Dire (And Seemingly Silly) Predictions Of The Past: Did Anyone Take Them Seriously?

Factual Questions
1

This Cracked article tells of hilarious predictions made about mundane things that we take for granted; for example, that train travel would disintegrate your face.

My concern is that these types of articles don’t always tell the whole story. Historians writing about 2015, for example, might say “Politicians warned that the HPV vaccine would make your daughter retarded,” when in fact only a small handful of ridiculous politicians (viz, Michelle Bachmann and her cronies) ever said such a thing, and only a small handful of ridiculous people believed it.

So in those days, were ridiculous claims like face-melting trains taken seriously?

2

If you had never seen a railway engine and never travelled faster than a horse can gallop. And if your education had stopped at about year eight. Do you think that if someone you thought of as educated and knowledgeable said that your face would melt at high speeds, you might just believe them?

Who was it that said this anyway - I know it was thought that it would suck the breath from your body, but I never heard the face melting thing.

I am saying that many people would have taken these silly predictions seriously. We live in a much more skeptical world now, but many people still believe in heaven and hell as just one trivial example.

3

They were all taken seriously by people who wanted to believe them, exactly as a million idiotic things are believed by some people today. In fact, today we have a hundred times as many idiotic beliefs because there are a hundred times as many things to be idiotic about. There have been many threads here about strange beliefs people have.

Nor do people stop have idiotic beliefs just because one proved wrong. They just transfer them. That Cracked article mentions the horrible sexual effects that polyphonic music would have. Later the waltz was condemned the same way, because it allowed people to embrace while dancing. The Charleston showed women wriggling. Horrors. So did the Twist. More horrors. Some people will condemn every new thing that comes along because it is new.

This isn’t a question about beliefs. It’s a question about people. And the answer is no, they haven’t changed and they never will change in this fundamental way.

4

I’ve never seen a particularly authoritative source for the whole “people predicted people would die on trains” thing. If you try to follow the chain-of-cites it’s just one casual mention after another never leading to a primary or authoritative secondary source. FWIW WikiQuotes thinks the most common one (the “passengers will die of asphixia” one) is apocryphal: Dionysius Lardner - Wikiquote

5

There was panic in the year 999-1000 about the end of the world coming. The Year 1000 A.D. and the Millennial Panic - The NESS

6

Or was there?
From your link;

7

And then there was Y2K.

8

Not quite on topic, but here is a list of predictions of the end of the world (amongst other dire events)

9

As far as the dangers of train travel are concerned, the effects of travelling at 25mph (a common top speed at that time) were comparable to the effects of standing still in a 25mph wind; something that people had a lot of experience with. So long as the carriages were capable of withstanding a 25mph wind (or, more realistically, the effects of a natural wind added to the speed of the motion) then the people inside would be fine.

In due course railway engineers became somewhat overconfident concerning the effects of wind pressure - this probably contributed to the collapse of the Tay Bridge in a storm in 1879.

10

Here in Texas. it was a conservative Republican governor, Rick Perry, who made HPV vaccination mandatory for girls.

It was also conservative Republicans who led the opposition.

MOST of the opposition had little to do with the medical pluses and minuses of the vaccine, and a LOT to do with belief that this was about cronyism, and Perry handing a big payday to pharmaceutical companies.

11

Old Dorothy Martin had 'em going for a while:

From Wiki:

12

Well, back in the Seventies. there were a LOT of predictions that the world would be out of fossil fuels by 2000, if not sooner.

I’ll let you decide if that was a “silly” prediction (it was definitely a wrong prediction), but people took the idea VERY seriously at the time.

13

ETA: ref Dorothy Martin not 1970s oil predictions.
Proving once again, despite our & Cecil’s best efforts, that …

Stupid is eternal.

14

Comet Halley, 1910. Lots of educated people in the Western world went crazy and thought the Earth would come to an end. (I believe French astronomer and popular scientist Flammarion had a lot of responsibility for this).

Of course, as usual, nothing much happened.

15

There was always The Great Disappointment when the Millerites believed the second Advent would occur and many members gave up all their possessions in expectation.

Following a serious of embarrassed about faces the movement disintegrated to later give birth to the Seventh Day Adventists and, by their wacky dietary beliefs, breakfast cereal!

16

Peak Oil in the past decade.

17

I can’t tell you how much your post reads like something from a Douglas Adams book.