 Western influence and technological transfer contributed to the establishment of Japan's first daily newspaper (1870), first gas-powered street lamps (1872) and Japan's first railway constructed in the same year to connect Yokohama to Shinagawa and Shinbashi in Tokyo.In 1872 Jules Verne portrayed Yokohama, which he had never visited, in an episode of his widely read novel "Around the World in Eighty Days", capturing the atmosphere of the fast-developing, internationally oriented Japanese city.In 1887, a British merchant, Samuel Cocking, built the city's first power plant.