“The future, which always comes too late for the living, will see these things, and many others too, for the world is born, nowadays, of the union of steam and the railways. Everything that existed the day before yesterday no longer has any reason for being; the new order is already the antipodes of the old; the impossible will regenerate the world; interests are never disunited, they combine; there is no longer any distance; wheels are wings, mountains corridors, ships bridges, oceans streams. What, then, will come to pass after our generation?”

Joseph Mery, 1854