Progress Studies

once we had machines to do labor, we could afford to stop treating humans like machines.

Governments sporadically got things spectacularly wrong. In 1865, the rail and horse-drawn carriage lobbies in the U.K. drummed up enough outrage to pass the Locomotive Act, whose most notable feature was an absurd requirement that a man walk in front of any self-propelled vehicle waving a red flag and blowing a horn. It stunted the U.K. automobile... See more