Success Quote by John Moody

The line lands like a small insult to the mythology of progress: the machine we now treat as destiny, John Moody reminds us, initially lost a footrace to older, simpler tech. By stacking “horses and mules” alongside the almost-comic “sail cars,” he punctures the idea that innovation arrives fully formed and immediately superior. Early locomotives weren’t sleek symbols; they were underpowered prototypes competing against mature systems with decades of optimization and infrastructure behind them.

Moody’s intent, coming from a businessman, reads less like nostalgia than instruction. It’s a market-facing truth: new technology rarely wins on raw performance at first. It wins when the surrounding ecosystem catches up - capital investment, standardized parts, reliable fuel supply, trained operators, maintenance networks, safety rules, and public trust. His comparison implies a broader lesson about hype cycles: early adopters pay for the privilege of disappointment, while incumbents look unbeatable until the curve bends.

The subtext is also a quiet critique of triumphalist storytelling. We retroactively narrate industrial change as inevitable, but Moody foregrounds contingency. If the “earliest locomotive” couldn’t outrun animals, then the decisive factor wasn’t speed alone; it was scalability and the promise of compounding returns once the kinks were worked out. In that sense, he’s not diminishing the locomotive’s impact. He’s showing how disruptive revolutions begin - not with glory, but with embarrassment and patience financed by believers.