Twain on Twains (Well, Really, Twain on the Risk of Train Accidents. Couldn’t Resist.)

I love it. Mark Twain’s knew what he was talking about.

On the other hand, drat! I guess we can’t expect a complete turn around to sanity any time soon. People in general have trouble believing statistics.

This had me laughing out loud. Great stuff! Thanks again for a dose of sanity.

Actually, the years around 1871 were pretty risky, compared with today.

The middle class of this country was small, the lower class and burgeoning numbers of immigrants high, and an very, very wealthy elite (hmm, sound familiar?) topped it all off.

Work was dangerous for the average person–few if any laws or regs existed to protect those in ag, industry, manufacting, and that’s where most worked (not ‘white collar’ or service).

Labor and labor unions were going nuts; the early l870’s were years filled with bitter and violent labor demonstrations and strikes that often became deadly.

Huge numbers of immigrants were pouring into the country, desperate for work, and willing to do any work. The early years of the 1870’s were hot and dry in large areas of the country and major cities (Chicago) and other areas (northern Wisconsin and beyond) struggled with devastating fires.

Most people did not attend school beyond the 8th grade, if that far. And, obvious but hard to believe, in 1871, the Civil War which had plundered almost the entire generation of younger men who fought it (and leveled, literally, a large swath of the South) had ended a mere SIX years earlier. The South was still reeling from the brutal beating it’d taken, its economy was in taters, and its state governments in complete disarray.

Hmm, what else was going on?

Oh yes, the railroads were a big, growing, monied, and powerful industry, and yes rail travel could be dangerous. In a few years there would be a growing public push to rebuild the train station in NYC (resulting in the construction of Grand Central as we know it today) because the existing one couldn’t handle the volume of trains going in and out of the city, and too many crashes were taking place.

1871?

A fascinating year to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live then!

I couldn’t let this one go by without commenting. I’ve often thought that railway enthusiasts would line up around the block if someone developed a time machine that would take them back to the days when trains were “king” and trolley cars were the main urban transportation. But I don’t think they’d want to go back to the 19th Century when it was a rare brakeman who had all his fingers, quality control for steel rails wasn’t that great and collisions and derailments were all too frequent. BUT–they didn’t have CNN and Eyewitness News circling the wreck scenes with TV cameras on the ground and in helicopters. I could go back further–to the days of riverboats. The “engineers” on many of the old-time steamboats were farm boys who had a rather rudimentary knowledge of safe boiler operation. The only thing that prevented boiler explosions from becoming a national scandal was that these catastrophic failures usually happened somewhere out in the boonies (which most of the US was in those days), far from even a telegraph station.
To bring things back to the modern age, there’s a story about an airline pilot who, after the plane had landed, would say to the passengers, “We’d like to thank you for riding XYZ Airlines and remind you that the most hazardous part of your flight is still ahead–the drive home on the streets and highway of (arrival city). Drive carefully and wear your seat belts–we want you to fly with is again!”

Lenore, that is a fantastic quotation from Twain. In my business (earthquake hazards) it is a great challenge to help the public to understand the nature of catastrophic risk, especially the risk of very rare but very high-impact hazards like earthquakes. With little understanding or experience to serve as guidelines, people tend either to exaggerate the hazard (frightened out of their wits over something for which reasonable actions can keep you safe) or ignore it (not bothering to do even the simplest of things to keep their families safe). Twain hits the nail on the head. I am going to pass the link along to my colleagues. Too bad he’s dead, else he could be a keynote speak at our next natural hazards conference!

Good points, Bob Davis and Wellcraftedtoo. I have to smirk when people get all romantically piney and drippy about the “good old days” of the 19th century. Sure, there were some wonderful things back in Twain’s day. But there was a lot to worry about too, including a really rudimentary understanding of disease, such that practices such as blood-letting were just then fading out of practice. Here’s a commentary from the British Medical Journal from March of that year:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2260507/?page=1

Bob Davis — and women wore veils and everyone wore “traveling clothes” because you’d get so filthy and smelly from the travel, from the smoke and ash. It probably didn’t bother them quite as much as it would bother us, as we are not used to putting up with such things for the sake of travel. But still, it was no picnic, literally.

I’ve been a fan of Schneier’s work for a very long time. He wrote a great treatise on cryptology (http://www.schneier.com/book-applied.html) that’s actually understandable to laypeople, and I get a kick out of his rants on the “security theatre” apparatus at airports.