Regarding the voice of a microwave and other transcendental confusions

William Playfair (1759-1823) bar/line chart: price of wheat and wages

It is sometimes said that the 18C, a time of rationalization and the birth of nations, saw the dawn of an obsession with measurement and quantification. The world, whether social or natural, required only application and genius to unlock. So how to visualize, let alone hold in the head, the world of two centuries hence?

Visiting the Paris Exhibition in 1900, the American writer Henry Adams saw something so remarkable he compared its influence to that of the Virgin Mary. It was a hall filled with machines – early power generators known as dynamos. Watching them at work, he “began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross,” 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, and barely murmuring.” Adams wondered if he should pray to it. [link]