In the 1840s in England, the economy went a bit nuts. What was going on had to do with a technology bubble. The technology at the time was the steam train, and everybody wanted to jump into the frenzy by creating a startup company, hiring on some engineers, and selling stock. (Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.)
Railways were new and nearly everybody was quite sure that they were the answer to everything. They made communication between distant points far easier and faster than before, and there were underlying standards (like the width of the tracks) that made it pretty easy to add your new company to the mix and, for example, lay a new section of track. Then you’d set up some sort of subscription service to sell access, you’d do everything you could to make sure your new rail line got noticed, and then you’d watch the revenue roll in.
Or not. In 1846, 272 new railway companies were established, and together they proposed 9500 miles of new rail lines. This is in England, remember, which already had thousands of miles of track in a country about four hundred miles north-to-south and about three hundred miles wide. A lot of these companies achieved their exit strategy of being purchased by a more established competitor (like I said, stop me if this sounds familiar). And a certain number were just frauds from the start, set up to get money from investors without actually having a working plan or technology at all. None of them were called “Theranos” as far as I can tell; but that was probably just a lack of branding imagination.
Anyway, the whole thing turned out to be a tech bubble, railroad shares overall stopped rising by the early 1850s, and lots and lots of people realized, as they found they’d speculated with money they couldn’t really afford, that the whole thing was a case of “irrational exuberance”. There was one chap, William Hudson, a high-profile railroad entrepreneur, whose career was described as “one vast aggregate of avaricious and flagitious jobbing for the accumulation of wealth.”
The word “flagitous” is pretty good. It’s a word from the 1300s that originally referred to a really rotten person; one who’s “guilty of or addicted to atrocious crimes; deeply criminal, extremely wicked.” It’s from the Latin word “flagitium,” meaning a shameful act, which comes from “flagrum” (a whip). So it’s similar to “flagellate,” which means whipping — which is probably what lots of newly-impoverished people wanted to do to Hudson. His record of fraud was, by all accounts, pretty flagrant. But “flagrant” isn’t related to “flagitous.” It comes from a different Latin root: “flagrare,” which means to burn. Not burning wasn’t also one of the fates people probably wished on Hudson, the poor fellow. After all, he must certainly have protested that all he was trying to do was generate shareholder value, and what could possibly go wrong? No need to stop me if this sounds familiar; it’s the end.
