Fire
Over history the domestication of fire has taken two distinct paths, merging and separating like the dancing flames of a wood-burning fire: the appropriation of fire as an all-around symbol and the slow technological mastery of its power. Keep in mind that, as Bachelard so acutely notes, "...I am going to examine a problem in which objectivity has never held sway, in which the initial seduction is so compelling it warps the most rational of minds, leading them to the cradle of poetry, where daydreams supplant thought and poems cloak theorems..."