The Dynamo and the Virgin

“As he [Adams] grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring–scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power … Before the end, one began to pray to it ... Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.”

- Henry Adams 1900