. The lowest horror of
the steamship had been abolished here.

I was tempted to say: "This alone is fit to be called the heart of New
York!"

They took me to the twin palace, and on the windy way thither figures
were casually thrown at me. As that a short circuit may cause the
machines to surge wildly into the sudden creation of six million
horse-power of electricity, necessitating the invention of other
machines to control automatically these perilous vagaries! As that in
the down-town district the fire-engine was being abolished because, at a
signal, these power-houses could in thirty seconds concentrate on any
given main a pressure of three hundred pounds to the square inch,
lifting jets of water perhaps above the roofs of sky-scrapers! As that
the city could fine these power-houses at the rate of five hundred
dollars a minute for any interruption of the current longer than three
minutes--but the current had never failed for a single second! As that
in one year over two million dollars' worth of machinery had been
scrapped!... And I was aware that it was New York I was in, and not
Timbuctoo.

In the other palace it appeared that the great American scrapping
process was even yet far from complete. At first sight this other seemed
to resemble the former one, but I was soon instructed that the former
one was as naught to this one, for here the turbine--the "strong, silent
man" among engines--was replacing the racket of cylinder and crank.
Statistics are tiresome and futile to stir the imagination. I disdain
statistics, even when I assimilate them. And yet when my attention was
directed to one trifling block of metal, and I was told that it was the
most powerful "unit" in the world, and that it alone would make
electricity sufficient for the lighting of a city of a quarter of a
million people, I felt that statistics, after all, could knock you a
staggering blow.... In this other palace, too, was the same solitude of
machinery, attending most conscientiously and effectively to itself. A
singularly disconcerting spectacle! And I reflected that, according to
dreams already coming true, the telephone-exchange also would soon be a
solitude of clicking contact-points, functioning in mystic certitude,
instead of a convent of girls requiring sugar and couches, and thirsting
for love. A singularly disconcerting prospect!

But was it necessary to come to America in order to see and describe
telephone-exchanges and electrical