It lives to kill. A mindless eating machine. It will attack and devour anything. It is as if God created the devil, and gave it…jaws. With an ominous two-note score, these are the opening moments of the first trailer for the 1975 blockbuster Jaws. The world has been fascinated and afraid of sharks ever since. Even today, Shark Week, an insanely popular stretch of shark-based programming on the Discovery Channel, similarly exploits sharks as unpredictable and out for blood.
But for most of history, sharks were generally considered harmless. At the turn of the twentieth century, swimming started becoming acceptable as recreation. “The average bather knew or cared little about sharks,” writes historian Beryl Francis. Any terrifying tales about the creatures were “accepted as simply sailors’ lore and legend.”
Sharks also existed on the fringes of science. They were “unseen, liminal creatures, inhabitants of the marine wilderness,” according to historian Jennifer Martin. Because sharks weren’t commercially valuable, there was very little money or support for research.
This changed with the start of the Cold War. The U.S. military feared sharks would be dangerous to their water-based operations, so the Navy sponsored a secret program to develop a chemical repellent called “Shark Chaser.” They would issue Shark Chaser for decades, despite testimonies that the creatures “seemed oblivious to the repellent; some animals consumed the packets without any apparent consequences,” as Martin reports.
By the 1960s, wariness of sharks started to makes its way into civilian culture. Shark scares would rattle the public and lead to a burst of media attention. After a scare on Coney Island, the New York World-Telegram reported that city police “triggered several bursts of machine gun fire, aiming into the water for the benefit of photographers.” The alarm would often diminish quickly once performative measures like these were taken.
