New technology has always been scary
What the world’s craziest age of technological advancement — the 1890s — can teach us about today’s new tech
A recent study found that the average American is more afraid of robots than death. And it’s not hard to see why — did you see that those Boston Dynamics humanoids are doing parkour now?
Mind control, designer babies, and covert listening devices are no longer things of science fiction. They are integrating ever-deeper into our lives as the years pass, and the pace of change is accelerating. It’s enough to strike fear into the hearts of even the most tech-savvy among us — perhaps especially the tech-savvy among us.
Take OpenAI: founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015, the company’s stated goal is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)… benefits all of humanity.” A noble, comforting mission, but one that conveniently glosses over the abject horror that their founders feel towards the very technology they’re developing.
The fear, of course, is that a sufficiently smart computer could decide to wipe humans off the map just as humans casually exterminate household pests — Musk called the development of advanced AI “summoning the demon,” and said that AGI represents a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”
And so, while we laugh at OpenAI’s whimsical AI demonstrations…
…the company internally believes that they, the good guys, have to build AGI before the bad guys do, or else the world might literally end.
In a world with too-intelligent AI, killer robots, brain-to-computer interfaces, and gene editing, you can be forgiven for being a little bit afraid of modern technology.
It certainly feels like we’re standing at the knee of the exponential curve: the road behind us flat, the road before us vertical.
But we shouldn’t forget a truism of exponential growth: it always looks the same, relatively. A doubling from 0.5 to 1.0 is the exact same shape as a doubling from 5,000 to 10,000.
New technology has always been scary, and humanity has always been a little bit alarmist.
People worried that subways violated the will of God by getting people closer to hell, and that telephones would let people communicate with the dead. Early elevators were plagued by consumers who felt “elevator sickness” after their rides. And with the advent of the passenger train, people worried that “the unprecedented speeds of railroad travel could send women’s uteruses hurling from their bodies.”
Technology changes, but people stay the same.
In this piece, we’ll talk through three of the most earth-shattering, terror-inducing inventions of the late 19th century: electricity, elevators, and automobiles. All three were feared, boycotted, protested, regulated… and, ultimately, adopted.
Scary technologies can still succeed, but the initial, terrifying hurdle can only be cleared if entrepreneurs and inventors know how to build trust among the general public.
If you keep reading, I’ll help you understand how scary technologies become less scary over time, and how entrepreneurs can hasten that transition.
We’ll get to those three innovations I mentioned — electricity, elevators, and automobiles — shortly, but before we do, let me set the stage. The era in which these inventions emerged was an incredible time to be alive; to appreciate the examples, you’ll need to understand life in the 1890s.
The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was the greatest technological demonstration in human history.
The fairgrounds were comprised of fourteen gargantuan buildings built of wood and painted in gleaming white (see above). The largest was big enough to hold Madison Square Garden, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the U.S. Capitol, and the Great Pyramid of Giza at the same time.
It was such an epic event, in fact, that about 42% of the U.S. population attended the fair (!) — including Buffalo Bill, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Clarence Darrow, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and Archduke Francis Ferdinand.
One of the primary draws to the fair was simple: electricity. For most, the Fair would have been their first run-in with widespread electrical lighting and machinery. (Edison General Electric was only founded the previous year, and it wouldn’t be until 1925 that more than half of U.S. homes were electrified.) Murat Halstead, an esteemed writer in the late 19th century, captured how it felt to see electric lighting for the first time at the Fair:
The Fair, considered as an electric exposition only, would be well worthy the attention of the world. Look from a distance at night, upon the broad spaces it fills, and the majestic sweep of the searching lights, and it is as if the earth and sky were transformed by the immeasurable wands of colossal magicians; and the superb dome of the structure, that is the central glory of the display, is glowing as if bound with wreaths of stars. It is electricity!
The Fair was also chock full of stars. Harry Houdini gave a magic performance; John Philip Sousa’s band played for the dedication; the Pledge of Allegiance was performed for the first time at the fair; and Katharine Lee Bates was inspired by the Fair to write “America the Beautiful.” An astounding number of iconic American brands made their debuts at the Fair: from Cream of Wheat to Juicy Fruit, from Quaker Oats to Aunt Jemima to Hershey’s, and, my personal favorite, a beer from Pabst that, after winning the Fair’s top honors, forever adopted the name “Blue Ribbon.”
But even those famous firsts paled in comparison to the Fair’s main attraction: a gigantic wheel, nearly 300 feet high, which allowed over 2,000 concurrent passengers to soar over the White City. That wheel was the first of its kind, invented for the Fair by a young engineer: Mr. Ferris.
The list of inventions, cultural icons, and future stars present at the Chicago World’s Fair continues nearly indefinitely, but you get the picture. It was a spectacle to behold.
The overwhelming wonders of the Chicago World’s Fair were emblematic of the age in which they came about. In the 1890s, a wave of inventions changed how all Americans lived and, accordingly, shook the very fabric of American society. To some, the wonders of the Fair inspired their subsequent inventive and creative endeavors. Erik Larson writes:
Walt Disney’s father, Elias, helped build the White City; Walt’s Magic Kingdom may well be a descendant. Certainly the fair made a powerful impression on the Disney family. It proved such financial boon that when the family’s third son was born that year, Elias in gratitude wanted to name him Columbus… The writer L. Frank Baum and his artist-partner William Wallace Denslow visited the fair; its grandeur informed their creation of Oz. The Japanese temple on the Wooded Island charmed Frank Lloyd Wright, and may have influenced the evolution of his “Prairie” residential designs. …Even the Lincoln Memorial in Washington can trace its heritage to the fair. The fair’s greatest impact lay in how it changed the way Americans perceived their cities and their architects.
But to others, the Fair marked everything they were afraid of — the advancement of dangerous ideas, the willing acceptance of a blind public to test out deficient, experimental technology, and the beginning of the end.
That’s the promise and peril of innovation: it represents change. Some people love change; others loathe it.
In the sections that follow, we’ll see three examples of massive technological change that rose to prominence in the 1890s: the automobile, the elevator, and electricity.
In 1865, the British Parliament passed a law to regulate a new, scary invention: the horseless carriage.
The law was, shall we say, restrictive. All locomotives had to yield to any person with a horse; the maximum speed limit, even on a highway, was four miles per hour; vehicle owners had to “conspicuously” display their names and addresses on the car’s exteriors; local municipalities could ban vehicles from their towns altogether if they wished; and, my personal favorite, the “red flag” provision:
…one of [the three] Persons [employed to drive or conduct a Locomotive], while any Locomotive is in Motion, shall precede such Locomotive on Foot by not less than Sixty Yards, and shall carry a Red Flag constantly displayed, and shall warn the Riders and Drivers of Horses of the Approach of such Locomotives, and shall signal the Driver thereof when it shall be necessary to stop, and shall assist Horses, and Carriages drawn by Horses, passing the same.
It’s not hard to see why these laws drew such ire from horseless carriage owners, or why, after they were struck from the books, dozens of Londoners tore red flags in half, jumped in their locomotives, and raced to Brighton at a hair-raising 14 miles per hour to celebrate. It is hard, conversely, to hear that story and empathize with the members of Parliament who passed the act. What were they thinking? Couldn’t they see the potential they were stifling?
Early-adopting technologists tend to see the glorious future rather than the terrifying present. This may be hard for a tech lover like you, dear reader, to internalize, but pumping the brakes on innovation, as the Red Flag Act demanded, is often not such a bad idea.
Early technology usually requires rosy glasses to be seen as worthy of experimentation and adoption.
Ask anyone how the automobile came to be adopted, and they’ll probably mention Henry Ford and the Model T. But that famous production line wasn’t live until 1908, and the automobile’s entrance into modern American life began, as did most inventions of the era, in the 1890s. And cars in those early days were absolute deathtraps, as Brian Ladd wrote:
For the early [automobile] enthusiasts, speed was the key attraction, coupled with the sense of individual mastery that came with driving. …In the 1890s, when most people were no more likely to drive a car than to ride a racehorse, auto races promised thrills for a few drivers as well as crowds of onlookers. Crashes were common, often fatal, and part of the excitement of the race. The machine’s power — the power of life and death — depended on an individual driver, a role to which anyone could aspire.
These cars weren’t designed for the general public: they were loud, hard to operate, and highly dangerous for their passengers. They didn’t have electric headlights until 1889 or speedometers until 1901, safety glass and turn signals wouldn’t be invented until the ’30s, modern seatbelts weren’t common until the ’60s, and airbags didn’t exist commercially until 1973.
Cars also posed dangers to those around them — usually rural folk, who suffered as rich city-dwellers took their cars on reckless joyrides through the countryside. Being unused to anything moving so quickly, and without cultural norms like “look both ways” to protect each other, both drivers and pedestrians alike were at high risk of injury and accident. “By the 1920s,” Ladd wrote, “rural English hospitals were staggering under the costs of treating auto accident victims — the motorists who careened off the roads as well as the locals who got in their way.” He continues,
Country dwellers wailed at the clouds of dust descending on their lungs, their homes, and their gardens. Unpaved country roads (that is, nearly all of them) had always been dusty, but the tires of speeding cars churned the dust faster and farther than horses, oxen, or wagons ever had. A statement from a 1909 British road-building handbook reveals the severity of the plague (if not necessarily an accurate diagnosis of it): “It is a matter of common knowledge that our great infantile mortality is largely attributable to dust.”
This pattern is one that can be found throughout tech history: new inventions are highly dangerous. Take airplanes:
People flying in 1930 were roughly 200 times more likely to be killed than the passengers of forty years later. Navigation aids were rudimentary: pilots often followed railroad tracks until one too many of them failed to notice the approaching tunnels… Carriers distributed cotton balls to dull the earsplitting roar of the piston engines. Motion sickness was frightful, afflicting about half of all passengers.
Subways were similarly treacherous: at the first test of a horse-drawn underground railway in 1832, two test cars collided with each other, and at an early demonstration of a true subway, faulty wiring ignited a literal explosion under a prospective financier. I could continue, but you get the idea.
Thinking back to the Red Flag Laws of the 1890s — to a time before the invention of safety features, when vehicles were still centrally used as death-defying carnival attractions and frequently killed the chickens that crossed the road — is it really so ridiculous that vehicles drew such a skeptical eye from regulators? Perhaps the regulators were correct to be worried about automobiles.
We know, of course, that the story didn’t end with cars being regulated out of existence — in the end, Henry Ford’s production line and a half-century of safety improvements made automobiles a near-mandatory purchase. Those innovations took a long time to come about, however, which required a lot of persistence and persuasion by folks like Ford.
The lesson: innovators must not only bring about the future, but also help others know that it’s coming.
Not everyone owns rosy-colored glasses, so those of us who can see the future promise of currently-terrifying technology have to practice our storytelling to drive adoption and survive the scary, early days of new technology.
In the next section, we’ll meet one of the best storytellers of the 1890s: Elisha Otis.
Consumers were originally terrified of elevators.
“I mean, think about it,” said Steve Henn from NPR, “You’re hanging hundreds of feet in the air by a cable.”
Early elevators were claustrophobia-inducing; they were socially uncomfortable (there were no norms around elevator use, e.g., should men be allowed to wear hats in elevators?); and their herks and jerks often induced “elevator sickness” in inexperienced riders. Elevator historian Andreas Bernard wrote:
The stoppage of the elevator car brings a dizziness to the head and sometimes a nausea to the stomach. The internal organs want to rise in the throat… As a countermeasure, the article recommended a very precise positioning of the body, just like the railroad hygienists three decades earlier: ‘If the body as a whole can be arrested at the same time with the feet, there will be no sickness. This can be done by placing the head and the shoulders against the car frame.’
Imagine medically knowledgeable New Yorkers descending in an elevator around 1890 and all pressing up against the cab walls as they reach the ground floor!
Consumers also feared elevators because they didn’t understand how they worked. As sociologist Joseph Gittler explained:
Americans initially resisted the elevator for personal use because they didn’t quite understand how it worked and this opacity contributed to fear for their personal safety. People were asked to put their trust in a system they could not see. In the confines of the [elevator] car, it was easy to imagine the cables fraying or the gears not working properly or the doors closing on an arm or leg.
Trust needs a comprehensible object. It’s like Mr. Weasley’s advice to Ginny in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, after he finds out that his daughter has been possessed by Lord Voldemort’s diary:
“Ginny!” said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. “Haven’t I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain?”
If consumers don’t know what to trust, they often choose to stay away — in fact, it can often take additional rounds of innovation before technologies become useful and safe enough for consumers to invite into their lives.
The man remembered for the invention of the elevator — Elisha Otis — wasn’t its inventor at all.
The world met Otis through one of the most compelling tech demonstrations of all time. Each day at a World’s Fair in New York City, crowds gathered around center stage as Otis stood on an elevator platform and hoisted it to its maximum height forty feet above the ground. Once the crowd reached a critical mass, Otis would introduce himself, concentrate their attention — and yell to his assistant to cut the cable, his platform’s only support.
The assistant would hack away as audience members screamed, certain that this man intended to end his own life on stage. But Otis stood calmly. As the rope snapped, the platform fell — but stopped after about two feet.
“All safe, gentlemen,” Otis called to the crowd. “All safe.”
Otis didn’t invent the elevator, he invented the safety catch — a device that prevented catastrophic elevator failure. His famous demonstration left crowds amazed and cemented his place in history as the main personality behind consumer adoption of the elevator — in fact, Otis Elevator is still the world’s leading elevator company today. The company’s chief historian, Stephen Showers, told me that the demonstration at the World’s Fair quadrupled the company’s sales.
It’s often not the inventions, but the co-inventions, that quell fear and drive the adoption of new technology at scale.
Otis’s invention showed people that elevators could be safe, but the public still wasn’t convinced of their usefulness: in the 1890s, nobody had any use for an elevator as most buildings were just a few stories high. Sure, walking up a stairwell was inconvenient, but society had designed around that constraint: for instance, the servants of taller houses would generally sleep on the top floor and top hotel floors held less expensive rooms.
According to the world’s foremost elevator historian, Dr. Lee Gray (a man who 1) exists, and 2) was nice enough to talk to me), elevators were originally luxuries reserved for only hotels and shops of the highest class. He said that the experience of riding an early elevator was about being “pampered.”
As the world became familiar with the idea of efficient vertical travel, however, other inventions — both mechanical and cultural — started to appear.
One such development was the skyscraper, which required a host of concurrent inventions to become viable: new techniques for strengthening the foundation beneath them, new plate glass to secure their exteriors, and new load-bearing, interior metal frames. These were only understood as useful once the major hurdle to building up — vertical travel — was conquered.
This mutually reinforcing cycle of co-invention was something Dr. Gray stressed in our conversation:
In the 1870s, elevators were powered by a steam engine in the basement. It’s loud, it has to run constantly, it requires constant maintenance, and it can explode. Consumers said that they didn’t like these steam engines, which led to the development of the hydraulic elevator. This was an immediate response to what consumers wanted.
This tennis match continued throughout the nineteenth century. Manufacturers would say “Here is the new version,” consumers would say, “well, now we want 25- and 30-story buildings. What can you do for us?” As a result, the modern skyscraper was made possible from the elevator; you can also say the desire to have a skyscraper made the modern elevator necessary. France and England didn’t want to build tall buildings, or couldn’t, so they didn’t develop high-speed elevator systems. America decided that it wanted tall buildings, and that drove elevator technology forward.
The cycle slowly and surely changed the minds of Americans. No longer was it necessary to walk up many flights of stairs to live on the upper floors of a building. And once people noticed that getting further away from the noisy, urban streets provided peace, a new cultural invention — the “penthouse” — was born.
New tech can be scary to consumers simply because it is new.
They have lived their entire lives without the new invention of the day, so in order to adopt it, they have to be convinced that it is both safe and useful. Without either, they’re unlikely to risk leaving what they already understand — better to stick with the devil you know.
This means that, once again, the job of the innovator is larger than just inventing the new thing. In order to facilitate mass adoption, innovators also have to help consumers trust their inventions (which often means helping them understand how they work), and realize why they can provide value to their lives. In both cases, additional, supplementary co-inventions from are often necessary — or at least really good storytelling.
Some innovators understand these rules and do the “extra” parts of the innovator’s job well. And others, like Thomas Edison, do not.
In 1890, people thought electricity was dark magic.
A newspaper from October 1889 put the perceived danger bluntly: “Death does not stop at the door, but comes right into the house, and perhaps as you are closing a door or turning on the gas you are killed.” Physicist Peter Fisher’s grandmother “insisted that we always have those child-proof things in the plugs because she thought the electricity was dripping out and it would collect on the floor and you’d step in it.”
Such hyperbolic fear wasn’t unfounded. In 1889, one horrific electricity accident scarred the public’s image of the new technology:
A telegraph lineman, John Feeks, was clearing dead wires from a pole when he touched one that had evidently crossed with a powerful arc-light wire. Though he died instantly, for over half an hour his body remained high above the street, trapped in the net of telegraph, telephone, and fire alarm wires. As comrades struggled to free his corpse, thousands of New Yorkers gazed up, watching flames shoot from the lineman’s mouth and nostrils and roast his hands and feet.
The accident occurred close to city hall, so government officials were part of the crowds that witnessed the trauma firsthand. One declared “his intention to have all electric wires in his district taken down at once,” and public support for regulating electricity transmission grew significantly.
And so, as we have seen as an all-too-common challenge, electricity was seen as bad and scary in its earliest days.
As we now know, what electricity needed in the 1890s was a compelling story about its future usefulness and current safety.
If an innovator who could tell such a story would emerge, perhaps other prospecting businesspeople and engineers would dedicate their time and money to co-inventing products that would make electricity safer and more impactful to the Everyday Joe.
Luckily, the world had a prospective, world-saving innovator in Thomas Edison.
By the time of Feeks’ accident, Edison had already filed his lightbulb patent, founded Edison General Electric, and become known to the public as a prolific inventor. And yet — in a boneheaded move that may have delayed the adoption of electricity by years — Edison’s response to the accident was to publish a letter titled “The Dangers of Electric Lighting.”
It was a petty move. Rather than take the chance to clarify that such accidents were rare, that electricity was the future, and that he would work to make sure such an accident never happened again, Thomas Edison tried to bolster his preferred technology (“direct current”) by blaming the catastrophe on the flaws of his rival’s technology (“alternating current”):
[Low-tension direct current] is harmless, and can be passed through the human body without producing uncomfortable sensations. …the passage of [alternating current] through any living body means instantaneous death. These are simple facts which cannot be disproved.
It’s worth noting that Edison is factually incorrect, there, and he knew it; there is no particular danger or safety inherent to either form of electricity.
In the years that followed, Edison would double down on his ridiculous smear campaign of the other brand of electricity, working through an intermediary to stage public demonstrations during which his assistants would use alternating current (AC) to electrocute dogs, horses, and even elephants to death. Even worse, when Edison found that New York State was looking for more humane ways to administer the death penalty, he invented the electric chair — powered by AC, of course.
Edison’s smear campaign hurt the public’s perception of electricity’s safety. Of course, folks in the 1890s didn’t know — or care — whether the current was alternating or direct. They heard a famous inventor telling them that electricity was dangerous, so they stayed away.
Henry Ford once called Edison “the world’s greatest inventor and the world’s worst businessman.”
Luckily for Edison General Electric, one of Edison’s young deputies was the inspirational, value-creative innovator that the big boss was not. According to Thomas Edison biographer Randall Stross, Samuel Insull was the real driving factor behind the professionalization and growth of GE — he took over the company and relocated its corporate headquarters to Schenectady, New York (far from Edison’s lab in New Jersey), and quickly grew it from 200 to 8,000 employees and from pennies to $100,000 a year in revenue. “We never made a dollar,” Insull said, “until we got the factory 180 miles away from Mr. Edison.”
Insull’s trash-talking skills were second only to his aptitude for co-invention. He constantly found highly valuable use cases for electricity and new operational and infrastructural investments that would drive electricity adoption. In the words of the Institute for Energy Research (the “IER”),
Samuel Insull did for electricity what Henry Ford did for the automobile — he turned a luxury product into an affordable part of everyday life for millions of Americans.
One such innovation was a two-tiered pricing scheme that radically changed the economics of power generation. The IER continues:
Given that electricity has to be produced and consumed simultaneously, providing power to a customer who demanded electricity in large surges could be unprofitable — new generators built to meet the intermittent surges in demand would only run a fraction of the time, but would have to remain constantly at the ready…
To be able to provide power for “peaky” customers, Insull implemented a demand charge (a fixed fee) in addition to the typical usage charge. That way, the customer paid for the privilege to use a lot of electricity in a little time. In this way, Insull could profitably expand his business to include all types of customers
Another was his active development of new, business-focused use cases for electricity. During the day, when consumers were at work, the electrical grids were largely underutilized. Insull’s solution was to learn about technologies most often used only during working hours — like streetcars and elevators — and find ways to sell electricity to their owners. This allowed Insull to increase production efficiency and justify the purchase of ever more powerful generators, improving economies of scale. These inventions were no less impactful than Otis’s elevator safety catch or Ford’s assembly line.
Insull’s financial magic transformed the economics of the industry and enabled waves of co-invention that drove electricity forward.
I’m bummed that the world doesn’t know his name. He deserves much more credit than Edison does, at least in my book!
In the end, Edison’s rival technology — alternating current — had the last laugh. Today’s electrical grid is primarily AC, and the killing blow for Edison’s favored DC was all-too-poetic: they lost the bid to power the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
But today’s technology is different, right?
Isn’t it scarier, more dangerous, and more undoubtedly evil? Isn’t everything different this time?
Honestly, I think the answer is no. I have another mega-post like this brewing that will focus on the early days of the internet, but I’ll give you the CliffsNotes for now: today’s technology is scary because we don’t yet understand it. But that was also true in the 1890s!
The automobile was ineffable, for never before had the power of an explosion been harnessed for anything but war. The elevator was ineffable, for consumers had never before experienced vertical travel. And electricity was especially confusing: consumers just straight up thought it was magic. Consumers couldn’t understand these three inventions, and all three had early troubles building consumer trust.
So, yes. We have no idea what internal magic OpenAI’s GPT-3 uses, as complex AI is already too complicated for our puny, mortal brains. That’s scary. But do you really understand how a phone call works? Or how the encryption that protects your credit card data on Amazon works? Or what happens on your computer when you pull up “svoutsider.com”?
The thought that we are historically special is conceited and short-sighted. Imagine a graph of human technological progress over time, and remember that Homo Sapiens has been around for 300,000 years. Technological progress accelerated during the Industrial Revolution around ~1800. If Homo Sapiens is around for another 300,000 years, do you really think that future historians will think 2020 Humanity was all that different from 1890s Humanity?
We’re the same people, with the same weird, little brains, and the same misconceptions about the terrifying world of the unknown.
I find it likely that as technologies like advanced AI, voice/neural interfaces, and advanced robotics become more mainstream and more useful, we’ll learn to trust them just as we have learned to trust the thousands of other technologies that we rely on to go about our daily lives.
Concurrently, today’s new, scary technologies will also be made safer. Perhaps OpenAI will succeed in its mission to make a safe AGI; perhaps other innovators will find new enabling inventions that protect us against Boston Dynamics’ killer robots. Such technological advancement is inevitable.
Ultimately, the safest prediction of all is that our grandchildren will think we were hilarious for ever being afraid of today’s newfangled technology.
It’ll be second nature to them; what is natural is what is safe; and the fact that what they trust ever scared us will be hilarious. I can’t wait for that day to come.
If you liked this post, you’ll love my newsletter. No promises on when the next mega-post is coming, but it’ll be soon — same idea as this one, but focused on the early days of the internet.
