Category Archives: The Liminal Times

I Can’t Drive 5.5

The first-ever speeding ticket was issued to a driver going 8 miles an hour.

Walter Arnold probably didn’t think he’d be making history when he took his “horseless carriage” (read: automobile) for a spin through the humble English village of Paddock Wood on January 28, 1896, but make history he did — by traveling at an absolutely blinding pace of 8 miles per hour on the main thoroughfare. And while you may find it difficult to believe that a bicycle-riding constable was able to catch up to him, the ensuing low-speed pursuit led to Arnold paying the first-ever speeding ticket.

Speeding wasn’t all he was charged with. Arnold was cited on four counts: using a “locomotive without a horse” (the nerve!) on a public road, operating said contraption with fewer than three people, failing to clearly display his name and address on that absolute manifestation of speed, and, last but not least, traveling at a higher velocity than 2 miles per hour. Arnold, one of England’s first car dealers, was driving a Benz that fateful day and paid the equivalent of more than $300 in today’s money for his quartet of criminality. However, a few months later he began marketing his own Arnold Motor Carriage, a variant on the very Benz he was driving, to the public. Whether the whole thing was a publicity stunt or a mere coincidence has never been settled.

But the statute of limitations probably passed.

That’s A Lot of Hot Air

About 117 billion people have ever lived.

There are more people on Earth today than ever before — nearly 8 billion, to be exact — which represents a full 7% of all 117 billion people estimated to have ever lived throughout the course of human history. The figure comes from the Population Reference Bureau, which released its first estimate in 1995 and has updated it occasionally in the years since. As with most math on this scale, the calculus wasn’t easy. That’s partly because our knowledge of history is ever-evolving: When the bureau initially calculated the number, modern Homo sapiens were thought to have first appeared around 50,000 BCE, but recent discoveries put the actual date closer to 200,000 BCE.

Three main factors go into the math: how long humans are thought to have been walking the Earth, the average population during different eras, and the number of births per 1,000 people during said eras. As you might imagine, the growth has been astronomical — there were just 5 million humans in 8000 BCE, 300 million in 1 CE, and 450 million in 1200. And while the bureau acknowledges that this is “part science and part art,” even being off by a few billion gives us a ballpark figure to imagine all the people who came before us.

And who shall come after.