In 1832, the French instrument maker Hippolyte Pixii built the first dynamo, then called a magneto-electric machine, in Paris, based directly on Faraday's principle of electromagnetic induction. Pixii's device used a hand-cranked permanent magnet rotated near coils of wire to produce a pulsing direct current, the first machine to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy continuously. Though primitive, this Paris-built device demonstrated that electrical power could be generated on demand through mechanical means.

The construction of the first dynamo in Paris during the heyday of French Romanticism symbolized the growing power of industrial technology to transform nature's forces into human utility. French Romantic poets including Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, who were deeply engaged with questions of progress and its costs, found in such machines concrete embodiments of the age's transformative energy. Hugo's later works, particularly his descriptions of Paris in "Les Miserables," reflect a world being reshaped by the technological forces that devices like Pixii's dynamo represented.