“I can, as Poe would have it, create revolving worlds and fiery, howling spheres, with the sound of a material dispossessed of a soul; and with this I have surpassed even Lucifer, for I can force disorganized things to blaspheme. Night and day, at my will, skins which were once alive and metals perhaps only not yet so, proclaim inanimate words; and if it is true that the voice creates universes in space, the ones I have it create are worlds which die before having lived. In my house dwells a Behemoth who bellows at the wave of my hand; I have invented a talking machine.”

Marcel Schwob, 1892