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  • 2008-05-29 (xsd:date)
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  • Is the 1875 Horseless Carriage Committee Report Real? (en)
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  • Many of us take especial delight in items that document how people of earlier times severely misjudged their futures, either holding expectations of a vastly improved world that proved to be ridiculously grandiose, or expressing woefully misplaced fears and concerns about dangers that never came to pass. The same principle can be applied in reverse, however -- one common form of satire is to lampoon a particular position on a modern political or social issue by projecting it into the past to highlight its ridiculousness. Into which category does the following purported 1875 report by the Horseless Carriage Committee warning about the dangers of gasoline and gasoline-powered vehicles fall: an example of 19th century citizens expressing exaggerated fears about a then-new technology, or a modern piece of satire intended to make a point about a 20th century issue? The first clue is that the dating of the report appears to be anachronistic. The year 1875 was the dawn of experiments in building gasoline-fueled, internal combustion engines and using them to power wheeled vehicles, and the term horseless carriage to refer to such vehicles didn't come into use until the 1890s, when the public was much more familiar with the concept of the automobile. Researchers at the Library of Congress expressed similar thinking in responding to a query about this item: Another clue is that all the concerns stated in the putative report about gasoline and gasoline-powered vehicles — potential for dangerous explosions, poisoning of the atmosphere, military and economic implications, development costs exceeding the financial resources of the private business sector, potential for displacement of existing industries — sound very much like the apprehensions that were expressed about atomic power in the years after the end of World War II. In fact, both lines of thinking are correct: The Horseless Carriage Committee report dates not from 1875 but from the late 1950s, and it is a bit of fiction created for (and excerpted from) a much longer editorial intended to point out the dangers of the U.S. government's capitalizing on all those fears to justify controlling the development and application of atomic power: As is the usual course of things, the original has long since been stripped of its attribution and context, with just enough of the original left behind to allow us to poke fun at how silly folks supposedly were back in 1875. (en)
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