Autumn 1852
Berlin no longer looked like an old European capital.
The city still carried stone government buildings, royal palaces, and old churches standing beneath gray skies, but increasingly, those structures felt overshadowed by something newer rising around them.
Factories.
Rail yards.
Steel workshops.
Warehouses.
Steam.
Smoke.
Noise.
The city had changed faster over the past few years than most Europeans thought possible.
And it was still changing.
At dawn, the industrial districts already thundered with activity.
Locomotives hissed beneath clouds of steam while freight wagons rolled through muddy streets carrying coal, timber, and iron toward expanding factories near the outskirts of the city. Factory whistles echoed across Berlin before sunrise while workers poured from crowded residential blocks toward steel mills and locomotive workshops operating almost nonstop now.
The air smelled different too.
Coal smoke.
Oil.
Hot steel.
