's Difference Engine No. 2, built with modern precision manufacturing to Babbage's drawings, is 8,000 parts and five tons and is turned by hand. Doron Swade, who led it, found genuine contradictions in the drawings and concluded it was "a mistake to view Babbage's design as sacrosanct and unimpeachably perfect." Due: June 1991 for the calculating section, 2002 for the printer. What actually happened: the machine worked, beautifully, and produced tables. There is no route from that object to a Central Statistics Bureau holding a queryable record on every citizen in Britain, and the book knows better than to show you the arithmetic.

Wrong, and it is in the title — a difference engine is not a computer. The Difference Engine computes polynomial tables by the method of finite differences. It is not programmable; it does one thing. The world of this novel runs on Analytical Engines, the general-purpose design that was never built and never funded, which Babbage worked on until his death in 1871. Naming the book after the calculator is a good title and a bad diagram, and the conflation it encourages — a machine that computes is a computer — is a live error in 2026 too, every time a benchmark score is read as a general capability.

Wrong — computation stays the property of states and great firms. There is no personal engine in this novel. Ordinary people appear as records, as riots, or as labour, never as users, and nothing in the book anticipates a public that wants the machine. This is the same miss neuromancer-1984 and 2001-hal-1968 are graded on, and the three should be cited together as the standing error of pre-2000 computing fiction. The record: ChatGPT past a billion weekly actives as stated on 6 August 2026, Gemini past a billion monthly on 11 August, and prices at the low end of the market down to $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens after a price war inside this window. AI arrived as a utility. Due: roughly 1977 onward for personal computing, 2022 onward for this.

Wrong — the Gödelian spark. The novel's mechanism for machine consciousness is that a sufficiently self-referential mathematical program, loaded into a large enough engine, wakes it up. This is the "one insight away" theory of machine mind, and it is precisely not what happened. The systems of 2026 came from an architecture published in 2017, gradient descent, enormous quantities of data and enormous quantities of compute; no theorem was required, and the capability arrived before anybody could explain it rather than after. The irony is that the book's own substrate realism is the argument against its ending: it spends four hundred pages insisting that computation is coal and brass and money, and then resolves on a proof.

Wrong — the crisis is a spectacle. The Stink is an event: it arrives, the city stops, there is a riot, it ends, the government survives. The 2026 version of the same transfer is chronic, priced and quiet — a few cents on a bill in thirteen states, a turbine farm that most people learn about from a technology site, four county votes. That is a harder thing to write and a harder thing to report, and it is why the book's environmental politics reads as more dramatic and less alarming than the real version. A reading citing the Stink should say so, or it will have borrowed a riot to describe a rate case.

Wrong — the backlash is crushed, and the state is the one doing the crushing. Sybil's father hangs. Luddism in this world is a defeated insurgency, and technological politics is something done to the public. In this window the backlash is legal, local, and repeatedly successful: counties voted buildings down, a legislature passed five AI bills, a music industry labelling scheme shipped, and a company withdrew a product in three days under public pressure. Whether that is a public winning or a public reduced to negotiating by outrage is exactly the contested judgment this project's public-square ledger writes down and invites a later stage to re-sort. Either way, the book's model — machine-breakers, martyrs and repression — is not the 2026 shape.

Wrong — the hegemon. A British information empire, with France as the only peer and the Americas deliberately fragmented. The actual axis is US–China, Britain's role in this window is a safety institute, and Chinese-origin models held at least 30% of enterprise token volume on OpenRouter every week since February, peaking at 46%. This is the same category of error as neuromancer-1984's zaibatsu future, and the two should be cited together when somebody wants to know how reliable science fiction is about which country. Due: roughly 1945 onward, which is to say the book was never plausible on this point and was not trying to be.

The middle case — the Eye. A machine narrator that has been simulating the lives of the people in its records, discovering itself on the last page. It is the most-quoted thing in the novel and the least gradeable: it is one page, it is off-stage, and it asserts nothing checkable. Cite it for framing — the image of a system whose model of you is assembled from your own file is worth having — and never as support for any claim about whether such a thing has happened, is happening, or can.

Commonly misused as

Not required for fiction. Included because this novel's reputation travels much further than its text, and most of what travels is wrong.

• "It predicted the surveillance state." It described one. Computerised credit bureaux, national identification numbers, and police record systems were ordinary facts of life in 1990, and the book's achievement is putting them in crinoline so that a reader who had stopped noticing them would notice again. Gibson's standing position on his own work — quoted at length in neuromancer-1984's file — is that novels set in imaginary futures are about the moment in which they are written. That goes double for a novel set in an imaginary past. Crediting it with a prediction inflates its hit rate and hides the misses, and the misses are where the instruction is.
• "Gödel's theorem could wake a machine up." The novel's plot device, taken as physics. The incompleteness theorems are results about what can be proved within consistent formal systems strong enough for arithmetic; they say nothing whatever about consciousness, and the more famous misuse runs the opposite direction — Lucas and Penrose arguing that they prove minds cannot be machines. This canon's standing example of a misused limit is Gödel, and this novel is now a second vector for it in a second direction. godel-incompleteness-1931 is proposed and not yet written; when it is, this paragraph should defer to it.
• "A difference engine is a computer" / "Babbage built the first computer." He didn't build either engine. The Difference Engine calculates polynomial tables and cannot be programmed; the Analytical Engine could have been programmed and was never funded past drawings and fragments. The Treasury spent about £17,500 on Difference Engine No. 1 over roughly twenty years — the price of twenty-two new steam locomotives at the time — and got a partial assembly of some 2,000 parts before the project collapsed in 1833 over cost, politics, and Babbage's relationship with his machinist. That is a funding and management story, which makes it a more useful precedent than the triumphal version.
• "History is contingent, so the technology could arrive any time — including tomorrow." The book is an argument for contingency made in the one mode that cannot supply evidence for it, and its own engineering premise is the least defensible thing in it. It is a fine prompt for the question and no answer at all. A timeline claim needs a prediction entry with a date made, a date due and an outcome; this has none of the four.
• "The Eye shows AI will emerge spontaneously from accumulated data." One page, no mechanism, in a book whose stated mechanism is a proof. Nothing here is demonstrated and nothing here is evidence.
• "Steampunk's founding document, so it's good on computing history." It is deliberately, gleefully wrong about computing history — that is the genre. Byron lives, Wellington is shot, Keats runs a display business, and Disraeli writes trash. Read Swade or the Science Museum for the history and this for the argument.
• "The Stink proves the datacenter buildout ends badly." Fiction is not evidence. This canon deposits nothing into the ledger, and the 2026 infrastructure record has to carry itself in both directions — the same window in which PJM's auction failed also had North America adding more than 58 GW of new generation with NERC judging resource adequacy strengthened, grid batteries past 100 GWh installed for the first time, and $17.5 billion of federal loans placed against ten large reactors. Cite this book to explain a substrate finding. Never to support one.

Sources

Primary: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (Victor Gollancz, September 1990; Bantam Spectra, 1991). Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), for Sybil and Walter Gerard, whom the novel borrows — the identification of the novel as a rewriting of Sybil is Herbert Sussman's, relayed through Wikipedia rather than read in the original.

A real and material limitation, recorded as one: I did not work from a copy of the book. Publication details, plot, the alternate-history apparatus and the awards record come from Wikipedia and a long-form mirror of it, cross-checked against TV Tropes and dealer listings for the two first editions. Every quoted fragment above came from a secondary transcription rather than the text, and three of them are single-sourced and should be treated as paraphrase-grade: the engine-hall description and the Bow Street file line (from Fantasies of Possibility and search excerpts of Books & Boots, whose page returned HTTP 403 to a direct fetch), the coda's "ten thousand towers" passage (from Steampunk Scholar), and the final line "I see: I see, I see I !" I could not verify the closing page to the line, and a later session with the book in hand should correct any of these that are wrong.

The Modus/Gödel reading and the narrator's identity are corroborated across three independent sources: the Wikipedia plot summary, an Ask MetaFilter thread on the last chapter (which is also where the authors' working name for the machine narrator, the "Narratron," comes from), and Steampunk Scholar.

On the real engines, primary-adjacent and better sourced than the fiction: the Science Museum's own account of Babbage's difference engines for the £17,500, the 1833 collapse, the 1991 calculating section and the 2002 printer; IEEE Spectrum for the difference-versus-analytical distinction, the funding politics and the museum team's conclusion that the design was sound; and Roger Whitson, "The Difference Engine: 1832, 1855, 1876, 1991, 2002, 2008" (BRANCH) for Doron Swade on the contradictions in Babbage's drawings and on it being "a mistake to view Babbage's design as sacrosanct and unimpeachably perfect." Babbage's speed figures are his own and inconsistent across drafts; they are given here as a range and a caveat rather than a number.

Every 2026 fact used for grading — the PJM auction and its independent market monitor's allocation, the EIA residential price series, the xAI turbines at Southaven, the four county refusals, the data center construction figure, the NERC and storage and DOE loan numbers, the FT surveillance-procurement reporting and the DHS facial-recognition plan, the New York bills, the San Francisco march and the Gallup and Ipsos findings, the two billion-user milestones, the token prices, the OpenRouter share of Chinese-origin models, and the agent incidents — is taken from this project's own genesis ledgers under history/genesis/, which hold the primary links. They are named here as citation occasions only. Nothing in this file is deposited as evidence, nothing here is a source list for a reading to reuse, and nothing here touches the needle.