How It Started, How It's Going

Today I learned the identities of the first person known to have been killed by a motor vehicle in the world and later the first one in the U.S.

I've never thought about this before. 

But there it was, in this article about the 1920s invention of a traffic speed-governor that was not adopted. 

• Henry H. Bliss was the first American to die in a car accident. An electric taxicab ran him over in the streets of New York City in 1899.
• Thirty years earlier, an Irish scientist named Mary Ward was run over by an experimental steam car. She was the first person anywhere in the world to die from an automobile.

Now, of course, the U.S. sees almost 40,000 deaths per year from road crashes of one type or another.