As he 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 --
while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.
Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct
taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite
force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo
was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.
Yet the dynamo, next to the steam-engine, was the most familiar
of exhibits. For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its
occult mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines
and the engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to
abysmal fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation
could he discover between the steam and the electric current than
between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were
interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an
absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. Langley could not help
him.
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