Maybe nobody objected [to Peer Review] because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don't pass muster. They called it "peer review."
This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from "we print whatever we get" to "the editor asks his friend what he thinks" to "the whole society votes." Sometimes journals couldn't get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.
(Only one of Einstein's papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)
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