Incorrect predictions

Sometimes, someone says something that turns out to be an incorrect prediction. In hindsight, however, the people who said these things may have had good reasons for thinking they were right.

Sourced

Television

• Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.
  • C. P. Scott, BBC History of television

Transportation technology

• What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?
  • The Quarterly Review, March, 1825.

• That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
  • Scientific American, January 2, 1909.

Computers

• Where a calculator like the ENIAC today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1½ tons.
  • Andrew Hamilton, "Brains that Click", Popular Mechanics 91 (3), March 1949, (pp. 162 et seq.) at p. 258. Notwithstanding that events have proceeded greatly since the prediction was fulfilled, this was a correct prediction in the short-term.

Miscellaneous

• We can close the books on infectious diseases.
  • Surgeon General of the United States William H. Stewart, 1969; speaking to the U.S. Congress – cited in The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise Of Drug-Resistant Bacteria by Mark J. Plotkin and Michael Shnayerson, 2003, ISBN 0316735663.

• Democracy will be dead by 1950.
  • John Langdon-Davies, A Short History of The Future, 1936.

• With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself.
  • Business Week, August 2, 1968.

Attributed

Technology

Technology refers to tools, machines, and other tangible devices that are used by humans for certain processes.

Railroads

• Rail travel at high speed is not possible, because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.
  • Dr Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859), professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, University College London, 1823.

Light bulb

• Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure.
  • Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, on Edison's light bulb, 1880.

Telephone, telegraph

• Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires as may be done with dots and dashes of Morse code, and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.
  • Unidentified Boston newspaper, 1865
  • Quoted in Jehl, Francis (1936). Menlo Park Reminiscences (1st edition ed.). Dearborn, Michigan: Edison Institute. pp. unidentified page (of 430). 
  • Re-quoted in Gregory, Richard Langton (1994). "What Use Is a Jelly Baby?". Even Odder Perceptions. Routledge. pp. p. 18. ISBN 0415061067. 

• Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.
  • Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of Inventing the Future, 1962.

Automobiles

• The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.
  • The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903.

• The ordinary 'horseless carriage' is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.
  • Literary Digest, 1899.

Airplanes

• Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical (sic) and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.
  • Simon Newcomb; The Wright Brothers flew at Kittyhawk 18 months later. Newcomb was not impressed.

• Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
  • Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895.

• It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.
  • Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1895.

• There will never be a bigger plane built.
  • A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people.

Radio

• Radio has no future.
  • Lord Kelvin, Northern Irish mathematician and physicist, former president of the Royal Society, 1897.

• The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?
  • Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter's call for investment in the radio in 1921.

Rockets

• A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere.
  • New York Times, 1936.

Television

• While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.
  • Lee De Forest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926.

• Television won't last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.
  • Darryl Zanuck, movie producer, 20th Century Fox, 1946.

• Television won't last. It's a flash in the pan.
  • Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948.

Atomic/nuclear power

• There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.
  • Robert Millikan, American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, 1923.

• No “scientific bad boy” ever will be able to blow up the world by releasing atomic energy.
  • Robert Millikan, American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, attributed without citation in "They are saying", Popular Science 116 (2), February 1930, p. 66.

• There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.
  • Albert Einstein, 1932.

• The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
  • Ernest Rutherford, shortly after splitting the atom for the first time.

• Atomic energy might be as good as our present-day explosives, but it is unlikely to produce anything very much more dangerous.
  • Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, then soon-to-be British Prime Minister, 1939.

• The basic questions of design, material and shielding, in combining a nuclear reactor with a home boiler and cooling unit, no longer are problems... The system would heat and cool a home, provide unlimited household hot water, and melt the snow from sidewalks and driveways. All that could be done for six years on a single charge of fissionable material costing about $300.
  • Robert Ferry, executive of the U.S. Institute of Boiler and Radiator Manufacturers, 1955.

• Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years.
  • Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955.

Computers

• I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year.
  • The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.

• [By 1985], machines [computers] will be capable of doing any work Man can do.
  • Herbert A. Simon, Nobel Laureate from Carnegie Mellon University, one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence – speaking in 1965.

• There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
  • Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), in a talk given to a 1977 World Future Society meeting in Boston. This is widely quoted but Olsen claims it is taken out of context, that he was not referring to personal computers but to a household computer that would control the home.
    Reference: "Ken Olsen", Snopes, includes bibliography.

Space travel

• To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.
  • Lee De Forest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1957

• There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.
  • T. Craven, FCC Commissioner (USA), in 1961 (the first commercial communications satellite went into service in 1965).

Miscellaneous technology

• What, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte, when told of Robert Fulton's steamboat, 1800s.

• The phonograph has no commercial value at all.
  • Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1880s.

• X-rays will prove to be a hoax.
  • Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883.

• Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.
  • Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1889 (Edison often ridiculed the arguments of competitor George Westinghouse for AC power).

• I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.
  • H.G. Wells, British novelist, in 1901.

• The idea that cavalry will be replaced by these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short of treasonous.
  • Comment of Aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Haig, at tank demonstration, 1916.

• Very interesting, Whittle, my boy, but it will never work.
  • Cambridge Aeronautics Professor, when shown Frank Whittle's plan for the jet engine.

• The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most.
  • IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, saying the photocopier had no market large enough to justify production, 1959.

Science, medicine, and health

Science in this case refers to any of the diverse scientific fields of study, medicine refers to the scientific study of the body and how it functions, and health refers to the study of how to keep the body functioning well.

• I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors lied, than that stones fell from the sky.
  • Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President, on hearing reports of meteorites, 1790s(?).

• The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it...knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient.
  • Dr. Alfred Velpeau, French surgeon, 1839.

• Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.
  • Pierre Pachet, British surgeon and Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872.

• The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon
  • John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, 1873.

• We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.
  • Simon Newcomb, Canadian-born American astronomer, 1888.

• The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is particularly true when the observations are pushed to a limit, i.e., whenever the circumstances of experiment are such that extreme cases can be examined. Such examination almost surely leads, not to the overthrow of the law, but to the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions.
  • Albert Abraham Michelson, Light waves and their uses, University of Chicago Press, 1903. The first sentence is often quoted out of context, completely misrepresenting his intent.

• If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one.
  • W.C. Heuper, National Cancer Institute, 1954.

• Every attempt to refer chemical questions to mathematical doctrines must be considered, now and always, profoundly irrational, as being contrary to the nature of the phenomena. . . . but if the employment of mathematical analysis should ever become so preponderant in chemistry (an aberration which is happily almost impossible) it would occasion vast and rapid retrogradation...
  • Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, 1853

Future historical, social, and pop-cultural events

• Four or five frigates will do the business without any military force.
  • British prime minister Lord North, on dealing with the rebellious American colonies, 1774.

• Ours has been the first [expedition], and doubtless to be the last, to visit this profitless locality.
  • Lt. Joseph Ives, after visiting the Grand Canyon in 1861.

• They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-.
  • Last words of Gen. John Sedgwick, spoken as he looked out over the parapet at enemy lines during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in 1864.

• No, it will make war impossible.
  • Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun, in response to the question "Will this gun not make war more terrible?" from Havelock Ellis, an English scientist, 1893.

• I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here... We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.
  • Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator, on the Smithsonian Institution, 1901.

• Man will not fly for 50 years.
  • Wilbur Wright, American aviation pioneer, to brother Orville, after a disappointing flying experiment, 1901 (their first successful flight was in 1903).

• The invention of aircraft will make war impossible in the future.
  • George Gissing, 1903.

• Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.
  • Grover Cleveland, U.S. President, 1905.

• The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.
  • Guglielmo Marconi, pioneer of radio, Technical World Magazine, October, 1912, page 145.

• You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.
  • Kaiser Wilhelm, to the German troops, August 1914.

• Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
  • Irving Fisher, economics professor at Yale University, 1929.

• This is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.
  • Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister, September 30th, 1938.

• The Americans are good about making fancy cars and refrigerators, but that doesn’t mean they are any good at making aircraft. They are bluffing. They are excellent at bluffing.
  • Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, 1942.

• It will be gone by June.
  • Variety, passing judgement on rock 'n roll in 1955.

• A short-lived satirical pulp.
  • Time magazine, writing off Mad magazine in 1956.

• We will bury you.
  • Nikita Kruschev, Soviet Premier, predicting Soviet communism will win over U.S. capitalism, 1958. Originally mistranslated, a better translation would be "We will be there when you are buried", a common Russian insult.

• In all likelihood world inflation is over.
  • International Monetary Fund CEO, 1959.

• Reagan doesn’t have that presidential look.
  • United Artists Executive, rejecting Ronald Reagan as lead in 1964 film The Best Man.

• And for the tourist who really wants to get away from it all, safaris in Vietnam
  • Newsweek, predicting popular holidays for the late 1960s.

• Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop—because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds.
  • Time, 1966, in one sentence writing off e-commerce long before anyone had ever heard of it.

• If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women.
  • David Riesman, conservative American social scientist, 1967.

• It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become Prime Minister.
  • Margaret Thatcher, future Prime Minister, October 26th, 1969.

• Read my lips: NO NEW TAXES.
  • George H. W. Bush, 1988.

• This antitrust thing will blow over.
  • Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft.

• It doesn't matter what he does, he will never amount to anything.
  • Albert Einstein's teacher to his father, 1895

• The war... will last... six days, six weeks... I doubt six months.
  • Donald Rumsfeld on the Iraq War

Celebrities, athletes, and great artists and their works

• If Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is not by some means abridged, it will soon fall into disuse.
  • Philip Hale, Boston Music Critic, 1837.

• By the year 1982 the graduated income tax will have practically abolished major differences in wealth.
  • Irwin Edman, professor of philosophy Columbia University, 1932.

• I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face, and not Gary Cooper.
  • Gary Cooper, on declining the lead role in Gone with the Wind.

• We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
  • Decca Records, when they rejected The Beatles, 1962.

• The singer (Mick Jagger) will have to go; the BBC won’t like him.
  • First Rolling Stones manager Eric Easton to his partner after watching them perform.

• The case is a loser.
  • Johnnie Cochran, on soon-to-be client O.J.’s chances of winning, 1994.

• Children just aren’t interested in Witches and Wizards anymore.
  • Anonymous publishing executive writing to JK Rowling 1996

Entrepreneurs and their revolutionary ideas

• ...so many centuries after the Creation it is unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value.
  • Committee advising King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain regarding a proposal by Christopher Columbus, 1486.

• Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy.
  • Associates of Edwin L. Drake refusing his suggestion to drill for oil in 1859.

• No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse there in one day for free.
  • King William I of Prussia, on hearing of the invention of trains, 1864.

• The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible.
  • A Yale University management professor in response to a college assignment by Fred Smith proposing a reliable overnight delivery service, in 1966. Smith would later go on to found Federal Express Corp.

• A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.
  • Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.

Disputed

• There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
  • Lord Kelvin, allegedly speaking to the w:British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900. The veracity of this attribution is disputed, and no contemporaneous documentation of the statement is known.
• 640 K ought to be enough for anybody.
  • Variation: No one will need more than 640 kilobytes of memory for a personal computer.
  • Attributed to Bill Gates, 1981
  • Gates has denied saying either variation, and no verifiable source is known.

Misattributed

• Everything that can be invented has been invented.
  • Charles H. Duell, Comissioner of the US Patent Office, 1899.
  • Although most commonly attributed to him, (it has also been attributed to anonymous US Patent Office employees of varying dates, as well as British ones), there is no evidence that Duell ever held this opinion, let alone stated it. [1]

• I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
  • Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM, on seeing the first mainframe computer in 1943.
  • There is no evidence that Watson ever said this. See his Wikipedia article for more information.

See also

• Future

External links

• Things People Said - Bad Predictions