Few ideas in the scientific realm have ever been introduced without ridicule and unbelief. When men first suggested that the world was not flat and man could not sail off the end of the world, they were laughed to scorn. When Nicolaus Copernicus first suggested his theory of a sun-centered universe, he was so persecuted that he was forced to withdraw his hypothesis. When Henry Ford put his first automobile on the road, he was thought of as a fool who wasted his time on foolish inventions.