'Every generalisation that we settled forty years ago, is abandoned' As a journalist, historian and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. Source: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918). … He found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.
These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about. Historians undertake to arrange sequences,-called stories, or histories,-assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. Before the end, one began to pray to it inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. 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, and barely murmuring…. 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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