Notes Introduction 1. Thomas Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), number 585. Nathanial Hawthorne, “The Celestial Railroad,” in Hawthorne’s Short Stories, ed. Newton Arvin (New York: Knopf, 1946), 234–50. 2. Quotation from “The Chatsworth Wreck,” author unknown, in Great Poems from Railroad Magazine, ed. Robert Wayner (New York, 1968). 3. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (New York: Berg, 1977). 4. Fatality ratesfor airlinesin the 1990s averaged 0.2per billion passenger miles;in 1907 railroad passenger fatalities were about 22 per billion passenger miles. 5. Paul Slovic,“Perception of Risk,” Science 236 (Apr. 17, 1987): 280–85. 6. A good review of risk amplification and stigmatization is James Flynn et al., eds., Risk, Media and Stigma (London: Earthscan, 2001). 7. For a brief discussion of the idea of a risk transition see James Mitchell,“Human Dimensions of Environmental Hazards: Complexity, Disparity, and the Search for Guidance,” in Nothing to Fear: Risks and Hazards in American Society , ed. John Kirby (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 131–78. 8. For a superb discussion of the origins of increasing life expectancy see Robert Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 9. For a more complete development of this approach see Walter Oi, “On the Economics of Industrial Safety,” Law and Contemporary Problems 38 (Summer –Autumn 1974): 669–99.See also W.KipViscusi,Fatal Tradeoffs (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1992). 10. For the importance of information in shaping business decisions see Naomi Lamoreaux, Daniel Raff, and Peter Temin,“Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History,” American Historical Review 108 (Apr. 2003): 404–33. For differences in organizational capabilities see Richard Langlois and Nicholas Foss,“Capabilities and Governance:The Rebirth of Production in the Theory of Economic Organization,” Kyklos 52 (June 1999): 201–17.Joel Mokyr,The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), quotation on 3–4. 11. On the importance of technological change in reducing social costs see Arnulf Grübler, Technology and Global Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 12. LangloisandFoss,“CapabilitiesandGovernance,”stresstheimportanceof tacit knowledge. See also Jeremy Howells,“Tacit Knowledge, Innovation, and Tech343 nology Transfer,”Technology Analysis and Strategic Management 8 (June 1996): 91–106. Richard Easterlin,“Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed?” Journal of Economic History 41 (Mar.1981): 1–19,discusses the importance of education in technology diffusion. Paul David, Technical Choice, Innovation and Economic Growth (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975) stresses the localized nature of technological change. The idea that engineers are inherently technology critics I get from Henry Petroski, Invention by Design (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1996).See also William Baumol,The Free-Market Innovation Machine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), ch. 3. On railroad technological change generally see Steven Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 13. Thomas Haskell,“Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part I,” American Historical Review 90 (Apr. 1985): 339–61. Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety (New Brunswick, 1988), 205, makes the point that “the secret of safety lies in danger.” 14. For analyses of voluntarism as a response to modern environmental problems seeJohnMaxwelletal.,“Self-RegulationandSocialWelfare:ThePoliticalEconomy of Corporate Environmentalism,” Journal of Law and Economics 42 (Oct. 2000): 583–617, and works cited therein. 15. On induced technological change seeVernon Ruttan andYujiro Hayami,“Toward a Theory of Inducted Innovation,” Journal of Development Studies 20 (July 1984): 203–23,andVernon Ruttan,Technology, Growth, and Development: An Induced Innovation Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 4. 16. JoAnne Yates, Control by Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore, 1987). In ch. 4 Yates briefly discusses communication for safety. Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (Vintage, 1992). Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 17. Crisis of control is from James Beniger, The Control Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1986),ch.6.Charles Perrow,Normal Accidents (New York: Basic, 1984). For a review that also criticizes Perrow’s emphasis on the technology see Larry Hirschorn, “On Technological Catastrophe,” Science 228 (May 17, 1985): 846–47. See also James Reason, Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 1997). 18. “Rules for Travelers,” Scientific American 5 (May 4, 1850): 1. Chapter1.IntheBeginning Epigraphs: Captain Douglas...