La Galerie des Machines_Paris_1889

La Galerie des Machines

Paris 1889

architect: Ferdinand Dutert 

 engineer: Victor Contamin

 

 

In 1900, historian Henry Adams (1838-1918) visited the Galerie des Machines at the Paris Exposition.  He composed an essay shortly afterward recalling his sense of astonishment at the display of new-fangled gizmos he had seen, particularly the dynamos which left him "lying in the Gallery of Machines..., his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new."

"To me the dynamo became a symbol of infinity.  As it grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, it 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...."

1900_Henry Adams (1838-1918)