Predictions

Predictions from the past

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."

Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"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

"But what ... is it good for?"

Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

"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.

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would payfor a message sent to nobody in particular?"

David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

"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 Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"

H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper."

Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind."

"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.

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."

Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."

Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this."

Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads.

"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 got through college yet.'"

Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

"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."

1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.

"You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training."

Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus.

"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy."

Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.

"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives."

Admiral William Leahy, US Atomic Bomb Project.

"This fellow Charles Lindbergh will never make it. He's doomed."

Harry Guggenheim, millionaire aviation enthusiast.

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."

Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."

Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances."

Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube and father of television.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

"Louis Pastueur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction."

Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the instrusion of the wise and humane surgeon."

Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, 1873 

v

• "The end of the world will surely come
  in eighteen hundred and eighty one."
  - Mother Shipton, English prophet, c.1600.
• "To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin." - Cardinal Bellarmine, on Galileo's trial, 1615.
• "One day there will be a telephone in every major city in the USA" - Alexander Graham Bell, c.1880.
• "The telephone may be appropriate for our American cousins, but not here, because we have an adequate supply of messenger boys." - group of British experts, c.1900.
• "[By 2000] every river or creek with any suitable fall will be equipped with water motors, turning dynamos, making electricity" - John Elfreth Watkins, Jnr, Ladies' Home Journal, 1900.
• Electricity transmission by wireless may be commercially feasible - Scientific American, 1920.
• "I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning." - J Rayleigh, leading British physicist, 1896.
• "Aircraft are interesting toys, but of no military value." - Marshal Foch, France, 1912.
• "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" - Associates of David Sarnoff, manager of an early US radio network, 1920s.
• "While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossiblity, a development on which we need waste little time dreaming." - Lee de Forest, "father of radio", 1926.
• "Television won't be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six mmonths. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." - Darryl F Zanuck, 1946.
• "An automaton may be contrived that will have its 'own mind'." - Nikolai Tesla, 1900.
• "I think there is a world market for as many as 5 computers." - Thomas Watson, head of IBM,1943.
• Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons - Popular Mechanics, 1949.
• "I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." - Editor of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.
• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 (who was wrong, even then, as the first Apple was already available. Maybe he had a very narrow idea of what people did at home.)
• "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be available. It would mean the atom would have to be shattered at will." - Alfred Einstein, physicist, 1932.
• Some predictions from Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener's 1967 book The Year 2000:
  100 Technical Innovations Very Likely in the Last Third of the 20th Century:
  • "Human hibernation for relatively extensive periods (months to years)."
  • "Physically nonharmful methods of overindulging." [in the movie, Dr Strangelove was a caricature of Herman Kahn.]
  • "Artificial moons...for lighting large areas at night."
  • "Stimulated and planned and perhaps programmed dreams."
    (About 50 of the 100 predictions were more or less correct.)
• The first American demonstration of the videophone was on 14 November 1920, when pictures were wired between New York and St Louis. In 1975, Telecom Australia predicted up to 200,000 videophones in Australia by 2000. The actual figure: about 50. See "On the persistence of lackluster demand - the history of the video telephone" - Steven Schnaars and Cliff Wymbs, in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2004, vol. 71, pages 197-216.
• "The 'death ray' for destroying aircraft is a potentially valuable weapon" - Lt Cmdr Fitzhugh Green, US Navy, 1924.
• In December 1938, Lloyds of London was offering odds of 32 to 1 that there would be no war in the following year. In 1939, World War II began.
• "Before the twentieth century closes, the earth will be purged of its foulest shame, the killing of men in battle under the name of war." - Andrew Carnegie.
• "The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty." - President of Michigan Savings Bank, 1903, advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.
  Checking the links to this page, I found an interesting comment on this prediction at theroblog.blogspot.com- "could well have been true for the distance into the future the author might have been speaking of (e.g. 10 years from 1902)". This raises the interesting idea that if I make a prediction for 10 years ahead, it could be be very different from the prediction I make for 100 years ahead.
• [When cars are in general use] "we shall probably find public taste changing so that many people will prefer to travel from place to place more slowly than at present" - Cleveland Moffet, USA, 1900.
• [By 2000,] "the automobile will have driven out the horse... The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only." - J E Watkins again, 1900.
• "The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of many rumors to that effect." - Harper's Weekly,, USA, August 2, 1902.
• " "Automobiles will start to decline as soon as the last shot is fired in World War 2. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter." - Harry Bruno, aviation publicist, 1943.
• The first cars were called horseless carriages, and the first radio was called a wireless. What else could be renamed whatlessly? Is an egg the headless chook?) And what might be the next thing to drop an association we now take for granted? The pageless book? The computerless internet?