There’s a pattern buried inside almost every great leap forward in human history. Before it became normal, it was terrifying. Before people relied on it, they warned against it. Whether the fear came from religious leaders, governments, newspaper editors, or simply neighbors, the reaction was remarkably consistent: this new thing is dangerous, unnatural, and possibly the end of something precious.
Widespread concerns about new technologies have been repeatedly found throughout history, from novels to radios to smartphones. What changes is the object of anxiety, never the anxiety itself. Here are eleven innovations that once inspired genuine dread, before quietly becoming indispensable.
1. The Printing Press
When Gutenberg’s press arrived, the introduction of mass-produced books challenged the control of manuscripts by religious and secular authorities. Critics feared it would put monks and scribes out of work, while also threatening the monopoly and influence of the literate elite. Some superstitious people equated printing with Satan because the uniform quality of the copies seemed magical, and printers’ apprentices became known as “the printer’s devil.”
In 1476, a group of scribes in Paris attacked and destroyed a printing press, fearing the new technology endangered their livelihood and their role as custodians of knowledge and culture. It took about fifty years for the printing press to become widely accepted. By the end of the 15th century, printers in Western Europe had produced more than twenty million copies, and by the following century, that number had reached between 150 and 200 million.
2. The Steam-Powered Railway
When the Stockton-Darlington Railway opened in 1825, people feared the worst: the human body, surely, wasn’t made to travel at incredible speeds of 30 miles per hour. People genuinely believed that going that quickly would kill you in gruesome ways. Among medical circles, speed remained the most pressing concern, since some doctors and commentators warned that no human body could safely endure motion faster than twenty miles per hour, a belief that was especially widespread during the 1820s.
As more case reports appeared, terms such as “railway madness” entered everyday language. Physicians warned of physical and mental breakdowns because some patients experienced nausea, confusion, and memory lapses after travel. Some pamphlets condemned the railway as destructive to the environment, and among many country dwellers, fears spread that iron tracks brought fire and noise without warning, killing livestock and scaring children.
3. Electricity
When electricity started arriving on the scene in the 19th century, many people were too afraid to use it. U.S. President Benjamin Harrison was apparently one of them, reportedly having White House staff turn the lights on and off because he was scared of getting electrocuted. Electric streetlights were branded a “fearful source of death, and a constant menace to the lives of our fellow citizens,” as one newspaper proclaimed in October 1889.
Society usually accompanies the introduction of new technologies with both excitement and suspicion, being simultaneously driven by enthusiasm for the possibility of improvement, as well as profoundly discomforted, with a sense of having little or no control over the direction of radical changes. The arrival of electricity in the late 1800s initially brought concerns that it would eliminate jobs in traditional industries like gas lamps and horse-drawn carriages. However, the electrification of factories, homes, and cities led to the rise of electrical engineering and the birth of entirely new industries.
4. The Telephone
When telephones were introduced in the late 1800s, the New York Times was quick to attack. The paper’s critique included the suggestion that telephones would only be used to invade people’s privacy. Some elderly people feared that touching the telephone would give them electric shocks, while in Sweden, preachers said the phone was the instrument of the Devil, and phone lines were stolen or sabotaged.
After Bell introduced his telephone to the world, his father-in-law offered to sell the patent to Western Union, which turned him down. This decision is now considered one of the worst in business history, since the phone would go on to make Western Union’s telegraph business obsolete. Today, there are well over eight billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, a number that surpasses the global population.
5. The Telegraph
When the telegraph was first introduced, critics insisted the new technology would ruin the poetry of the English language. There exists an intricate interplay between technological advancements and how the public receives new technologies, and this is particularly evident when focusing on the mass adoption of the electric telegraph. Technophobia in literature reveals deeply ingrained fears of innovation that permeated rural societies, exacerbated by very limited access to scientific knowledge.
The introduction of the telegraph began to annihilate distances between people and represented an unprecedented advancement in communication. It also revolutionized landscapes and city environments through the installation of poles connected by dense networks of wires. Those wires themselves became a flashpoint: fear of low-voltage telegraph wires was a widespread phenomenon that cut across various social and geographical boundaries.
6. The Radio
Guglielmo Marconi believed he had perfected wireless technology back in 1895, but more than two decades would pass before his technology was used to broadcast to the masses. This made Marconi second-guess his own contribution, and he asked himself whether he had “done the world good” or just “added a menace.” In 1922, just 6,000 radios were owned by the American public. That number grew to 1.5 million by 1923, to 17 million by 1932, and by 1936, about nine in ten New York households owned one.
Researchers from that era voiced severe concerns about children’s health and future outcomes, claiming that children who consumed more radio crime dramas were more nervous and fearful and suffered from worse general health and more disturbed eating and sleep. In 1936, the government of St. Louis, Missouri, tried to ban car radios because a determined movement had become convinced that the radio distracted drivers and caused car accidents. The car radio was widely feared by newspapers, which were competitors and had every incentive to sensationalize the product’s dangers.
7. The Steam-Powered Printing Press
When steam power was first applied to printing at The Times, there were very strong feelings in the minds of the working classes against the introduction of machinery. The memory of Luddite machine-breaking in the textile industry during 1811 and 1812 was very fresh, and it was widely felt that machinery mainly benefitted the capitalist and deprived the working man of his right to labor. For that reason, the owner of The Times, John Walter II, secretly set up Friedrich Koenig’s printing machine in a separate building adjoining the office, for fear that his pressmen might smash the machinery like the Luddites.
The new press rolled out 1,100 pages an hour, more than four times faster than the recently introduced Stanhope press. This was an extraordinary success that placed The Times way ahead of its competitors in printing and labour costs. The invention of the industrial cylinder press transformed the power of print, accelerating the pace of change by allowing radicalism and innovation to spread beyond the confines of one region across Britain and overseas.
8. The Television
Television received backlash from both sides. Those who feared what technology might do to human interaction were opposed to it, and those who were optimistic about technology but had already invested in radio were afraid the new medium would tarnish their investments. At the start of the 1950s few homes had TVs, but by the end of the decade more than roughly four in five homes did. Some people, suspicious that TV commercials had a kind of hypnotic power, readily demanded government intervention.
In the late 1960s, General Electric shipped faulty television sets that emitted dangerous X-rays, which gave the earlier health-based fears an uncomfortable grain of truth. Still, by the 1970s television had become the dominant form of mass entertainment across the developed world, reshaping politics, culture, and daily life in ways its critics had only dimly imagined.
9. The VCR
Even something as simple as a VHS tape was feared at one point in time, though this fear had less to do with health and far more to do with greed. It was generally believed that the ability to record films would bring the entire movie industry to its knees. The Motion Picture Association of America’s Jack Valenti famously told the U.S. Government in 1982 that the VCR posed an existential threat comparable to violent crime, in an appeal to have video recorders banned entirely.
Video subsequently saved the U.S. film industry, creating a massive global market for video cassette sales and rentals, a market that would continue as DVD replaced VHS and the same films were sold all over again. The technology that was supposed to destroy Hollywood became one of its most lucrative revenue streams for well over a decade.
10. Nuclear Power
Political events such as the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 proved the destructive power of nuclear weapons, while the Cuban Missile Crisis contributed to broadcasting to the wider public the increasing possibility of nuclear devastation. This violent history made society like a person afraid of dogs because one bit him as a child. Show that person a golden retriever, and he sees a Rottweiler. Show society a nuclear power plant, and it sees a mushroom cloud. Yet nuclear power plants and atomic bombs are separate technologies that harness the same property of nature very differently.
One of the main reasons people are fearful of nuclear power is the possibility of accidents, a fear generally fueled by three high-profile events: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiichi. A Lancet study concluded that nuclear power, compared to other sources of energy like coal, has one of the lowest levels of greenhouse-gas emissions and smallest levels of direct health effects, yet nuclear energy remains controversial.
11. The Internet
The introduction of the internet sparked worries about privacy, social connections, and the possibility of spreading disinformation, revealing a pervasive apprehension about how innovation would affect individual lives and societal structures. By the end of the 20th century, personal computers had entered homes and the internet was a global phenomenon, yet almost identical worries were broadcast through alarming headlines claiming email hurt intelligence, and that Facebook and social media could raise cancer risk or prevent the formation of meaningful relationships.
The emergence of the internet sparked concerns about job obsolescence due to automation and digital technologies. However, this wave of fear gave way to a transformational shift, leading to the creation of new opportunities in fields like information technology, software development, and cybersecurity. The internet revolutionized communication, expanded global markets, and connected people like never before, surpassing initial concerns.
Looked at together, these eleven cases reveal something worth sitting with. The fear was rarely irrational given what people knew at the time. It was simply incomplete. Each generation faced something genuinely new, with no roadmap for where it would lead. The pattern suggests less that people are foolish, and more that every transformative force looks like a threat before it looks like progress.