by Tom Phillips
Edwin Katskee
A doctor who in 1936 wanted to know why cocaine—then used as an anesthetic—had negative side effects. Injected himself with a ton of it, spent the night scrawling notes on the walls of his office in increasingly illegible handwriting, then died.
Carl Wilhelm Scheele
A genius Swedish chemist who discovered many elements—including oxygen, barium and chlorine—but had a habit of tasting each of his new discoveries. Died in 1786 of exposure to substances including lead, hydrofluoric acid and arsenic.
Clement Vallandigham
A lawyer who pioneered an early kind of forensic science. Defending an accused murderer, he proved that the supposed victim could have accidentally shot himself...by accidentally shooting himself. He died, but his client was found not guilty.
10
A Brief History of Not Seeing Things Coming
The modern world is, let’s be honest, a confusing place.
We live at a time when technological and societal changes happen with dizzying speed. Dramatic shifts in the way we live can happen inside the space of a generation, or a decade, sometimes in less than a year. Everything seems to be constantly new: and yet, at the same time, it’s hard to escape the feeling that we’re just replaying the mistakes of our past at an ever-increasing rate. Somehow we consistently fail to see them coming.
As we said all the way back in the first chapter, our ability to accurately predict the future and plan for it has never been great, but the accelerating pace of change over the past few centuries hasn’t exactly helped. When we’re surrounded by shiny and unexpected new things all the time, those heuristics we use to make judgments get thrown out of whack. When we’re bombarded by ever more information, it’s not surprising if it gets too much to process and we fall back on picking out the bits that confirm our biases. How can any of us tell if we’re falling victim to the Dunning–Kruger effect if we’re constantly having to learn how to do new things?
And so we live in an age of endless firsts, most of which we either didn’t see coming, or we ignored the people who did. And unfortunately, not all of those firsts are good. Just ask Mary Ward.
Mary Ward was a pioneer in many ways. She was born into an aristocratic family in the Irish county of Offaly in 1827, but not just any family: from a young age she was surrounded by scientists, both relatives and the visitors they received. She was lucky enough that not only did they nurture her interest in science, they also were able to fund it. As a child, seeing her interest in the natural world, her parents bought her a microscope—the best in the country at the time. It was an inspired present, because it turned out that Mary had a rare skill for drawing the specimens she observed with the microscope. (As a teenager, she also sketched the construction of the Leviathan of Parsonstown—a huge 72-inch reflecting telescope built by her cousin, former Royal Society president William Parsons—which would hold the record for the largest telescope in the world until 1917.)
As she grew into adulthood, Mary corresponded with many scientists, and her talent for illustration saw her commissioned to produce illustrations for several of their books. Then in 1857, disappointed with the quality of microscopy books on offer, she decided to print a book of her own drawings. Afraid (not without reason) that no publisher would touch it because she was a woman, she self-published 250 copies. They sold out, and the book came to the attention of a publisher, who believed that the beauty of her illustrations and the quality of her writing meant that, in this one case, perhaps the issue of her sex could be overlooked. Published as A World of Wonders as Revealed by the Microscope, it became a bit of a publishing sensation—reprinted eight times over the coming decade, making it one of the first books in the category that today we might call “popular science.”
Title page from A World of Wonders as Revealed by the Microscope by Mary Ward, 1859
That wasn’t the end of her popular science career—she wrote two further books, including a telescope companion to the microscope book, which were displayed at the 1862 Crystal Palace exhibition; she would illustrate numerous other scientific works for eminent scientists; she published articles in several journals, including a well-received study of natterjack toads; and she became one of only three women permitted to be on the Royal Astronomical Society’s mailing list—one of the other two was Queen Victoria. She never got a degree, though, because women weren’t allowed to.
Except...all of this is preamble, because while Mary Ward was a talented woman who led a remarkable life, that’s not why we remember her today. Maybe it should be. But it isn’t, because of what happened in Parsonstown on August 31, 1869. On that day, at the age of 42, she and her husband, Captain Henry Ward, were riding in a steam-powered automobile. This vehicle was a homemade one—she was always surrounded by scientists, so of course it was—built by the sons of her cousin William Parsons.
Riding in a vehicle like this was a new experience at the time, an early sign of the age to come. The steam-powered automobile had been invented a century earlier in France, but this was still years before the advent of anything we’d recognize as a car today. What vehicles there were—hulking, ungainly things that were widely suspected of damaging roads—had caused enough of a sensation that Britain had passed a law regulating their use a few years earlier in 1865, but they were still rare, experimental novelties. Of the billions and billions of humans who’ve ever lived on this planet, Mary Ward was among the first fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent to ride in a car.
Records tell that as the vehicle trundled down the Mall in Parsonstown at a speed of three and a half miles an hour, it turned sharply into the corner of Cumberland Street, by the church. Maybe it was simple bad luck. Maybe the road was uneven, not being designed for anything more than a horse and cart. Maybe they weren’t thinking about the concept of “turning too sharply,” because cars and horses handle very differently and the risks aren’t the same. Maybe Mary was simply thrilled by the experience, excited about the possibilities of the future, and she leaned out a bit too far to see the road pass beneath.
Whatever the reason, as the vehicle took the corner, one side of it tipped up slightly, and Mary was thrown from the car and under the wheels. Her neck was snapped, and she died almost instantly.
Mary Ward was the first person in the history of the world to die in a car accident.
She was a pioneer in many ways, but you don’t always get to choose what you’re a pioneer of. Today, around the world an estimated 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year. The future keeps on inconveniently arriving faster than we were expecting, and we keep struggling to predict it.
For example, in 1825, the Quarterly Review predicted that trains had no future. “What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?” it asked.
A few years later, in 1830, William Huskisson, a British member of parliament and former minister of state, was attending the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. He was riding from Liverpool to Manchester in a train with the Duke of Wellington and numerous other dignitaries. Stopping off halfway for the engine to take on water, the passengers were instructed not to leave the carriages, but they did, anyway. Huskisson decided he should go and shake the Duke of Wellington’s hand, as they’d had a falling-out, which is why he was standing on the opposite line when George Stephenson’s famous Rocket was speeding past the other way. The passengers were warned to get out of the path of the oncoming train, but Huskisson, unfamiliar with the novel situation, panicked and couldn’t decide where to move. In the end, rather than simply standing with the other passengers on the far side of the line, he instead tried clambering up onto the carriage of Wellington’s train, only for the door he was desperately holding onto to swing open, putting him right in the path of the Rocket. And so William Huskisson was one of the first people in history to be killed by a train.
In 1871, Alfred Nobel said of his invention of dynamite: “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.”
In 1873, stock markets around the world crashed as a bubble of speculation finally burst. The global economic depression lasted for years.
In 1876, William Orton, the president of Western Union, advised a friend against investing in Alexander Graham Bell’s new invention—the telephone—by telling him: “There is nothing in this patent whatever, nor is there anything in the scheme itself, except as a toy.”
A few years after Nobel, in 1877, Richard Gatling, the inventor of the Gatling gun, wrote to a friend that he had hoped its invention would usher in a new, humanitarian era of warfare. He wrote how he was moved to invent it after he “witnessed almost daily the departure of troops to the front and the return of the wounded, sick, and dead... It occurred to me if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could, by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.”
In 1888, a Methodist missionary group in Chicago needed money and hit upon the idea of what they described as a “peripatetic contribution box”—they sent out 1,500 copies of a letter begging the recipients to send them a dime, and to forward a copy of the letter to three friends with the same request. They made over $6,000, though many people got very angry after receiving the letter multiple times. The chain letter had been born.
In 1897, the eminent British scientist Lord Kelvin predicted that “radio has no future.” Also in 1897, the New York Times praised Hiram Maxim’s invention of the fully automatic machine gun as being one so fearsome that it would stop wars from occurring, calling Maxim guns “peace-producing and peace-retaining terrors” that “because of their devastating effects, have made nations and rulers give greater thought to the outcome of war before entering upon projects of conquest.”
In 1902, Kelvin predicted in an interview that transatlantic flight was an impossibility, and that “no balloon and no airplane will ever be practically successful.” The Wright brothers flew their first flight 18 months later. As Orville Wright recalled in a letter from 1917: “When my brother and I built and flew the first man-carrying flying machine, we thought we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible. That we were not alone in this thought is evidenced by the fact that the French Peace Society presented us with medals on account of our invention.”
In 1908, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge was a passenger in a demonstration flight piloted by Orville Wright. On the fifth circuit flying around Fort Myer in Virginia, the propeller broke and the plane crashed, killing Selfridge (Wright survived). He became the first person in history to be killed in a plane crash.
In 1912, Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, predicted that “the coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.” In 1914, the world went to war.
On October 16, 1929, the eminent Yale economist Irving Fisher predicted that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Eight days later, stock markets around the world crashed, as a bubble of speculation fueled by easily available debt finally burst. The global economic depression lasted for years; in the wake of the financial crisis, voters in many democracies increasingly turned to populist authoritarian politicians.
In 1932, Albert Einstein predicted that “there is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable.”
In 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned home with a deal he had just signed with Adolf Hitler and predicted, “I believe it is peace for our time,” before adding, “Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” In 1939, the world went to war.
In 1945, Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the efforts to produce the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, wrote, “If this weapon does not persuade men of the need to put an end to war, nothing that comes out of a laboratory ever will.” Contrary to his hopes—and the hopes of Nobel, Gatling, Maxim and Wright—we still have wars, although at least we haven’t actually had a nuclear war yet (statement correct at time of writing), so Oppenheimer maybe wins this one on points.
In 1966, the eminent designer Richard Buckminster Fuller predicted that by the year 2000, “amid general plenty, politics will simply fade away.”
Neville Chamberlain waves the Munich Agreement bearing his and Hitler’s signatures in September 1938
A nuclear test explosion in Nevada, 1951
In 1971, the Russian cosmonauts Georgiy Dobrovolski, Viktor Patsayev and Vladislav Volkov became the first people to die in space, after their Soyuz module decompressed on their return from a space station.
In 1977, Ken Olsen, the president of the Digital Equipment Corporation, predicted that the computer business would always be niche, saying, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” In 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at the Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an unsolicited email plugging his company’s products to around 400 recipients over Arpanet, one of the earliest manifestations of the internet. He had just sent the world’s first spam email. (And according to him, it worked: DEC sold millions of dollars’ worth of machines from their email campaign.)
In 1979, Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford plant in Michigan, became the first person in history to be killed by a robot.
In December of 2007, financial commentator Larry Kudlow wrote in the National Review: “There’s no recession coming. The pessimists were wrong. It’s not going to happen... The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up its sixth consecutive year with more to come. Yes, it’s still the greatest story never told.” In December of 2007, the US economy entered recession. (At the time of writing, Larry Kudlow is currently serving as the director of the National Economic Council of the United States.) In 2008, stock markets around the world crashed as a bubble of speculation fueled by easily available debt finally burst. The global economic recession lasted for years; in the wake of the financial crisis, voters in many democracies increasingly turned to populist authoritarian politicians.
In August 2016, a 12-year-old boy died, and at least 20 other people from a nomadic group of reindeer herders were hospitalized, after an anthrax outbreak in Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula. Anthrax hadn’t been seen in the region in 75 years; the outbreak happened during a summer heat wave in which temperatures were 25°C above normal. The heat wave melted the thick permafrost that coats Siberia, uncovering and defrosting layers of ice that had formed decades earlier—and which held the frozen carcasses of reindeer that had died in the last anthrax outbreak in 1941.
Ice can keep pathogens preserved—alive, but in stasis—for decades, centuries, perhaps longer. The disease had been lying dormant in the subzero temperatures since the days when the Russian winter was breaking Hitler’s army, just waiting for the time when its frozen cage would melt. That finally happened in 2016 (at the time, the hottest year globally since records began) as the warming world released the bacteria once more, infecting more than 2,000 reindeer before it spilled over into humans.
It’s tempting to say that nobody could have foreseen a disaster so baroque, but in fact five years earlier two scientists had predicted that exactly this would happen as climate change grew worse: that the permafrost would gradually retreat, and would release long-absent historical diseases back into the world as it went. This will only continue as the temperature rises, with the curious effect of rewinding history—back past Thomas Midgley hard at work in his laboratory, back past Eugene Schieffelin standing in a park opening cages, back past William Paterson dreaming of an empire—as the cumulative effects of the Industrial
Revolution unspool around us. We don’t know how many people climate change will kill over the coming century, we don’t know in what ways it will change our society, but we do know that at least one of its victims died because an unintended consequence of our decisions as a species was to summon zombie anthrax back from the grave. He probably won’t be the last.
On May 7, 2016—a little under a century and a half after Mary Ward went for a drive one fateful summer’s morning—a man named Joshua Brown was driving down a road near Williston, Florida, in his Tesla Model S, which was in autopilot mode. A later investigation showed that in the 37 minutes of his journey, he had his hands on the wheel for just 25 seconds; he was relying on the car’s software to control the vehicle for the rest of the time. When a truck pulled out into the road, neither Brown nor the software spotted it, and the car crashed into the truck.
Joshua Brown became the first person in the history of the world to die in a self-driving car accident.
Welcome to the future.
EPILOGUE
Fucking Up the Future
In April 2018, a deal was announced to reopen a previously closed coal-fired power plant in Australia. This was unusual for obvious reasons—as the world tries to slowly move away from climate-change-causing fossil fuels, reopening a coal-burning plant seems a strange move—but it was even more unusual because of the main impetus for it being reopened. It was to provide cheap power to a company mining cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is the most widely known of the cryptocurrencies, but there’s an ever-expanding ecosystem of the things as companies launch new ones at a seemingly exponential rate, hoping to cash in on the mad scramble for digital money. These currencies aren’t “mined” in the way that, say, gold is. They’re just bits of computer code, most of them based on something called blockchain technology, where each virtual coin is not just an item of symbolic value but also a ledger of its own transaction history. The computational power needed to create them in the first place, and to process their increasingly complicated transaction logs, is significant—and, as such, sucks up electricity at a crazy rate, both to run the ever-larger data centers devoted to crypto-mining and to cool them down as they overheat.