The Education of Henry Adams

(...) to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accostumed 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-breath 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 ultimte energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive."