It smells of soot and of oil.
That’s for my nose.

For my eyes, both of it produced some iridescent film on scattered glass-pieces, sitting in the rusty sieve of a roof, hovering over this draughty hall, each fragment reflecting a dazzling recollection of great engineering art, developed through more than two centuries. ...

The light of the sun remains pale within this enormous hall, in the morning, at midday or in the evening — fixed only for moments as bright white fingers, indicating from above through shifting clouds of dust.

Steam first, then diesel, electricity never — no!

The last locomotives which did rest here, then did rust — they represented the engineer‘s highest effort to complete a development of which the beginning was the turning wheel, the wheel!

With the advent of electricity, the wheel lost its power. Oh, it knew how to use the wheel, this electricity, it would need it for its very existence, afterwards it would drive the wheel itself — may be, even better than steam and diesel, but at the end, it would dispense with it, not to be used in intelligent machines anymore, would replace it with endless lines of letters and numbers in flickering computers — operating soon without a turning wheel.

The matrix of electricity will see the wheel serving for production and communication as a slave of digital codes only, as a rolling misery mounted under cargo-robots.

Gone is the time when steel-rails would guide rolling wheels to conquer foreign worlds.

Oh, I have studied the secrets of electricity; this is the switch, which will let it serve my purpose in this hall ...




Click!