“There are moments when human genius slumbers. There are others when it is exalted by the fever of creation. Chemistry, physics and biology evolve with a miraculous rapidity, translated before our eyes into such miracles as the ancient poets revered. Without harness, chariots run with a magical speed. Tritons plunge into the bosom of the sea with the submarines. Icariuses fly. Jupiters by the millions manipulate the lightning. Phaetons pass in a day through the spaces of the European sky. Swifter than Iris, the message-bearing thought, entrusted to the waves of an aerial vibration, spreads from Europe to Africa, Asia, America in a fraction of time. 

“Did the nymphs of the waterfalls know that they would one day deliver up the force of their waves to the power of a dynamo, that would change them into electric lightning glowing over whole regions?”

Paul Adam, 1894