False Predictions

I haven't snoped any of this, but I think most of it's fairly accurate. Ah well. It just goes to show that a great mind can rationalize nearly anything, and often does just that.


False Predictions
Note that it's risky to say that something can't or won't be done, especially when technology is concerned. Here are some past quotations that still haunt their speakers today:


Invention – "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the US Patent Office, recommending that his office should be abolished (1899)


Computers – "I think there is a world market for about five computers".
Thomas J. Watson Jr., chairman of IBM (1943)


Computers – "Where a calculator on the ENIAC 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 1 ½ tons."
Popular Mechanics (March 1949)


Computers – "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
Kenneth Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (1977)


Computers – "640 K [of computer memory] ought to be enough for anybody."
Bill Gates, founder and CEO of Microsoft (1981)


Computers – “By 1990 75-80 percent of IBM compatible computers will be sold with OS/2."
Bill Gates, founder and CEO of Microsoft (January, 1988)


Computers – "So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't gone through college yet.'"
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak's PC


Computers – "We see a corporate market of maybe 15,000 PCs a year by 1990."
DataQuest (1984) Compare that with this one:


Copiers – "The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most."
IBM to the founders of Xerox as it turned down their proposal (1959)


Internet – "Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com and inventor of Ethernet (1995)


Telegraph – "I watched his countenance closely, to see if he was not deranged ... and I was assured by other senators after he left the room that they had no confidence in it."
U.S. Senator Smith of Indiana, after witnessing a demonstration of Samuel Morse’s telegraph (1842)


Telephone – "Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."
Boston Post, on the telephone (1865)


Telephone – "This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
Western Union internal memo (1876)


Telephone – "The Americans think we need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."
Sir William Preece, chief engineer of Britain's Post Office (1876)


Phonograph – "The phonograph has no commercial value at all."
Thomas Edison


Music – "Guitar music is on the way out."
Decca Records, declining to record a new group called The Beatles (1962)


Radio – "Radio has no future."
Lord Kelvin (1897)


Radio – "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
David Sarnoff's associates responding to his urgings for investment in radio (April 1912)


Radio – "The radio craze will die out in time."
Thomas Edison(1922)


Movies – "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers (1927)


Television – "While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."
Lee DeForest, radio development pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube


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


Television – "The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; The average American family hasn’t time for it.”
New York Times (1949)


Electricity – "Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever."
Thomas Edison (1889)


Nuclear – "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)


Nuclear – "That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives."
Admiral William Leahy, when President Truman asked for his opinion on the project to build an atomic bomb


Cars – "The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty--a fad."
President of the Michigan Savings Bank, speaking to Henry Ford's lawyer, Horace Rackham.
Rackham ignored the advice, invested $5000 in Ford stock, and sold it later for $12.5 million.


Cars – "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 (Jan. 2, 1909)


Planes – "No possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air."
Simon Newcomb, astronomer and head of the U. S. Naval Observatory (1835-1909)


Planes – "Heavier-than-air flying machines are fantasy. Simple laws of physics make them impossible."
Lord Kelvin, president, British Royal Society (1895)


Planes – "Man will not fly for 50 years."
Wilbur Wright, to brother Orville after a disappointing flying experiment in 1901. (Their first successful flight was in 1903.)


Planes – "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
(and soon, that will be the largest plane again the way the airlines are downsizing!)


Space – "A rocket will never be able to leave the earth's atmosphere."
New York Times (1936)


Space – "Space travel is bunk."
Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of the UK (1957, two weeks before Sputnik orbited the Earth)


Space – "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 (1961)


Tanks – "The idea that cavalry will be replaced by these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short of treasonous."
ADC to Field Marshal Haig, at tank demonstration (1916)


Tanks – "Caterpillar land ships are idiotic and useless. Those officers and men are wasting their time and are not pulling their proper weight in the war"
Fourth Lord of the British Admiralty, regarding the introduction of tanks in war (1915)


New Businesses – "The concept is interesting and well-informed, but in order to earn better than a 'C' the idea must be feasible."
Yale professor's comments on a term paper submitted by Fred Smith for an overnight delivery system. Two years later, Smith founded Federal Express.


New Businesses – "A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, market research and focus groups confirm that America wants soft, not chewy, cookies."
Investor rejection letter to Debby Fields, founder of Mrs. Fields' Cookies


Stocks – "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University (1929)

Radio – "The radio craze will die out in time."
Thomas Edison(1922)

Actually this one is starting to become true. Does anyone listen to the radio anymore? No one I know does.

Those of us who drive older cars do as casset decks are useless now.

I listen to radio, too. There is a wonderful community radio station here and they play all sorts of music. Also, very little idle chatter by the dj's. I rather chuckled at the ones about TV (Television – "The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; The average American family hasn’t time for it.”
New York Times (1949) ) Yeah, most people do sit with their eyes glued on the screen today. Actually, I feel very sad about this. Many people have long conversations about TV shows they watch. I find that sad, too. They are missing out on real life by so immersing themselves into TV shows. Sigh.