(Image: The Local/Owen Kilgour)
Now I shall ask the obvious question: why is this not an Olympic sport? Getting dragged behind a galloping horse while on fire is a fantastic recreational activity. It should have a role in youth sports programs, training these specialized athletes from a young age. After a generation or two of this, we could see athletes halving Joe Tödtling’s record.
Tödling, a stuntman from Austria, wore a special protective suit (which, in my opinion, takes some of the fun out of it) while being dragged by a horse for a full 500 yards. He did this on fire, thus breaking the previous Guinness Word record of 472.8 meters. Tödling then immediately turned around and was dragged by an ATV 582 meters, also while on fire.
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Quoting one web site, after the tests started at the Nevada Test Site: "Almost overnight, Las Vegas ushered in the age of atomic tourism. Fueled by a series of press releases from the Chamber of Commerce, visitors from around the country descended on the city in droves to witness the mushroom clouds first hand. On April 22, 1952, 200 members of the media were invited to broadcast from Yucca Lake, just ten miles from the epicenter of a major blast. As the bomb exploded on televisions from coast to coast, the country was caught up in atomic fever."
Quoting another site: In the summer of 1957, an article in the New York Times explained how to plan one's summer vacation around the "non-ancient but none the less honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching." Reporter Gladwin Hill wrote that "for the first time, the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada test program will extend through the summer tourist season, into November. It will be the most extensive test series ever held, with upward of fifteen detonations. And for the first time, the A.E.C. has released a partial schedule, so that tourists interested in seeing a nuclear explosion can adjust itineraries accordingly."
Sure, it was shared on slides and postcards instead of Twitter, and broadcast on network TV instead of sent through Facebook, but it's hard to imagine how there would be "new levels of desensitization." People expected nuclear powered cars and airplanes and rockets, and new ports created by detonating nuclear bombs. Quoting Wikipedia: "Nuclear power was seen to be the epitome of progress and modernity."
The fake pictures, as whitcwa succinctly says, pale in comparison to what actually happened.