9. The Dumb Belief That the High Speed of Newfangled Trains Made People Crazy
For many people, anything new or different is suspect and a cause for alarm. As a result, the introduction of new technologies throughout history has often triggered fears, many of them irrational, and dumb beliefs to justify those fears. For example, take the concerns that cropped up when passenger trains first entered service back in the nineteenth century. New steam locomotives, such as the pioneering Rocket, built by Robert Stephenson in 1829, were capable of maximum speeds of 28 miles per hour.
28 mph is quite slow by modern standards, but until 1829, it is unlikely that any human beings had ever experienced such velocities unless they were falling off a cliff or the like. As a result, there were grave concerns that such literally unprecedented speeds would prove lethal to passengers. The perceived risk of such unheard-of velocities was not limited to the consequences of a crash or derailment. Naysayers theorized that human physiology was simply not adapted to and capable of withstanding travel at speeds faster than those of a galloping horse.
