by Karen Pennar
n 1900, an awestruck Henry Adams visited the Great Exposition in Paris. The City of Light dazzled. A graceful new bridge, the Alexandre III, spanned the Seine River close by the spanking new exhibition halls, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, that packed crowds in to see contemporary artwork. The Paris Metro had just opened, with its sinuous Art Nouveau ironwork entrances. The Eiffel Tower, completed a decade earlier, punctuated the skyline. But it wasn't art or architecture that drew Adams back to the exhibit halls repeatedly. It was the Gallery of Machines and its 40-foot-tall dynamo. There,
he wrote in The Education of Henry Adams, "the planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual, or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed." On considering the achievements of science and technology, Adams found his "historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new."
Imagine how many historical necks have broken since then. This century has erupted with countless inventions and innovations, many of which have had a huge impact. In some instances, that impact has been obvious—the detonation of the A-bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In others, it is more subtle but no less profound—the binary weave of ones and zeros that, largely unseen by humans, keeps computers and telecommunications humming.
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