4 Things That Were Going To Kill Us All (Until They Didn't)

Smartphones have been associated with extreme stress, euphoria, addiction, and even insanity. Oh, sorry, not smartphones -- regularphones. The telephone was invented in 1876, yet the concerns people had about it then are strikingly similar to the hand-wringing we now see over cellphone addiction: It will cause information overload, people will lose the ability to personally connect with one another, they'll try to port fighting games onto it but it just won't work without a third-party patch, etc.

One worry about the original phone, however, didn't make the leap to its modern descendant. People feared the telephone was an instrument of Satan. It was apparently a pretty natural reaction to have, because it happened independently in different locations. In one incident, the clergy in Ethiopia damned and burned the phone of the minister of justice because it shocked him. (That's why AppleCare doesn't cover damage from water or clergy mistaking bugs for Lucifer's handiwork.)

ambassador806/iStock/Getty Images
You're fired! Hahahaha- WAIT, NOT IN THE FACE!

In another, Swedish preachers similarly condemned the phone as hellspawn and people sabotaged telephone lines, fearing that they attracted evil spirits. Whether the demon spirits were supposedly communicating the messages -- somehow enslaved by the telephone -- or whether they were just seizing the opportunity to overhear who in Helsingborg made the best fiskbullar, I do not know. What I do know is, if you could work out the logic you'd have a tall, blond, alcohol-fueled prequel to The Ring.

Second, eating tomatoes actually did kill some Europeans (though not for the reason they thought). New foods coming in from the Americas meant that Europeans got to experience things they could never have dreamed of, things like flavors. Their traditional foods of bread and hunger did not react with much of anything, be it the pewter plates they ate on or their taste buds. Tomatoes, on the other hand, did react with both of those things. The high level of acidity in the tomatoes leached the lead from the pewter, causing some people to die of lead poisoning. Ha! History people are stupid.

That's two strikes against tomatoes: They're related to a plant that seems like it was genetically engineered to murder children and eating them was sometimes followed by death. So, it's somewhat surprising that a lot of Europeans grew tomatoes anyway. What could motivate these cautious Europeans to cultivate death plants in their homes? They grew them just because they were so dang pretty. Yeah, try giving the love of your life one of those bad boys on Valentine's Day.

Like a spherical femme fatale stuffed into a red dress, I imagine the tomato inspired conversations like:

"Oh darling, let's not grow tomatoes. They're big, brightly colored sacks of poison. What if one of the children eats one and dies?"
"Dearest, we live in 16th-century Europe. If we start worrying about what might kill the children, we'll never get anything done."
"Your modern thinking is enlightening."

Digital Vision./DigitalVision/Getty
Wait, that's not a child. That's a goat. Feed it tomatoes!

This means that tomatoes sat in people's homes, staring at them, brighter than anything they'd seen before, more flavorful than anything they'd tasted, yet they thought they couldn't eat them. All because their plates were toxic. Well, if sitcoms have taught us anything, it's that a precarious situation like that can't last long. Yep, figuring out their silly little mix-up just took Europe a mere 200 years.

The clincher was when pizza was finally invented, because nobody could argue with pizza. Only after all of that did tomatoes begin to catch on in the United States. Think about that: People in what is now Mexico had been eating tomatoes since before they had writing, but it took over 200 years and a trip across the Atlantic and back for people in the United States to say, "You know, I think we should eat these motherfuckers!"

But that's been around forever, right? The '40s thought of jazz as "moral degeneration" because it was played in bars. Parents of the 1950s thought rock 'n' roll was sex-fueled Satan music. The '60s were going to be destroyed by the hippie music that promoted drug use, sexual freedom, and rebellion against the government and military. The '70s were going to destroy us all because their music sucked. And also all of the cocaine that went along with the nightlife. Music from the '80s was a cocaine funnel ... oh, and that whole "devil music" thing popped up again when metal got big. Even the shitty hair metal bands were supposedly minions of Lucifer. And 1990s gangsta rap was supposed to obliterate our youth by turning them all into gang-bangers. Then Marilyn Manson happened. Whatever. We're all still here.

Sumetee/iStock/Getty Images
Well ... mostly.

Looking back, it's hard to even believe a previous generation's prissy mindset. Today, refusing to show Elvis' hips on The Ed Sullivan Show seems as implausibly prudish as the old myth about Victorian piano leg covers. Worrying that your kids will be corrupted by the lyric I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day seems absurd looking back from a post-"Smell Yo Dick" world.

Without so much as a "click here to confirm that you're 18," kids today have free access to porn, violence, and even some naughty words. As of yet, they don't appear to be fucking and fighting their way across the U.S. like Road Warrior Babies. Will the next generation be different from the previous one? Sure! One would hope so, right? Will their problems be objectively worse than those of their parents'? I haven't seen any data to support that, and I read parts of three different Wikipedia entries for this article. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to make some tiny tire armor for a movie idea I just had.

Though no bodies disintegrated, trains did cause catastrophes. They were just boring, predictable catastrophes like people getting crushed to death (something everyone in the 1800s would have been very familiar with) or, at worst, the movie Snowpiercer. Women's uteri did not fly out the moment they reached 50 miles per hour, like some kind of Troma-made Back To The Future III. Unsurprisingly, the prediction based on nothing but irrational fear of the unknown did not come to pass.

rebius/iStock/Getty Images
Though, to be fair, these cars were pelted off by dislodged wombs.

And that's kind of the deal with all of these, right? Fear of the unknown. Fear of change. Fear of a flying uterus.

To me, the take-home message of these examples isn't that all change is good or that there's never cause to be alarmed. I'd say the Cuban Missile Crisis deserved a good deal of "holy shitting," for example. And it seems like global climate change is something that could make our lives objectively suck. I'm just advocating a healthy dose of skepticism when articles insinuate we're all headed for Sodom and Gomorrah because Lemonade teaches kids these days to firebomb cancer research centers. Maybe I'm preaching to the converted, advocating skepticism on Cracked. If I am, please remember: Telephones were built by Satan to rot our brains and intercept your hot goss. Amen.

Aaron Kheifets is an occasionally mustachioed comedian, writer, and director. You are allowed to follow him on Twitter, watch his videos, and look at his website.

Deep inside us all -- behind our political leanings, our moral codes, and our private biases -- there is a cause so colossally stupid that we surprise ourselves with how much we care. Whether it's toilet paper position, fedoras on men, or Oxford commas, we each harbor a preference so powerful we can't help but proselytize to the world. In this episode of the Cracked podcast, guest host Soren Bowie is joined by Cody Johnston, Michael Swaim, and comedian Annie Lederman to discuss the most trivial things we will argue about until the day we die. Get your tickets here!

Learn how bugs might become a delicacy in 5 Shocking Ways The World Is About To Change, and learn the truth about Lizard People in 5 Pathetic Groups That People Think Rule The World.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see why life in dumb movies would be better than what we've got now in Why 'Idiocracy' Would Actually Be A Utopia, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook, because the Cracked comments section alone just isn't big enough for your diatribes about the end of the world.