Poor PR – 19th Century

English railroads in the 1800s had a PR challenge — railroad madness. Victorians thought the sound and motion of a train caused men to become lunatics. There were several reported incidents to back their thinking. There wasn’t much a railroad company could do about it. Modern psychology and psychiatry had yet to be discovered. So, they accepted the idea of railroad madness and tried to devise means of safety for the passengers on board. Nothing worked well. We in the 21st century can look back and think how ignorant our forefathers were, but were we tasked at the time to combat the idea of railroad madness, the PR challenge would have been nearly insurmountable. The only evidence we would have would be the presence of psychotics on trains. In other words, we would have nothing to work with.