In 1866, the German electrical engineer Werner von Siemens invented the self-exciting dynamo in Berlin, a crucial improvement over previous generators. Earlier dynamos like Pixii's required permanent magnets whose strength limited the power they could produce, but Siemens's design used the generator's own electrical output to create the magnetic field through electromagnets, removing this limitation. This innovation in Berlin made it possible to build electrical generators of virtually any desired power, opening the door to large-scale electrical power generation.

Siemens's self-exciting dynamo represented a breakthrough in the scaling of electrical power that paralleled the massive scaling of industrial society in the late nineteenth century, a transformation that became a central theme in German literature of the period. The naturalist writers of the 1880s, including Gerhart Hauptmann whose play "The Weavers" depicted the human cost of industrialization, were writing in a world being fundamentally reshaped by the electrical technologies that Siemens's dynamo made possible. The idea of a machine that could amplify its own power also suggested troubling metaphors of uncontrolled growth that would appear in early twentieth-century German literature.