Antiques.

[Henry Adams] found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines [Galerie des Machines] at the Great Exposition of 1900, with his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907; 1918

The historian Henry Adams, a great-grandson of President John Adams and a grandson of President John Quincy Adams, visited the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris and was especially impressed by the Great Hall of Dynamos [Palais de I'Electricite]. When he wrote about the experience in 1905, he looked at human contrivances all around him and realized that they only hinted at the real nature of the twentieth century. Extensions of earlier technologies would not do. The modern world had to rise out of a complete intellectual disruption, and Henry Adams saw that disruption with disturbing clarity. No one else in the materialistic ferment of the 1890s pinpointed anything so subtle as the coming fragmentation of his world.

A century earlier William Blake reclaimed the medieval notion that infinities are found by looking inward at small things when he wrote: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand,/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,/And eternity in an hour." Adams, a historian of medieval Europe, saw that the twentieth century would be fueled by the same vast mystery that had raised Chartres Cathedral in France seven hundred years earlier. In The Education of Henry Adams the author portrays himself as everyman facing a juggernaut of technology. In the chapter entitled "The Dynamo and the ...