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Depending on the criteria and personal preferences, the history of the electric street-tram began either in Russia in a small seaside town of Sestroretsk near Sankt Petersburg in 1880 or in Berlin a year later. On May 16 1881 Werner Siemens, the vehicle´s German inventor who had previously contacted Fyodor Pirotsky, the Russian engineer, opened his first electricity-powered tram line near the Prussian Military College in Lichterfelde.

DEBUT OF THE FIRST ELECTRIC TRAM IN THE WORLD: BERLIN-LICHTERFELDE, MAY 1881 (image through siemens.de)

Even though the idea behind the project was brilliant, engineers involved in developing it still had a lot of work to do. The main problem were the rails, initially used as electricity conduits. They provided an invisible but very palpable power which not only propelled carriages along the 250-metre long line at an until then unknown speed but, on the downside, if you accidentally stepped on them, an…

The landscaped acres of this island in the Danube make a peaceful (and pretty much cost-free) day out in the middle of the city

Sometimes you have to dig around a bit to understand what is going on in a painting, particularly some of JMW Turner’s.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), The Opening of the Wallhalla, 1842 (1843), oil on mahogany, 112.7 x 200.7 cm, The Tate Gallery (Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-opening-of-the-wallhalla-1842-n00533

Here, my puzzle is The Opening of the Wallhalla, 1842 (1843), which shows a classical building resembling the Parthenon in Athens, and a huge crowd of people gathered on the opposite bank of the river below it. Valhalla is, of course, the mythical majestic hall to which half of the Vikings went when they died in battle, in preparation for Ragnarök.

The Walhalla (to spell it correctly) which Turner shows is a very long way from the lands of the…