You know, it might work, but as a very different story than I imagined. What if Our Hero ends up in New Jersey and looks up ol’ Tom Edison? We could see WW1 being almost unimportant.
In fact to get really cute, give Tom a time traveller and use this as a means to explain his great ability to invent important stuff. In other words, do not create an alternate universe, but explain the one we live in. That might work.
Heh, yeah—start it out in 2105, with the hero escaping into the past seconds before the Westinghouse-Tesla Cartel’s Corporate Security guys catch him for building the bootleg Vacuum Tubes™ he used in his chronomobile. (Not to mention pirating the Wireless ACtricity™ to power it.)