How did coffee from the São Paulo plateau reach the port of Santos, with the Serra do Mar mountain range, an 800-meter wall, in the middle of the way? And why didn't the São Paulo Railway, opened in 1867 between Santos and Jundiaí, solve this stretch with a more powerful locomotive? The video follows the history of Brazil's first railway up to the English project that tackled the ascent of the Serra do Mar.

The Baroneza, the country's first locomotive, in 1854, on the Mauá Railway: fourteen kilometers of flat tracks, alongside water, commissioned by Baron Mauá—and not a single sack of coffee nearby.

The numbers of the slope: from an elevation of 4.50 meters in Cubatão to 800.5 meters in Paranapiacaba, 796 meters of altitude overcome in 11,031 meters of travel.

The physical limit that the mountain explores: a steel wheel on a steel rail only climbs as long as there is adhesion. The boiler might be full of power, and the train could still stop climbing.

Where did the power that the 19th century had to offer come from: Thomas Savery's 1698 pump, the Miner's Friend, which lifted water a maximum of nine meters; Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric engine in a Staffordshire coal mine in 1712; the separate condenser that James Watt imagined on a walk through Glasgow Green in 1765; and the sun and planet mechanism, patented in 1781.

The Rainhill race in October 1829, the victory of George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket, the peak of 29 miles per hour—and the doctor who publicly warned that human lungs would not survive above 20 miles per hour.

The sheer volume of cargo that would pass through those tracks: approximately 359,000 tons per year as early as 1887, and something close to 70% of everything Brazil exported between 1924 and 1928.

And the question that drives the episode: what if the machine capable of conquering the Serra do Mar mountain range wasn't a machine that travels alongside the train?