The sensation scene was a well known staple of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century melodramas: received with derision, admiration, and awe during its time as an emerging, dominant, enduring, and later, in the advent of the silent screen, ultimately waning form. From avalanches to train derailments, earthquakes to underwater battles, horse races to cave-ins, the everyday incidents and disasters of modern industrial life were ripe fodder for the so-called spectacular melodramatists of the period who repeatedly drew from real-life headlines as stimuli for spectacle and feats of mechanical ingenuity. The fate of the heroine was no longer only at the hands of the dramatist and hero but was just as much at the mercy of the stage carpenter, and with every new spectacle the pressure to not only outdo previous efforts but also to exceed them became an ever-increasing industry imperative and source of competition (between dramatists and theatres alike).  A visual and visceral encounter, the sensation scene offered audiences the opportunity to witness and bodily experience the thrill of a spectacle – in particular with relation to nature and machine.