The first-ever speeding ticket was issued to a driver going 8 miles an hour.
Walter Arnold probably didn’t think he’d be making history when he took his “horseless carriage” (read: automobile) for a spin through the humble English village of Paddock Wood on January 28, 1896, but make history he did — by traveling at an absolutely blinding pace of 8 miles per hour on the main thoroughfare. And while you may find it difficult to believe that a bicycle-riding constable was able to catch up to him, the ensuing low-speed pursuit led to Arnold paying the first-ever speeding ticket.
Speeding wasn’t all he was charged with. Arnold was cited on four counts: using a “locomotive without a horse” (the nerve!) on a public road, operating said contraption with fewer than three people, failing to clearly display his name and address on that absolute manifestation of speed, and, last but not least, traveling at a higher velocity than 2 miles per hour. Arnold, one of England’s first car dealers, was driving a Benz that fateful day and paid the equivalent of more than $300 in today’s money for his quartet of criminality. However, a few months later he began marketing his own Arnold Motor Carriage, a variant on the very Benz he was driving, to the public. Whether the whole thing was a publicity stunt or a mere coincidence has never been settled.
Not for nothing has Finland been called the “home of the $103,000 speeding ticket.” The Nordic country, as well as a few others in Europe — Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and France — eschew the flat-rate system in favor of “day fines” that work on a sliding scale, leading to a famous case in which a high-earning Nokia executive was ordered to pay the equivalent of $103,600 for driving 47 miles per hour in a 31 mile-per-hour zone. The world record for the largest speeding fine, however, belongs to a repeat offender in Switzerland, who had to pay the princely sum of $290,000 for blazing through a 50 mile-per-hour zone near the village of St. Gallen at 85 miles per hour in a red Ferrari.
