Living in the shadow of Silicon Valley, we in the South Valley
have a front-row seat to the latest developments in technology’s
evolution. And it’s my secret pleasure to see that prophecies from
the so-called experts dismissing technological and scientific
advancements are often proven ridiculously wrong.
Living in the shadow of Silicon Valley, we in the South Valley have a front-row seat to the latest developments in technology’s evolution. And it’s my secret pleasure to see that prophecies from the so-called experts dismissing technological and scientific advancements are often proven ridiculously wrong.
I keep a file of these erroneous fortune-telling quotes.
One of the most famous is: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” That came from Thomas Watson, the founder and chairman of IBM.
In 1977, Ken Olson, the founder, president and chairman of Digital Equipment Corp., emphatically told the world, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
A Popular Mechanics article boldly went out on a limb in 1949 and predicted, “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
Thankfully, today’s laptops tip the scales at considerably less weight.
A farsighted Prentice Hall business book editor said in 1957, “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.”
Even Bill Gates, the multi-billionaire founder of Microsoft, can get high-tech predictions wonderfully wrong. In 1981, he told the computer industry: “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” Of course, that amount of computer memory could never sustain today’s complicated software programs.
Telephones, of course, are prolific in today’s world. It seems everyone and their teenage kid now tote around cell phones allowing them to speak to almost anyone anywhere in the world. But in the telephone’s early days, the experts saw a less rosy future for the device.
“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,” concluded an editorial in the Boston Post of 1865.
A company-wide Western Union memo of 1876 predicted: “”This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value at all.”
And two years later, Sir William Preece, the chief engineer of the British Post Office, told Parliament, “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
In 1880, another British lord commented on Thomas Edison’s new-fangled electric lightbulb by resolving, “Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress.”
That same year, Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, said of Edison’s lightbulb, “Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure.”
In 1895, Edison himself failed in an attempt at scientific prophecy when he looked pessimistically at man’s chances of ever creating mechanical flight. “It is apparent to me,” he said, “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.”
The British mathematician and physicist Lord Kelvin agreed with him by stating in 1895, “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
And in 1901, a famous inventor predicted, “Man will not fly for 50 years.” That statement was made by aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright to his brother Orville. Two years later, they had their first successful flight at Kitty Hawk.
The “horseless carriage” also had its prophets of disappointment.”The horse is here to stay, the automobile is only a fad,” the president of Michigan Savings Bank told Horace Rackham, a lawyer for Henry Ford in 1903. Fortunately for Rackham, he ignored this expert opinion, invested $5,000 in Ford Motor Company stock, and sold it later for a tidy $12.5 million.
This prediction about advances in car technology came from a 1909 article in Scientific American: “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.”
Space travel has also been scoffed at by the experts.
In 1921, the New York Times ran an editorial about Robert Goddard’s rocket technology. “Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
However, on July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humanity’s first stroll on the moon’s surface, the New York Times ran a correction on page 2 reading: “Errata: It has now been conclusively demonstrated that a rocket ship can travel through the vacuum of space. The Times sincerely regrets the error.”
And somehow, it’s humbling to observe even the great physicist Albert Einstein could be moronically wrong in his prediction of nuclear power – a scientific topic we can assume he would be an ultimate expert in.
In 1932, Einstein told the world, “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean the atom would have to be shattered at will.”
Without fear of someday being proven wrong, I’ll venture now to make my own prediction: Experts who arrogantly dismiss the future of technological and scientific advancements risk a tremendous chance of eventually being proven mistaken.
