![]() ![]() ![]() Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind, even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable volume … 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. His chief interest was in new motors to make his airship feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the new Daimler motor, and of the automobile, which, since 1893, had become a night-mare at a hundred kilometres an hour, almost as destructive as the electric tram which was only ten years older and threatening to become as terrible as the locomotive steam-engine itself, which was almost exactly Adams’s own age. … He led his pupil directly to the forces. While he was thus meditating chaos, Langley came by, and showed it to him. He would have liked to know how much of it could have been grasped by the best-informed man in the world. ![]() Until the Great Exposition closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to find it. Henry Adams, the great grandson of President John Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, the son of a major American diplomat, and an accomplished Harvard historian, writing in the third person, describes his experience at the Great Exposition in Paris in 1900 and writes of his encounter with “forces totally new.” ![]() Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918) ![]()
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